Sourwood & Sweat

"You're early," Allan said, and I nearly dropped my coffee.

He was crouched behind the Dyer Family Produce stall, unloading a flat of Sourwood honey jars out of a dented white van, and when he stood up my whole morning went sideways. White t-shirt, dark brown forearms slick with sweat, the early Georgia sun doing him favors he clearly didn't need. Thirty-five years old and built like someone who actually works the farm he brags about.

"So are you," I said, because I am graceful under pressure.

"I always come early. You came forty minutes early." He set the flat down on the tailgate and looked at me. Not glanced. Looked.

Well. What was I supposed to do, show up at the exact start time like other people do? I'm thirty-three, I've been a professional nanny for a decade, and I know exactly how working interviews go. Show up early, look eager, get the gig. The gig pays four hundred for a weekend, and I was between families, with a savings account making noises like a dying fan.

"Traffic," I said.

"There's no traffic in Eastwood at six a.m."

"There's traffic somewhere in the world, Allan."

He laughed at that, and something in my stomach did the thing. The old thing. Nine years ago, back when I was twenty-four and paired with him for a senior business project neither of us cared about, I'd felt this exact thing and ignored it. Then we finished our presentation on a farm co-op that we both got A's on, went to his dorm room to celebrate with warm beer, and ignored it a lot less successfully. One sweaty night. He asked me to dinner after. I said no thanks. Very adult of me, honestly.

And here he was, nine years later, holding a jar of honey and looking at me like I'd shown up in a limo instead of driving my ancient Corolla.

"You look good," he said.

"You look sweaty."

"I look like a farmer. This is the aesthetic. Come on, I'll introduce you around."

I followed him under the canvas awning, past crates of tomatoes so red they looked fake, past a chalkboard sign that said DYER FAMILY PRODUCE in handwriting that was clearly not his. Sixty stalls lined the lane, canvas tops all the way down, oak shade cutting the worst of the heat already. Somewhere a man was arguing about okra prices. Butter in actual pails. It smelled like dirt and honey and cut flowers, and I don't mean that in a greeting-card way, I mean it in a your-sinuses-notice-it way.

"Kris," Allan called. "She's here."

His sister came around the cash box like a woman arriving at a crime scene. Kris, thirty-eight, co-owner, and from the second I met her at some college tailgate a decade ago, deeply convinced that a pretty face meant a lazy worker. She'd said as much to someone within my hearing, which was a bold move, since I was standing right there.

"Bette." She looked me up and down. "Early. Good sign."

"I try."

"Don't try, do. Here's the schedule." She handed me a laminated sheet, because of course she laminated it. "We open at seven. You're on the floor until nine, then break, then floor until noon. Rodney takes over the honey booth at ten, so you help him load out first. Questions?"

"Just one. What exactly is the position? Allan's ad said weekend childcare, but I haven't seen a single kid."

Kris looked at Allan. Allan looked at a tomato.

"Ask him," Kris said. "I'm on the cash box. Bette, if he gives you trouble, holler." And she walked off, all five-foot-two of her radiating distrust like a space heater.

So there we were. Under the canvas, alone, with the honey and the tomatoes and my iced coffee sweating in my hand.

"So," I said. "The ad. Weekend childcare. Whose child? Where's the child, Allan?"

He picked up a honey jar, turned it around, set it back down. The man was stalling like a freshman defending a bad thesis.

"The ad was a mistake," he said.

"A mistake."

"A bait and switch. Kind of. Kris wrote the real posting and it got zero replies in three weeks, so I rewrote it."

"You rewrote it. How did your rewrite involve children you don't have?"

"Okay." He straightened up, wiped his hands on his jeans, and took a breath like he was about to deadlift something. "There's no kid. There was never going to be a kid. I made up the whole thing because I wanted to see you again and I couldn't think of a normal way to do it after nine years."

I stared at him. Somewhere down the lane a woman yelled about peaches.

"You catfished me with a fake nanny job," I said slowly. "You built an entire fake job listing. On a hiring site. To get a woman you haven't spoken to in nine years to drive forty minutes."

"When you say it like that it sounds bad."

"Name a way it doesn't sound bad."

"I genuinely can't." He rubbed a hand over his jaw. "But you're here. And you're early. So maybe it worked."

The audacity. The absolute audacity of this man. I should have turned around and left. I should have gone straight to Kris and told her her brother was using the family business as a dating scheme, which, by the way, Kris probably would have believed instantly.

Instead I stood there and thought about that dorm room. Warm beer, window unit rattling, his hands, the ache I used to get low in my belly just watching him explain something I already understood. Nine years of that, filed away under bad ideas, and now he'd handed me a fake job application and asked me to come feel it again.

"You asked me out once," I said. "After the project. I said no."

"I remember."

"Why did you remember? People forget. It's allowed."

"Because it bugged me for a year." He shrugged, which did terrible things to the shoulders of that white t-shirt. "You said no thanks and I spent about twelve months wondering what the deal was. Then I stopped wondering. Then you walked up this morning and I started again."

"Allan."

"Yeah?"

"You hired a nanny to do nothing. What happens when I ask for a paycheck?"

"Then I pay you and you stack crates for two days and we're square, and I'll never bother you again. Word of honor." He held up three fingers, scout style. "Or, option two."

"There's an option two."

"You tell me what you actually want, and we do that instead."

