Lonny's Day

I was at the edge of the yard by eight o'clock and I stayed there for an hour and a half.

Not doing nothing. I was being available. There is a particular way of standing that says I am here, and I would love to be asked, and I will not survive asking — and I have it down to an art. Slightly turned towards the busy part. Doing something with my paws so it does not look like waiting.

The thing I believed, and had believed for a very long time, was this: the fluffs who get picked are the ones somebody wants. So if nobody comes over, that is the answer, and it is politer not to make anybody say it out loud.

I watched Winky hand out four jobs. I watched Tidy pin up a plan. Nobody looked over. Which was, according to my rule, information.

Pinky came over eventually, the way Pinky does — already talking, already carrying something, already halfway into asking me to help with the glass.

And I heard my own mouth say: "No."

Which was not at all what I meant.

"I mean — I've been standing here all morning trying to say a thing and you keep getting there first." My ears had gone a colour I could feel. "Can I do the orchard hooks? For you. Not with you. For you."

There was a pause about a thousand years long.

"Yes please," said Pinky. "Thank you, Lonny."

That was the whole thing. Four seconds. I went up that lane with a job under one arm feeling roughly three inches off the ground.

Buddy had already put me and Peeky on the orchard stretch, before any of the counting got as far as who was left over. I did not know that at the time. I found out at the party, off an envelope, and had to go and stand in the kitchen for a minute.

The orchard is forty hooks long and nobody walks past it. Peeky did not say anything for the first ten minutes and neither did I, and then somewhere around hook four I said "want to be friends?" the way I always do, and Peeky said we already were.

We counted them. All forty, properly, instead of guessing — because guessing is what you do when you do not much mind how it turns out.

At half past twelve we walked down to the Bun Shop, the two of us, and Buddy came because Buddy always comes, and Newby came because there was a bun Newby had not tried. We sat outside for an hour with our feet in the sun and nobody said the word lantern once. Newby had one bite of the green one and did not like it and was extremely pleased to have found that out.

That hour is the part of the day I would keep if I could only keep one.

I knew where I was going to stand at Winky's before I got there. I always do. The left-hand side of the fire, where you can see the door.

I did not stand there for very long, as it turned out.

Peeky came and found me. Then Buddy, who knows everybody's name and had spent the whole day making sure nobody ended up standing on their own, and who I suspect was doing his rounds. Then Newby wanted to describe the green bun to somebody who had been there, which does not technically require a witness but is better with one.

Beamy read the envelope out. Lonny — orchard hooks, asked for it himself.

Asked for it himself. Beamy put that bit in.

I was not sad about it and I was not exactly happy either. Mostly I was thinking about all the other mornings, and how many of them I have spent at the edge of a yard, and how the sum of what it would have cost to fix any one of them is about four seconds and one sentence.