The Pepper Incident

Lila pulled her van into the dusty lot at the edge of the market and sat there for a minute with both hands on the wheel. The heat was already sitting on the windshield like a cat that had no intention of moving. It was July, it was Saturday, and she had four bags of chili-infused beans in the back that she needed to sell before noon if she wanted to make rent that month.

"Okay," she said to herself. "Okay, get it together."

She was thirty-four years old and she still talked to herself in the van. She figured that was fine. Everybody talked to themselves in the van.

The problem, and she knew this before she even opened the door, was Quentin. He ran a jam booth at this market, three rows over from where her spot always was, and they had dated for six months two years ago before it ended the way it ended. She was thirty-two then and she had said some things, and he had said worse things, and now every market day was a game of not making eye contact with a man who made jam for a living and was weirdly good at it.

She hauled her bags out one at a time. The roaster went last, because it weighed as much as a small dog that hated her. By the time she got everything to her stall, a canvas thing her neighbor Doreen let her share, sweat was running down the back of her knees and she was done with the whole day already.

"Hot one," Doreen said, fanning herself with a paper plate.

"The hottest one," Lila agreed. "There has never been a hotter one."

She set up her roaster and got the samples going. The chili beans smelled incredible when they hit the heat, smoky and a little mean, and she had little paper cups lined up like soldiers. Within an hour she had a decent trickle of customers. A woman in her forties bought a bag and told Lila it tasted like "a campfire that respects you," which Lila immediately decided was going on her sign.

It was going well, honestly. That was the part she kept waiting to go badly.

She glanced three rows over. Quentin's booth was doing its usual brisk business, and Quentin was doing his usual thing where he laughed too loud at whatever his customers said. He looked tanned and smug in a linen shirt, the jerk. She looked away before he could catch her looking.

That was when she noticed the crowd.

There was a stall under the big mossy oak at the far end of the path, one she had never really registered before, even though she'd been coming to this market for two years. It was a wooden thing, old and crooked, with a single shelf of jars on it. Honey jars, apparently. And there was a crowd around it, maybe fifteen people, all standing there in a loose half circle like they were waiting for something, and not one of them was moving to buy anything and leave.

"Huh," Lila said.

Doreen followed her gaze. "That stall turned up last month. Nobody runs it. I mean nobody, hon. I watched it for twenty minutes one Saturday and there was just... jars."

"So who takes the money?"

"That's the thing. You leave the money in the dish. There's a dish." Doreen shrugged in a way that meant she found it charming but also slightly against God. "I don't trust it."

Lila did trust it, which was her whole problem in life. She told Doreen she'd be back in ten minutes and walked down the dusty path, weaving through strollers and a man carrying a comically large potted fern.

Up close the stall was odder. The jars on the shelf were small, fist-sized, and the honey inside them caught the light in a way that honey should not, a faint shimmer like someone had stirred glitter through it very politely. There was indeed a dish for money, and a little handwritten card that said TAKE ONE, LEAVE FAIR TRADE. That was it. No prices, no name.

"Okay, this is a bit much," Lila said under her breath.

"It is a bit much," someone agreed behind her. "It stays anyway."

She turned around and there was a man standing there who had absolutely not been standing there before. He was tall, taller than her by a head and a half, wearing a plain linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He had dark hair going a little wild at the ends and green eyes, and she meant really green, like the woods behind her aunt's house in the spring. He looked maybe thirty-seven. He looked like he'd been standing in that exact shade his whole life.

"Sorry," Lila said, blinking. "I didn't see you walk up."

"Most people don't." He smiled, and it was a nice smile, a little crooked. "You're the bean woman. The one with the chili beans. I could smell it from here. The smoke and the... the bite, under it."

"Oh. Well." She wiped her hands on her apron for no reason. "That's the point of them, yeah. Sorry, are you the vendor here?"

He considered that. "I keep the stall. The honey keeps itself, more or less."

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agreed pleasantly. "It isn't."

She should have walked away right then. A normal person would have walked away. But the crowd was drifting off now, all of them carrying little jars, all of them looking vaguely pleased and slightly stunned, and the honey on the shelf was doing its shimmer thing, and the shade under the oak was the coolest air she'd felt all day, like the tree had its own weather.

"I'm Lila," she said.

"Howard." He said it like it was an old word he hadn't used in a while and wanted to be careful with.

"Howard. So what's in the honey that makes people look like they just remembered a happy dream?"

"Mostly flowers," he said. "And some other things. Old things. Do you want to try it?"

"You're not going to tell me what the other things are first?"

"It works better as a surprise," he said, and he looked apologetic about it, which somehow made it worse. "And it isn't for everybody. Some people taste nothing but sweet and go on with their morning. Some people taste everything."

