"Wouldn't dream of it."
"The chalkboard sign is mine."
"I'll get my own."
"Don't play music."
"I'm going to play music."
He turned back to his tomatoes.
Ivy looked at the large space they were meant to share. It suddenly felt too small. She looked at her phone, the notification count climbing past ten thousand.
She thought about Devon's version of her future. About Chicago and the food competitions and the way she'd almost disappeared into someone else's story.
She thought about her grandmother's kitchen, the smell of sugar and butter. She thought about the way she'd sat on the counter at age seven tasting batter from a spoon, absolutely certain that this — this particular pleasure, food and memory and the feeling of being completely present in a moment — was the thing she was going to build her life around.
She set down her bag. She started to unpack.
By noon, the view count was at twenty thousand. The comments had named the man in the video Highway Grump and were offering her varying degrees of support and speculation. She had to finish setting up. She had a summer to somehow pull off success in the town she'd spent a decade leaving.
CHAPTER TWO
The week's harvest loaded clean: four flats of Cherokee Purple, two of Brandywine, a half-flat of the Green Zebras he'd been trialing for three seasons, and the last of the summer squash packed in straw. Finn had been up since four-thirty. The truck was running by six.
This was the part of the week Finn liked best. The time before the town was awake, before people were on the street. The highway was still gray and cool. The fields opened up on both sides as if they were making room. He had a thermos of coffee and the radio off, and twenty miles of straight road to think in. Or not think. Mostly not think.
Especially not think about the woman on the side of the road.
The one with the fully charged phone who had somehow let her truck run out of oil. Who had been out there in the middle of nowhere telling her situation to strangers on the internet when he'd pulled over, cheerful about it, like running dry on a county highway at seven in the morning was an adventure she was having rather than a problem she'd caused. He'd stood there while she beamed at him like he'd done something remarkableinstead of something any person with a driver's license and twenty minutes would have done.
He was not thinking about the smile.
He was also not thinking about the truck. Pink. Not a working pink, not a faded-out pink, but a deliberate, committed, this-is-a-choice pink, with something written on the side in a cursive he hadn't stopped to read. And the smell coming off it: sweet, thick, the kind of sweet that had nothing to do with actual food. The kind that gave you a headache by association. Whatever she was selling out of that thing, it wasn't anything he'd put in his mouth.
Finn Hargrove had been farming long enough to know the difference between something thatlookedgood and something thatwasgood. Between surface and substance. Between a woman who was passing through and a woman who was staying.
He knew the type. Curvy girl, bright smile, someone who made you feel like the most interesting thing in the room for exactly as long as it suited her. He'd been that interesting once. He remembered how that ended.
The fields opened up on his left. The sun was coming up. He was not thinking about her.
Twenty minutes later, Finn backed the truck to the Boots & Roots spot, cut the engine, and started unloading.
This was also a part of the week he liked. The market before it opened. The sound of canopies going up and crates being moved. The smell of coffee from the diner across the square, vendors calling to each other across the lot in the unhurried way of people who'd been doing this long enough not to need to rush. He'd had the corner spot for two years. He knew every board in the platform underfoot, knew which neighbor would offer him a coffee and which would ask him about his yield and actually want to know, knew the angle of the morning light in Augustand how it hit the Cherokee Purples and made them look like something from a painting.
And then he'd looked up… and seen her.
He had the display finished and the price cards written and was working through the flavor notes on the chalkboard when an engine that sounded like it had been recently resurrected and was still surprised about it pulled up.
The pink truck was parked in the adjacent spot, close enough that he could read the logo. Sugar and Spite. She was standing in the gap between their trucks, looking at the distance between them, and then she looked at him, and she smiled the way someone smiles when a situation that could have gone badly had gone, in their assessment, well.
He did not smile back.
She lifted a hand. Same gesture she'd given him on the highway. He chose not to acknowledge that he recognized it. He chose to forget the interaction they'd just had and get on with his day.
He wroteCherokee Purpleon the chalkboard in his left-handed slant, thenRich, complex, low acidbelow it, then paused with the chalk in his hand.
He was reaching for the next variety card when the sound of her voice changed. It had gone up half an octave and acquired a warmth that had been carefully manufactured for an audience he couldn't see. He turned his head just enough to look without looking like he was looking.
