A Retreat In March
The village I live in has one paved road, two churches of different opinions, a general store that sells both kerosene and oat milk, and a bed and breakfast called the Wintergreen Inn, which is run by a woman named Deb who has been waiting twenty years for something to happen. By the first week of March, something was happening. I did not know this yet. Deb knew. Deb had known, it later turned out, since the second Tuesday in February.
The first I learned of any of it was a Saturday morning in the general store. I had walked down for eggs, because my own chickens were on strike on account of the cold, and I was standing in the aisle where the boots are kept next to the canned peaches, when a woman I had never seen before put her hand on my forearm and said, very quietly and with great emotion, *You're her.*
She was about forty. She was wearing a down coat of a type I associate with people who have recently read something about Patagonia's supply chain. She had the kind of clear, decent face that I normally trust, and which in this specific instance I found alarming, because behind the decency was a brightness I had seen before in certain relatives just before they asked me for a loan.
*I'm Margery Fell,* I said, carefully, the way you speak to a horse in a grocery store.
*I know,* she said. *We all know. I'm here for the retreat.*
There were, it transpired, forty of them.