In and out, grab what’s closest, no eye contact. I’ve watched him do it twice now, and it hurts me both times. A market is not a heist. A market is a conversation, and this one is finally learning to talk back. At nine in the morning, the stalls are loud with the season’s prime Georgia peaches.
“You smell them first,” I say, and hold one out to Davide. “Here. At the shoulder.”
“It smells like a peach.”
“Show some respect. Memorize it.”
“You’re going to make me late for the pool session.”
“The pool will keep.” I turn to the peach man, who has trees, a sister in a town I didn’t catch, and opinions about rain. I asked him about all three a few days ago, and now we’re colleagues.
“Georgia’s done in a few weeks,” he says, weighing my bag without being asked. “Then it’s apples and lies.”
“What kind of lies?”
“Store peaches.” He says it like a diagnosis.
I like him enormously. “Twenty minutes, Davide. The tomatoes were an apology the other day. Today they might be a promise.”
“You need help,” he says, shaking his head. He drifts toward the bread stall like a man pretending he isn’t going to buy the focaccia. We both know he’s going to buy the focaccia.
I’m smelling the third peach when I turn the corner of the stall, and a full year ends in the produce aisle.
The noise of the market goes somewhere else. My hand stays on the peach like the peach is holding me up. My body reacts before I authorize anything. The broad shoulders. The stillness. The cap pulled low over light brown curls it can’t fully contain. The extra inches on me I used to know by feel before I admitted I knew anything at all.
Marek is holding a tomato.
The cap hides the curls badly. It does nothing for the eyes. They are still that pale, unfair grey, the kind of grey that makes every thought behind them look organized even when I know better.
“Enzo,” he says.
My name lands the way it always landed. Like it never left his mouth. That’s the problem with him. Nothing about him announces what he took with him when he stopped coming. That name on his lips sounds brand new even though I heard it over and over for years.
“Kovár,” I reply.
Something crosses his face at that. Quick, filed away before it finishes arriving. I’m not going to examine it.
“The tomatoes.” He sets the one he’s holding back on the pile, careful with it, like it might testify later. “Better than I expected here.”
The hands haven’t changed. Blunt, certain, careful with everything they decide to hold. I spent two years being a thing they decided to hold. I look away from them first.
“They’re trying.”
“The peaches aren’t trying. The peaches have finished the job.” He nods at my bag. “Four?”
“Six.”
“Six,” he says, in the tone of a man confirming a scouting report. “Of course six.”
I don’t answer. There was a time I’d have handed him one and watched the whole ceremony, the first bite, the verdict delivered like a referee’s decision, and the ceremony was mine, in my kitchen, at my table. He can buy his own peaches now.
“The left ones,” he says to the pile. “Two days, maybe three, and the left ones win.”
“They’re the same peaches.”
“They are not the same peaches.” He almost smiles. I watch him decide not to. “Your lot look good against Austria.”
“We are good.”
