The Jam Vendor

Debra figured the market would be dead on a Thursday, so she left her van in the gravel lot behind the grange hall and gave herself twenty minutes to buy jam before the rest of her afternoon got eaten by a dinner order. She was thirty-four, single by choice, and a private chef in Butterworth, which mostly meant she spent her weeks cooking for other people's families and her Saturdays pretending she didn't want a family of her own. The Harvest Home market sat in a big grassy field with striped tents down the middle and livestock pens off to one side, and apparently half the county had decided to skip work too, because the crowd was thick for a weekday.

She threaded through the strollers and the folding tables and the guy yelling about sweet corn at two for a dollar. The pie-judging pavilion already had a line, which felt optimistic for eleven in the morning. She didn't care about any of it. She wanted apple butter, the good kind, the kind a client had mentioned in passing three weeks ago and then never shut up about.

The farm stand was near the back, under a canvas awning that had faded from red to something closer to pink. A hand-painted sign said Quince Hollow Orchard, and below it, jars in neat rows, all of them dark and glossy in the sun. Debra picked one up and was reading the label when the woman behind the table looked up from a jar she was wiping with a rag.

"Apple butter's the winner today," the woman said. "Unless you like plum, in which case I take it back."

Debra turned to answer and stopped with the jar half-raised. She knew that face. Auburn hair tied back with a strip of cloth, freckles across the nose, that one eyebrow that always sat a little higher than the other like it was waiting for a punchline.

"Aubrey," Debra said.

The woman's smile came slow and dry, like butter spreading. "Well. I figured it'd be somebody from town eventually, but I didn't figure it'd be you on a Thursday."

"You remember my Thursdays?"

"I remember your everything, Deb. That's sort of the problem." Aubrey set the jar she'd been wiping down on the table and stuck out her hand over the display, formal as a job interview. "Hi. It's been a while."

Debra shook it. Aubrey's hand was warm and a little rough, jam-sticky at the knuckle. "Twelve years," Debra said. "You counting?"

"Every one. Kidding. Mostly." Aubrey let go and shrugged. "I'm thirty-four now, if you're doing the math. You look good. Better than good, honestly, and I'm gonna stop talking before this gets weird."

"You're already there," Debra said, and it came out easier than she meant it to, and Aubrey laughed, and something in Debra's chest did a thing she decided not to examine. "How long have you had the stand?"

"Three years. Before that I just sold off the gate. I live at the orchard. I never really left, I guess, it's just that I left town." Aubrey gestured at the jars with the rag. "You want to sample before you commit? House rules. Nobody buys sad."

"I'll sample." Debra took the little wooden spoon Aubrey offered and dug into the open jar on the table. The apple butter was dark, spiced, warm-tasting even cold, and she made a noise she wasn't proud of. "Okay. Yeah. My client was right and I hate that."

"Client?"

"I'm a private chef now. Catering too. I cook for rich people who don't want to admit they hired somebody."

"That's a great job for you," Aubrey said, and it didn't sound like flattery, it sounded like a fact she'd been carrying around. "You used to cook for the whole dorm floor that one Thanksgiving. I remember the turkey."

"You remember the turkey."

"I remember standing in that kitchen doorway watching you wave a baster around like a sword. It was a formative afternoon."

Debra took another sample to have something to do with her mouth. Plum next. Also good, tart, honest. The third jar was quince, which she'd never had fresh, and it tasted like honey and flowers and something older underneath. "What is that?" she asked. "The quince one. It's sorta... I don't know. Different."

"Tree's different," Aubrey said, and there was a beat there, a little hitch in her voice, gone as fast as it came. "Old tree. Old fruit. My family's had the orchard since before there was a Butterworth, technically, though good luck finding that on any paperwork."

"Family secret?"

"Family weirdness. You'll have to come out there if you want the tour." Aubrey said it lightly, wiping her hands on the rag, and then busied herself straightening a row of jars that did not need straightening. "Actually. Since you're here. The orchard's got a problem, and you happen to have two working hands and, presumably, a free afternoon."

"A problem," Debra said.

"We've got more fruit than we can pick. Seconds, mostly, the ugly ones, windfalls, the stuff that makes the best butter anyway. Andy usually brings his crew over, but he's got hives to move and I've been putting off asking anyone." Aubrey looked up, and the dry smile was back but her eyes were doing something more careful under it. "So I'm asking now. Do you want to come pick apples sometime? Terrible pay, that is jam. All the jam you can carry."

