“Great,” John repeated. He gave me a coffee-flavored peck. “We’ll see you later.”
“Bye, my babies! Have fun.”
It was good for the twins to get away from me sometimes, I told myself as I pulled out of the driveway. To have special bonding time with their daddy. It was good for John.
Maybe it would be good for me, too.
At the farmers’ market, the pumpkins and tomatoes had been replaced by apples, pecans, and first-frost collards, sweet from the cold. Jars of local honey and pickled okra gleamed on makeshift shelves. The tree farmers and Boy Scouts were doing brisk business in Fraser firs and wreaths, loading trees into pickups, securing car trunks with cord. The fresh pine scent swept over me, sharp as memory.
Two weeks until Christmas. I still needed to buy our tree. Or maybe two trees, one for our house and one for the farm.
Maybe Jo would help decorate when she got home, I thought hopefully, setting up my stall. Part of me wanted to have everything ready for my sisters’ homecoming, to make Christmas for them the way our mother always had, to hang the star on the barn and the wreath on the door. Put candles in the windows and strings of lights everywhere, looping over the crepe myrtle and azalea bushes, twining the banister and railings of the porch until the house glowed inside and out.
The Saturday morning shoppers streamed past my stall, oblivious to the whiteboard sign with prices lettered in my mother’s handwriting. Ignoring me, except to ask sometimes, kindly, how my mother was doing.
“Better, thank you,” I lied.
Except she wasn’t. Not really. Since the fall, her pain seemed worse, and she complained about the way the meds made her feel, lethargic and then irritable. The doctor had ordered a narcotic patch “to even things out.” But it was too soon to tell if it was working.
I rearranged the display by the cashbox, jars of chèvre marinating in golden olive oil. They looked nice, peppercorns studding the white cheese like little jewels. When Amy was younger—twelve or thirteen—she used to decorate the jars for the farmers’ market. I remembered her at the dining room table, earnestly tying quilting scraps with bits of ribbon around the lids. But Amy was in Paris.
Somebody called my name. Carl Stewart, the sweet potato farmer, a feed cap pulled over his reddish hair.
“Hey, Carl. What are you doing here?” I asked. “I thought you only sold in organic grocery stores now.”
He flashed a smile. “I’m a single farmer. Where else am I going to meet hot women?”
I laughed.
“Anyway, local and organic is what it’s all about. You don’t get more local and organic than the farmers’ market.” He ran an assessing eye over my stall, as practiced and inoffensive as the look he’d given me. “How’s business?”
“A little slow,” I admitted. “Maybe I should hand out lollipops. Like at the bank.”
“Not lollipops, samples.”
“I was hoping to sell cheese, not give it away.”
“Just a taste.” Carl winked. “Show them what they’re missing. Got any crackers?”
“Crackers? No. But...” I watched across the way as Connie of Cupcake Confections handed a cookie to a toddler in a stroller.Samples. What a good idea. “Maybe I have something better.”
That’s two baguettes and a loaf of walnut bread,” Connie said a few minutes later. “You want me to throw in a couple of these little plastic knives?”
“That would be wonderful, thanks! What do I owe you?”
“Please.” Connie waved my money away. “If you hadn’t talked methrough my loan application, I’d still be baking cupcakes in my kitchen. Tell your momma I said hi. And if anybody asks, you got your bread from Connie’s.”
Not everybody who took a sample bought cheese. But gradually a sort of line formed. The pile of bills in the cashbox grew.
“Meg, my dear, what are you doing here?”
Aunt Phee, wearing coral lipstick and a sweater set from Talbots. Her little dog stuck its head out of her bag, a matching bow in its topknot.
I tugged on the hem of my hoodie. Tucked my hair behind my ears. “Hey, Aunt Phee. Miss Wanda. I’m filling in for Momma today.”
“Selling cheese,” Aunt Phee said, in the tone somebody else might have used forPushing drugs.
“Yes, ma’am.”
