Sweet Corn and Sour Grapes

I want to start by explaining how I ended up buying a pretzel I didn't even want, because that's basically where this whole thing begins. My name is Melvin Schneider, I'm 42 years old, I do graphic design for a regional grocery chain, and three months ago my girlfriend Randi dumped me after five years together. She didn't dump me in a dramatic way, which somehow made it worse. She just sat me down at our kitchen table, which was technically her kitchen table before I moved in, and said we had grown into different people. Then she helped me pack boxes and lent me her hatchback for the move, because she is genuinely a nice person, and I hate her a little for that.

So it's a Saturday in June and I'm at the Downingtown Farmers Market, which happens every week on this grassy lot between a used bookstore and a bait shop. I hadn't planned on going. I had planned on eating leftover pad thai alone and watching something dumb, but my apartment felt like a shoebox that afternoon and I figured walking around among strangers would be better than lying on the couch cataloguing my failures. The whole place smelled like fried dough and cut grass, and there was a guy with a fiddle playing for tips, and honestly it was almost working. I was almost feeling like a normal human being who had things to look forward to.

Then I bought a pretzel from the stand near the entrance and turned around with it, and there she was. Randi. Standing about twenty feet away by the honey vendor, laughing at something, wearing a yellow sundress I recognized because I had complimented it at least four times over the years. And her hand was resting on the arm of a guy I had never seen before. Big guy, probably mid forties, contractor type forearms, one of those laughs you could hear across an entire market. He threw his head back at whatever she'd said and she swatted his arm and they both cracked up again like they had invented laughing together.

I don't know how to describe what happened in my chest except that it was like getting punched, except from the inside, and by someone I used to cook dinner with. Which is stupid. We broke up amicably, like I said. She told me she wanted me to be happy. I told her the same thing back and mostly meant it. But there's a difference between knowing your ex is allowed to move on and watching her do it in real time while you stand there holding a pretzel like an idiot.

Her name, by the way, is Randi Zimmer, she's 44, she's a real estate agent, and the new guy, who I would later learn is Brody Powell, seemed to be having the best Saturday of his entire life. I stood there chewing my pretzel and doing the math on how long it took her to replace me. Three months. It took her three months. It had taken me three months to stop checking my phone out of habit.

I needed to not be standing there, so I did what any mature adult does. I walked in the opposite direction at a brisk pace with no destination, which is how I ended up in front of a goat cheese stall wedged between the honey vendor and a woman selling sourdough. There was a handwritten sign that said "Jodi's Goat Cheese, Chester County" with a little cartoon goat on it, and honestly the cartoon goat was well drawn, which is probably why I stopped, because I notice that stuff for a living. There were little wax paper samples arranged on the table and a woman behind them in a flannel shirt and jeans, early forties, short brown hair, reading a paperback like she was in no hurry to sell anything to anybody.

I tried a sample of the chive one to have something to do, and it was genuinely good, and I said so, and then for some reason my brain decided to keep talking.

"Whoever does your branding has real talent," I said. "The goat is proportionally correct. Most cartoon goats are not proportionally correct."

She looked up from her book with an expression I would learn later was her deciding whether I was being weird or funny, because apparently I land somewhere between the two.

"Proportionally correct," she repeated. "That's a new one. Usually people just say it's cute." She stuck out her hand. "Jodi."

"Melvin." I shook it. "I do design work, so I notice this kind of thing whether I want to or not. It's a curse."

She squinted at me, and then she tilted her head like she was pulling something up from a deep filing cabinet. "Wait. Melvin. Graphic design program at Delaware County Community College? Like twenty years ago?"

I blinked at her. "Yes? How do you know that?"

"Jodi Maxwell. We had that Tuesday night typography class. You sat by the window and you were always sharpening your pencils, like constantly, you sharpened them down to nothing."

She laughed. "You probably don't remember me, we never actually talked, I just remember the pencils."