Down the lane, Rodney, their father, fifty-seven and sun-beaten, was cranking up the awning on the honey booth and glancing over at us with the expression of a man who has watched his son moon over somebody for nearly a decade and would like it resolved before the heat peaks. I gave him a little wave. He gave me a nod that said, get on with it, girl.

I took a long drink of coffee. Bought myself three seconds.

Here's what I knew about myself, and I knew it clearly: I did not want to date Allan Dyer. I did not want Sunday dinners and meeting his sister's kids and figuring out holidays. I had just come out of two years of a relationship that ended in a group chat, and my appetite for strings was zero.

What I wanted was standing in front of me in a sweaty t-shirt, wanting me back.

"Option two," I said.

He went still. "Yeah?"

"But I'm going to be honest with you first, and you can't flinch."

"I don't flinch."

"Everyone flinches." I set my coffee down on a crate. "I don't want the farmhouse. I don't want the family plan. I don't want to be somebody you text good morning to. I want one afternoon, the two of us, no strings attached to anything, and after that we're friendly strangers who both enjoyed ourselves. That is the entire offer. Take it or leave it."

For a second I thought he'd actually flinch. Then he grinned, slow, like a man watching rain come in over a dry field.

"Bette," he said, "I've been waiting nine years for option two."

"That's pathetic."

"A little, yeah." He reached past me for the honey flat, close enough that I felt the heat coming off his arm. "So. Yes?"

"Yes. But after the market, because I am not losing four hundred dollars for you."

"Fair. God, that's fair." He laughed, quiet, and picked up the flat. "Then grab those tomatoes, future ex-nanny. We open in twenty minutes."

So I grabbed the tomatoes. What else was I going to do, walk away from four hundred dollars and a man I'd spent nine years not thinking about? I stacked them in pyramids like he showed me, and he worked beside me, close enough that our elbows bumped every third crate, and neither of us mentioned it.

The market opened at seven and it opened loud. Cars started filling the grass lot, strollers appeared out of nowhere, and a man in a fishing hat asked me if the tomatoes were dry farmed. I said sure, mostly, and he bought six pounds. Allan watched me make the sale with an expression I did not like at all, because it looked like pride.

"You're good at this," he said, handing me change from the cash box.

"I'm good at pretending to belong places. It's a nanny skill."

"Could've fooled me."

"You are fooled. That's the point."

Kris came back from the cash box around seven thirty, five-foot-two of pure suspicion in a Dyer Family Produce apron. She looked at me selling tomatoes, then at her brother, then at me again, and I watched the math happen behind her eyes.

"Huh," she said, and turned to Allan. "Can I see you for one second? Over by the van. One second."

"Sure thing, boss."

They walked off and I did not eavesdrop, technically. I just happened to be arranging squash at the end of the table closest to the van, and sound travels, and Kris's whisper is a normal person's shouting.

"A nanny, Allan? Really? That's your play?"

"It's a working interview."

"She's too pretty to be serious about nannying and you know it. You've known it since college."

"Thanks for the input, Kris."

"I mean it. Don't mess this stand up. Dad's already complaining about the heat."

They came back and Kris gave me a look that said she'd be watching, and then she went off to do whatever co-owners do, and Allan handed me a flat of okra like nothing had happened.

Around eight Rodney took his post at the honey booth and started handing out samples on little wooden sticks like a man on a mission. He caught my eye across the lane and tipped his cap. I tipped an imaginary one back. Behind me, Allan laughed.

"He likes you," he said.

"Everybody likes me. It's my curse."

And then, because the universe hates me, she showed up.

I don't know her name. Tall, sundress, big sunglasses pushed up into her hair, holding a canvas bag with some other market's logo on it. She came to the table at about nine fifteen, looked at the tomatoes for maybe four seconds, and then looked at Allan for considerably longer.

"Hi," she said. "You're the honey people, right?"

"We're produce," Allan said. "Honey's the booth across the way, my dad runs it."

"Well, you should come say hi sometime." She smiled at him. At him. Not at me, not at the okra, at him, all teeth and sunscreen. "You look familiar. Do I know you?"

"I don't think so. These peaches are good today, if you want peaches."

"I might want peaches." She leaned a forearm on the table. "What's your name?"

"Allan. Can I get you a bag?"

And here is the part I want to describe correctly, because I've turned it over maybe two hundred times since. He did not flirt back. He didn't do the thing men do where they accept the attention with a modest little smile while they stack it up for later. He answered her questions about the peaches and rang her up and his eyes never once drifted to where she was clearly inviting them to go. He watched her hands take the bag, said "have a good one," and turned straight back to me like she'd been a weather event.

She walked off toward the honey booth with her canvas bag swinging. I stood there holding a bunch of basil I had no reason to be holding.

"What?" Allan said.

"Nothing."

"You're staring."

"I'm inventorying the basil."

"You're staring at me."

"And what if I am?" I put the basil down before I crushed it. "You didn't even look at her."

"Was I supposed to?"

"No. That's not. I just." My stomach did something dumb and warm and completely beneath me. Nine years, one night, and this man not looking at a woman in a sundress was doing more for me than two years of an actual relationship. That's humiliating to type and it was humiliating to feel, standing behind a produce table at nine in the morning smelling like corn. "Never mind. It's hot out."

"It is hot out." He handed me a bottle of water