"Everything like what?"

He picked up one of the tiny jars and held it out. Up close the honey was moving, slowly, the way heat shimmer moves off a road. He had long hands and dirt in the creases of his knuckles, actual garden dirt, and something in Lila's chest sat up and paid attention, which was annoying, because she was there to sell beans and avoid her ex.

"Smoke and flowers," he said. "That's the short version. The long version takes about two minutes and some privacy, and I'd want you sitting down for it."

"Sitting down."

"It comes on strong," Howard said. "I should have mentioned that to the others. They manage."

Lila looked at the jar. She thought about her roaster three rows away, unattended, and about Quentin, and about how the last interesting thing that happened to her was a woman describing her beans as a respectful campfire.

"You know what," she said, taking the jar, "it's hot as hell out here and your tree has better weather. Sit down for it, you said?"

"There's a bench in the back," Howard said, and something in his green eyes went bright and pleased, like she'd said the thing he'd been waiting centuries for somebody to say.

Lila sat down on the bench in the back of the stall, which was exactly as rustic as it sounded, a plank of wood across two stumps with a cushion on it that smelled like rain. Howard stayed standing, which somehow made the whole thing feel like a tasting room at a very strange winery.

"So do I sip it? Swirl it? What are the rules here?"

"Just a little," he said. "Smaller than you think."

She took the smallest possible taste off the tip of the spoon he handed her. For about three seconds it was nothing, just sweet and a little smoky, and she thought, well, okay, this is a scam after all, a pretty one.

Then it arrived.

It came up through her feet and out the top of her head, a wave of heat that had nothing to do with the July weather. Her skin prickled all over, her scalp, her arms, the backs of her knees. Her thoughts went soft and fuzzy, like someone had turned the focus knob on the whole world. She felt every leaf on the oak above her. She felt the dust settling. She felt, briefly and absurdly, the exact mood she'd been in at six years old...

Wait, no, she was thirty-four. Numbers were getting slippery.

"Oh," she said. It came out as more of a breath. "Oh, wow. Okay. Wow."

"Here, breathe slower," Howard said, and he crouched down in front of her, which was the first time she'd seen his face level with hers. He was close enough that she could see the dirt on his hands up close, and something older than dirt in his eyes. "You're tasting more than most. I should have started you smaller."

"You think?" Her voice sounded far away to her. "What is this stuff? It's like my whole body turned into a Tuesday."

He laughed at that, a real laugh, short and surprised. "It's memory sap. The tree's, mostly. It holds what's happened under it. All the years. All the people." He paused. "And right now you're not just tasting the tree. You're tasting me. My presence is in it too, and some people react to that more than the honey itself. You're reacting to both."

"To you," Lila said, and the fuzzy part of her brain tried to make that a flirt and failed. "That sounds like a line."

"It's a fact. Lines are shorter." He took the jar gently out of her hand and set it on the shelf. "The heat fades in a few minutes. You'll be sharper after, actually. That's the fair trade part. You give it a minute of your morning, it gives you back a little more than you brought."

Her skin was still humming. Everything he said came through the hum. She noticed she'd leaned forward on the bench without deciding to, and pulled back, and he noticed that too, and very politely looked at the shelf instead of her.

Which was, of course, exactly when Quentin's voice showed up.

"Lila. Lila. I can smell those cursed beans from three rows over, I know you're here."

Lila closed her eyes. "Oh no."

"You know him," Howard said. It wasn't really a question.

"My ex. Quentin. Jam guy. Six months, two years ago, ended..." She waved a hand, which flopped more than she meant it to. "Badly. He's still mad I didn't cry at the breakup dinner."

The shadow at the front of the stall darkened, and there he was, Quentin, thirty-six and going slightly red in the face, in his good jam shirt. He held a jar of something red like it was evidence.

"There you are. Skulking at the honey stall. Of course." He held the jar up. "Somebody left a review on the town board last night saying my strawberry preserves tasted like cough syrup. Cough syrup. I've been making that recipe for nine years. And I watched you typing on your phone at Doreen's booth this morning, so don't even."

Lila stared at him. "You think I wrote a bad review of your jam?"

"Who else would? You've hated me since..." He ran out of sentence. "You know what you did."

"I told you I wasn't in love with you anymore! That's what I did."

"Excuse me," Howard said mildly, rising to his full height, which was considerable. "This is a place of trade. If you have a grievance, leave fair trade and come back never."

Quentin looked up at him, then up a little more. "Who is this guy?"

"None of your business," Lila said, standing up. The wave was mostly through her now and she could feel her thoughts clicking back into order, sharp and unhelpfully pleased about it. "Also, I did not write your review. I have been selling beans