Debra looked at the jar in her hand. She had a dinner order Friday, a brunch thing Sunday, and a Saturday that had been planning to be empty and lazy. The orchard was twenty minutes out of town. Aubrey was standing there in a tank top and work boots looking exactly like the last twelve years hadn't happened, and Debra had spent a solid decade not thinking about one particular kiss at a college party when they were both twenty-two, one kiss at the end of a night that neither of them had ever mentioned again, and then Aubrey was just gone the next semester, no goodbye, no explanation, and Debra had filed it under things that don't get talked about.

"Saturday," Debra said. "I can come Saturday morning. I'll bring crates."

Aubrey blinked. Whatever she'd expected, it wasn't a yes that fast. "Saturday. Yeah. That works. Come whenever, the gate's off Miller Road, follow the drive all the way back, you'll see the trees."

"I remember where the orchard is, Aubrey. I grew up here."

"Right. Yeah. Obviously." Aubrey laughed at herself and rubbed her palms on her jeans. "Okay. Saturday. I'll have the ladder out and the coffee on and I'll try not to act like this is a bigger deal than it is."

"Is it a bigger deal than it is?"

"Ask me Saturday," Aubrey said.

Debra paid for two jars, apple butter and the quince, and Aubrey refused to take money for the quince, saying it was a sample, saying the sample program was generous like that, and Debra gave up arguing when a lady with a wagon full of zucchini started hovering behind her. She walked back across the field past the pens, past the corn guy, past the pie pavilion where somebody was weeping with joy or defeat, and got in her van, and sat there for a second with the jars on the passenger seat.

Her phone buzzed. Chad, her occasional sous-chef, thirty-three years old and the biggest gossip in three counties.

"Tell me you found the jam lady," he said when she answered. "Because Betsy Swann will not shut up about the quince butter and I need to know if it's real."

"It's real," Debra said. "It's real and the woman who makes it is somebody I knew in college."

There was a pause on the line, the specific pause of Chad doing math. "The kiss girl?"

"You didn't know about that."

"Everyone knew about that, Deb. Well, everyone knew about it after Jamal told everyone, which, in fairness, was only like four people." Chad's voice went up an octave. "Is she cute? Is she still cute?"

"She's beautiful and she runs an orchard and I'm going there Saturday to pick apples and that's the end of this conversation."

"Deb."

"Bye, Chad."

She hung up on him and started the van. The quince jar caught the sun on the seat beside her and threw a little warm light on the windshield. Debra drove back into town and told herself, the whole way, that Saturday was about apples.

She didn't fully believe herself, but she'd gotten pretty good at that.

Saturday came up bright and cool, the kind of late-summer morning that made the whole town smell like apples whether or not there was an orchard involved. Debra loaded two empty crates into the van at seven, drove out Miller Road, and followed the gravel drive back past a hand-painted sign that said QUINCE HOLLOW, PICK YOUR OWN, MIND THE BEES.

Aubrey was not at the house. A note was taped to the porch post, written in pencil on the back of a seed catalog page.

"Deb. Got a blower to finish in the far block before it gets hot. Make yourself useful or don't, either way. Coffee's inside, it's the blue pot, don't touch the other one. A."

So Debra got a mug of the blue pot coffee, stood on the porch for a minute, and then, because standing still had never once worked for her, picked up a crate and walked out into the trees.

The orchard was bigger than she remembered from childhood drives past it. Rows ran off in long lines, old trees and newer ones mixed together, grass between the rows grown tall and gone to seed. The air smelled like cider vinegar and cut grass and, under it, something sweeter, like fruit that had already started turning. Windfalls lay everywhere in the grass, bruised and freckled, and every few rows there was a ladder leaning against a trunk where somebody had left off working.

She wandered without any plan, drinking her coffee, and that was how she found the sick tree.

It was in the middle of the far block, an old apple, bigger than the trees around it, with a trunk wide enough that a person could have hidden behind it. Most of it still had leaves. But a strip of bark on the south side had cracked and pulled away from the wood, a long vertical split, and the wood showing through was gray instead of the pale living color the rest of the orchard had. The branch above the crack held leaves that had gone brown at the edges, still hanging on, not