Sugar & Spite Daily Specials Serving size: one (obviously)
Joy: unlimited
Regret: minimal
Excuse to call your mother: yes
Recommended daily intake: at least one
She was arranging the next tray when she noticed Finn reading it. He read the whole thing. He looked at her. He looked back at the card with the expression of a man confronting a philosophical position he found both frivolous and vaguely personal. Then he went to his truck, retrieved a black marker and a piece of card stock, and spent four minutes writing something she couldn't see.
He taped it to the front of his display.
Ivy leaned around to read it: a card, formatted identically to hers, listing the actual documented antioxidant content of Cherokee Purple tomatoes, including lycopene levels and their relationship to cardiovascular health, cited with what appeared to be an actual publication date.
"Did you have that memorized?" she asked.
"Yes."
"That's — " she tried to find the right word " —deeply unsurprising."
By ten o'clock, without either of them planning it, both cards had migrated upward — hers first, then his, then hers again — in a slow escalation of display positioning until they were both above eye level and completely illegible to anyone under six feet tall. Dot, from the kettle corn booth across the lane, pointed this out cheerfully. Neither of them acknowledged her.
The Sign War started at ten-fifteen and could not, in Ivy's honest assessment, be attributed solely to her. She had simply noticed that her A-frame chalkboard was visible from most of the north lane and had a reasonable amount of unused space, and it would be a waste not to use it.
Life is short. Eat dessert first.
Seven minutes later, she checked Finn's board. He had written beneath the day's specials, in the same neat, left-handed chalk:
Life is long if you eat your vegetables.
She considered this. She erased the bottom of her sign and added:Studies show happiness is a warm cookie.
His response took four minutes:Studies show cookies are not a food group.
She wrote:Studies show Finn is wrong.
Across the lane, she heard Dot say to Clarence, "Oh, she's good."
Ivy helped two customers, wrapped a half-dozen brown butter cookies in market paper, and answered a question about whether she took custom orders (yes, with a week's notice, and here was her card). She was counting change when she heard the sound of chalk on a board being erased and then the sound of someone rewriting with more force than the task required.
She looked over.
He had crossed out the entire sign. All the specials. All the tomato notes. Everything.
She photographed the new message once he had finished. The crossed-out chalkboard, the back of his flannel shirt, the Cherokee Purples in their graduated rows in front of it, and on the left edge of frame, barely visible, the corner of her own sign withFinn is wrongstill legible.
She posted it at eleven with the caption: The Discourse Continues.
By noon, Dot and Clarence had pulled their folding chairs to the edge of their kettle corn booth and angled them toward the north corner with the unambiguous posture of people who had found the best seat in the house.
Dot was somewhere in her late sixties, with the permanent tan of a woman who had spent decades outdoors and the opinions of someone who had earned the right to share them freely. Clarence was quieter, taller, and wore a Purdue cap that Ivy suspected he'd owned since actual attendance. They'd been at this market for twenty-two years, Dot mentioned, unprompted.
"You're doing great," Dot told Ivy during a lull. "He hasn't rewritten his sign twice in one morning since the year Patrice made him share a booth with the essential oils woman."
"I'm glad to be carrying on a tradition," Ivy said.
"He likes you," Dot said.