And I'll admit, I did remember her once she said it, vaguely, a quiet woman a couple seats over who was better at kerning than anyone else in that room including the professor. Twenty years is a long time and we had barely exchanged ten words back then, but the memory was there. I told her the pencil thing was a nervous habit and she said she'd figured that out even then, which made me feel weirdly seen by a person I hadn't thought about in two decades.

I stayed and bought a log of the plain chevre I didn't need, because my fridge at that point contained pad thai and half a beer, and we talked while she rang it up. It was easy, which surprised me. She asked what I was doing at the market on a Saturday and I made the mistake of glancing back toward the honey stand before I answered, and she caught it, because she caught everything.

"Rough day?" she asked.

"Something like that," I said, and she let it go, which I appreciated more than she could have known.

And then I did the impulsive thing, the thing I would spend the entire drive home analyzing. I asked her to get coffee sometime. Out of nowhere. My ex was twenty feet away laughing at another man's jokes and I asked a near stranger to get coffee, and I'd be lying if I said those two facts were unrelated. At the time I told myself it was just to even the score, just so that if Randi ever heard I was out in the world being a person, it wouldn't be as a sad guy eating pretzels alone.

Jodi considered it for a second and then said, "Sure. I'm only here Saturdays, so next Saturday, after I pack up around four?"

So that's what we did. The following Saturday, which would have been mid June, she packed up her stall and I helped her carry crates to an old pickup that was not Randi's hatchback, thankfully, and we drove separately to a coffee place on the main street in Downingtown because it felt less weird than carpooling with someone I'd had one conversation with in this century.

I want to be fair to myself about what happened at that coffee date, because people online love to assign motives. Here is what actually happened. We sat down with our coffees and before we had even finished stirring them, Jodi said, "So, full disclosure, since you apparently remember me from twenty years ago and might be surprised. I'm a trans woman. Just putting that out there early so nobody feels ambushed."

I sat there for a second and then said, and I quote myself because I will never live it down, "Oh. Well. Congratulations?"

She laughed so hard she had to put her cup down. Not a polite laugh, a real one, the kind where you snort a little. "Congratulations," she repeated. "That's a first. Usually it's an awkward subject change or twenty questions. Congratulations is new."

"It was the worst possible thing I could have said," I admitted.

"It was terrible," she agreed, still laughing. "It was so terrible it looped back around. Congratulations, Melvin, you may proceed."

And after that the conversation just went. We talked about the design program and the professor who used to fall asleep during his own lectures, about her goats, of which she has six and can name all of them and rank them by personality, about my job and how I once spent three weeks redesigning a coupon nobody used. She was funny in a dry, sideways way, and she asked real questions and actually waited for the answers, which after five years with someone is more disorienting than you'd think.

Walking back to our cars, I caught myself thinking that I'd had a genuinely good afternoon, and then I caught myself doing the other thing, the scoreboard thing, imagining mentioning it to Randi someday. And I felt a little sick about that, because Jodi had been nothing but honest and easy company and I was still filing her under revenge.

I didn't figure out that I was doing it yet, though. That took another Saturday or two.

Here's the part I keep circling back to, because it's the part where I stopped being able to tell myself a clean story about my own motives. The market only runs Saturdays, but Jodi had mentioned offhand that she does a smaller weekday thing, a midweek setup outside the bait shop lot with a folding table and a hand painted sign, mostly for the regulars who work weekends. So the following Wednesday, which I remember was overcast and muggy, I told myself I was just in the neighborhood, which was a lie, because I live nowhere near the neighborhood and I had driven across town on purpose. I had actually taken a long lunch to do it, which is the kind of detail that makes the lie extra pathetic. I was in the neighborhood. Sure I was.

She was at her folding table reading another paperback, and when she looked up and saw me she did this little half smile, like she'd been expecting me to show up eventually but hadn't bothered betting on it. "Well, look who's in the neighborhood," she said, and I knew right then she had me figured out. I bought another log of chevre, which meant my fridge now contained pad thai, half