Finn. Community center before the market. Important. — Best wishes, A. Patel
Finn sighed. Both Pastor Patel and his wife were the only people who had his phone number who signed their texts like a written letter. This text was from Mrs. Patel. He set his phone face-down on the truck seat and pulled out onto the street in the direction of the community center —even though his fingers itched to make the left turn to the market instead. A summons from the pastor's wife could not be good.
The fact that she had gone to the trouble of typing something out and sending it meant that whatever this was, she wanted him there before he had a chance to think of a reason not to come. He thought of several reasons not to come during the seven-minute drive to the community center.
He respected the Patels. That was the problem. You couldn't dismiss a summons from someone you respected. It wasn't in how he'd been raised, and it wasn't in how he'd chosen to live. Pastor Patel had quietly arranged the line of credit that got Boots & Roots through its first winter. Mrs. Patel had shown up at his stall every Saturday for two years running and bought moreproduce than one household could reasonably use, and never once made him feel like it was charity. They were the kind of people Valor ran on.
But they were also the kind of people who had, between them, match-made approximately half the couples on the Purple Heart Ranch. Finn had spent three years making himself very small and very boring in their vicinity to avoid becoming a project.
He'd been careful. He'd been polite and distant and thoroughly uninteresting on the subject of his personal life. He'd watched one committed bachelor get that particular look from Mrs. Patel at the Fourth of July two summers ago and had taken three large steps sideways and pretended to be fascinated by the corn, only to be married in that same cornfield by Labor Day.
Finn pulled into the community center lot and sat for a moment with the engine off.
It's probably about the market, he told himself. Budget. Scheduling. Something administrative.
He got out of the truck.
The morning was still cool; the square quiet in the hour before everything started. He could hear the first vendors setting up across the lot; the sound of a canopy frame going up, a dolly on asphalt. He walked toward the community center doors with the energy of a man approaching a court marshal, or better yet, a firing squad.
He saw her at the same moment she saw him. Ivy came through the entrance from the other side, her camera bag over one shoulder, a coffee cup in her other hand. She looked up. Their eyes met.
She smiled. Not the audience smile, not the one she aimed at the phone. This smile made him stutter-step in his boots.
He reached the door first. Held it because (again) he'd been raised right. She stepped ahead of him, and he got a lungful ofvanilla and brown sugar. Finn was not a sweets man, but for the first time his mouth watered for something that had nothing to do with the harvest.
"Do you have any idea what this is about?" she asked.
"No," he said, which was mostly true.
Mrs. Patel was already at the front of the room. There was a projector screen pulled down behind her, which Finn had never seen deployed in this building before. A laptop sat open on the table, and a plate of something that smelled like cardamom was beside it. Pastor Patel was not present. Finn noted the absence, and it worried him. Mrs. Patel was a force on her own.
She looked up when they came in, and her expression did absolutely nothing to reassure him.
"Good," she said. "Sit down."
There were two chairs. Finn and Ivy sat in them simultaneously, with approximately eight inches between them.
Mrs. Patel clicked something on the laptop. The screen behind her lit up with a number.
Finn looked at the number.
"That's—" Ivy started.
"The view count on your social media account," Mrs. Patel said, "as of this morning. And this."
She clicked again. The follower graph for the Valor Farmers Market social account appeared. The graph line had been flat for eighteen months prior and then, in the last two days, the line went up like something had startled it.
"And this."
The next slide showed the Farmers and Food Truck Rally festival's budget spreadsheet. The deficit column was not small. She let them look at it for a moment.
"The internet has decided it is interested in Valor. Specifically in this year's festival. Specifically…" she looked atthem both with the measured patience of someone who had been waiting for slow people to catch up, "…in the two of you."
Finn said nothing. Beside him, Ivy had gone very still.
"It's clear that one of you will win the rally. But there's a bigger prize: the State Cook-Off."
Finn knew the Cook-Off. Every serious food vendor in the region knew about the Cook-Off. It ran the third weekend of spring in the state capital; three days, outside judges flown in from three cities, the kind of media coverage that could change what a small operation was and wasn't. He'd watched two vendors from neighboring counties come back from it different. Not famous, exactly. But established. The kind of established that meant a line before you'd finished setting up, that meant wholesale inquiries and catering calls and the credibility that came from having been seen and measured by people who didn't know you and had said yes, anyway.
