She'd said no. He'd been confused. She'd needed to be somewhere that wasn't Chicago, somewhere she could figure outwhat she was actually building. The rally had been her cousin Eva's idea and here Ivy was, returning to the place she'd spent years escaping, in a secondhand pink food truck with a hand-lettered logo, to sell the kind of sweets she'd been making since learning to make them in her grandmother's kitchen.
Sugar & Spite. Because both things were a fixture in her life.
She found the rally registration table in the community center lobby, staffed by a woman in her sixties with the organized energy of someone who had been running events since before events were things that needed managing.
"Ivy Lopez," Ivy said, pulling up the confirmation email. "I have a reserved food truck spot for the market on Saturdays and Sundays. The spot should be..." she scanned the email — "Spot 14B."
"Lopez." Leaf. Leaf. A small frown. "Lopez." More leafing. "Ah."
Ivy waited.
"14B was retired in June." he looked up. "Foundation issue. We had to pull the whole east section."
"I have a confirmation email."
"You have a confirmation email from before June. The system should have sent an update. I apologize if it didn't reach you."
Ivy took a breath. Outside the community center windows, she could see the market setup already in progress: vendors arranging their wares, a few food trucks maneuvering in the side lot, string lights being threaded through the overhead canopy framework. Everything she'd planned for. All of it contingent on a spot she no longer had.
"Is there anything else available?" she said.
The woman consulted another section of the binder. The length of this consultation was not encouraging.
"There's a double-corner. Stall 7, corner of Main and the north lane. High-traffic. Let me get this situated."
Ivy spent twenty minutes walking the market layout, filming a casual orientation reel, checking her view count (8,300 and climbing, with a comment thread that was primarily variations onwe need to know who the grumpy farmer is), and reminding herself that a spot at a corner location was arguably better than one in the east section.
"It's arranged. Spot 7, north corner. Mr. Gallagher's already set up. Just introduce yourself."
Paperwork was handed over. Directions were pointed out. Ivy hopped back into her truck and navigated it to Spot 7.
The truck itself was the first thing that stopped her. Not a food truck exactly — or not only a food truck. It was an older flatbed, painted the deep green of something that had been in a field once, with Boots to Roots stenciled across the side panel. It occupied the double spot as if the market had been built around it rather than the other way around.
The produce was what got her, though. Wooden crates stacked at graduated heights. Tomatoes in every shade from pale yellow to something so dark it was nearly black, grouped by variety with small handwritten cards that listed names she half-recognized — Cherokee Purple, Mortgage Lifter, Green Zebra — and flavor notes written in the shorthand of someone who expected you to keep up. A chalk-lettered sign anchored the whole thing, neat and unadorned. No Instagram handle. No QR code.
The man behind it had his arms crossed and was looking at her like a weather system that had decided a storm was approaching. It was her grumpy hero from earlier. His eyes went to her camera — she had it in her hand, not raised, just carried — and something in his jaw set.
"Hi," she said. "I'm Ivy Lopez. I'm going to be sharing the space with you. The east section had a foundation issue, and — " she gestured at the setup, which remained extremely impressive — "I'll be on this half. I do desserts, so there shouldn't be any menu overlap. I have my own signage and…"
He looked at her for a long moment. He looked at the camera again. He crossed his arms.
It was possible that this was going to be a problem. It was also possible that there was a version of this situation where she framed it as a win.
She met his eyes. He was looking at her the way he'd looked at her engine; like a problem to be assessed, oiled, capped, and slammed shut.
"You filled my oil," she said. "About an hour ago, on 41. The pink truck."
"I remember. You filmed me doing it."
"I'm a food blogger. I have a vlog. Content is kind of — it's what I do." She paused. "The clip has over eight thousand views."
He looked at the sky briefly, in the way of a man appealing to a higher authority that was not going to help him.
"I won't film your setup without asking," she said. "I won't use your products in my content without permission. I won't get in your way. I'm only here for the summer, so…"
That tidbit of information perked him up. His shoulders visibly relaxed. His jaw unclenched.
"Finn Hargrove," he said. "Don't put things on my side."
