She had her phone out, aimed at herself, and she was moving it. Constantly. Every few seconds a new angle; close on her face, then pulling back to catch the market behind her, then tilting toward the truck, then back to her face. He watched her do this for a full thirty seconds and understood.
Short attention spans. Keep it moving, keep it bright, don't let a single second settle long enough for someone to get bored and scroll away. That was today's society.
He looked at the sugar truck. Thought about sugar. Thought about what a steady diet of processed sweetness did to a person's ability to sit still.
"— so excited to be here at the Valor Farmers Market, and I am here to win the food truck competition, y'all, so stay tuned because things are about to get very delicious and very…"
Finn set the chalk down on the lip of the board with a care that had nothing to do with the chalk.
The food truck competition. That's what she was here for.
He picked the chalk back up. Put it down again. Turned, slowly, and looked at the pink truck with its cursive logo and its cloud of headache-sweet smell and the woman in front of it who was still talking to her phone in that bright, manufactured voice, laughing at something she'd said, touching her hair.
Three years. He had been working toward this for three years. Two wins already on the board — back to back — and this year was supposed to be the one that finished it. The prize money plus what he'd put aside, enough to stop being a truck and start being a place. Four walls. A real kitchen. A sign over the door that said Boots & Roots, planted in the town that had taken him in when he had nothing left and helped him rebuild himself from the dirt up.
He was not going to lose that to a woman in a pink truck who couldn't keep oil in her engine and talked to strangers on the internet for a living.
He picked up the chalk.
Brandywine, he wrote.Meaty. Sweet; the standard everything else is measured against.
Across the gap, Ivy Lopez laughed at something on her phone screen — bright and unguarded— and he did not look up.
Finn was not thinking about the laugh either.
It was on.
CHAPTER THREE
Ivy arrived at seven-fifteen. Finn was already set up. Not mostly set up, not in the process of setting up — fully, completely, not-a-crate-out-of-place set up, standing behind his display with a cup of coffee and the expression of a man who had been waiting for the chaos to begin and had correctly predicted its arrival vehicle.
"Morning," Ivy said.
Finn looked at her pushcart. She'd brought a folding display shelf, a chalkboard sign on an A-frame stand, a small string of market lights, a laminated menu card, a cupcake carrier, and her camera bag. Also, a portable Bluetooth speaker the size of a large grapefruit.
"It won't be that loud."
He looked at the speaker.
She maneuvered the cart past the invisible line and started unloading. "I brought you something."
"I don't need anything."
"It's a cupcake. It's a good-luck cupcake. It's a gesture of neighborly goodwill, and also, I made a test batch yesterday, and I need an outside opinion on the brown butter ratio."
She set the carrier on the table and opened it. Inside, one cupcake: brown butter cake, salted caramel buttercream, a very small edible gold star on top because she had them and why not.
"How much sugar?" he said.
"It's a cupcake."
"How much sugar is in it?"
"It's a cupcake, Finn, the answer is cupcake amounts of sugar, that's what makes it a?—"
"Grams."
She stared at him. "I made it as sweet as legally permitted."
