After two blocks the street hit another commercial strip, less hectic than Church, with sun-faded awnings and an upscale ramen joint. I passed a “wine shoppe,” an upholstery store, and three hair salons. There was check cashing and craft beer. A Mexican restaurant, a school. A bar that doubled as a flower shop.
By the library, I came upon a bevy of white four-cornered tents, like a caravan set down for the night. A woman called to me; did I want to fight fracking in New York State? Hastily I shook my head and waded in. It was slow-going. Fathers with strollers and older women clogged the sidewalk, leisurely leaning over the eggplants and pulling plastic bags from overhead hooks. There were homemade pies, a freezer of turkey meat, veiny gray shrimp. Potted herbs. Zucchinis and berries and endless, endless tomatoes, heirloom and cherry, plum and Roma, yellow and green and scarlet and that wonderful flat pink-red.
By the Bread Alone tent I saw her. In a pale peach sundress, with her hair atop her head, she floated in the eddy of shoppers. When she leaned over the lettuce heads, her shoulder blades tensed like twin hearts.
For a long moment I stood, half-hidden, watching. Lacie moved as if there were no one around her, as if each brimming basket of tiny wild strawberries had been picked especially for her.
The cheesemonger’s face softened like a peach when she approached. Laughing, he offered her a wedge of something gooey. She took it, smiling, nodding in agreement: delicious. And then she moved on. Yes, that was how she was—that was how she had always been with boys. But there was something new in her, too, something I couldn’t quite name.
Then she turned, and looked directly at me. Something live flew into my throat. I studied the sidewalk, and when I looked up again, she had turned away. I pressed through the crowd.
“Rose!” Awkwardly we hugged, her tote bags hitting my body. “What are you doing out here?” she cried, with a sour note of aggression she didn’t bother to hide.
Maybe that was the new thing: a little knife sewn into her childish voice, a butterfly skewer so light you hardly noticed it until the slice.
“I was just looking at an apartment nearby.” I hoped I sounded breezy.
“And you came over for the farmers’ market?” She sounded skeptical. “It’s so small.”
“No, I was just walking around. Exploring.”
Pedestrians swiveled around us, some sending reproving glances behind them. Lacie began to drift along the stalls, and I followed, twisting my hips to avoid the strollers.
“So how was it?” she called over her shoulder.
“The apartment? Not great.”
“Where was it?” She stopped to examine a cucumber.
I dodged a bobbing yoga mat. “Um, near the Parkside Avenue stop, on this big road—”
“Ocean?” She wrinkled her nose. “Yeah. Some of those places are in pretty bad shape.”
We reached the herb tent, where she bought a bouquet of mint, and something called sorrel, counting out her dollar bills and carefully flattening each one.
“I can’t believe how beautiful it is here, though.” A sack of squash thunked my ribs. “The houses are just gorgeous.”
She looked at me sharply, as if I were suggesting renting one of them. “A lot of them are still single-family homes.”
We reached the end of the stalls. “Well, bye,” she said with a tight little smile, her hand curling into a wave. I panicked. Apparently this was going to be it—she wasn’t even going to remark on how strange it was that we had run into each other. I found myself saying, “Wait.”
She turned back, surprised.
“You want to get coffee?”
“Ohh.” She grimaced. “You know, I totally would, but I’ve got to get this meat into the fridge.” She hoisted a bag, and I registered fully for the first time how many bags she was carrying, the way the straps cut into the pale skin of her shoulder.
“Oh, yeah, okay. Well, can I walk with you?” Her eyes narrowed. “I just want to see the neighborhood,” I explained. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be back out here again.” And then, because I could see she still wasn’t sure—because I could tell she was puzzled by my zooming back into her life, and who could blame her?—I added, “I like it here. It reminds me of Swarthmore. It reminds me of home.”
Her face opened. Swarthmore whizzed up before us, a snow globe of tiny houses and yellow streetlamps. “Yeah,” she sighed. “I love living here,” and when I fell into step beside her, she didn’t object.
We headed up a graceful side street lined with more stately mansions, each one brightly painted, with wraparound porches and wild gardens and mature trees. Beech leaves crunched underfoot, a dry, summery sound. “It’s funny,” I said as we walked. “I thought Swarthmore sucked when I was growing up, but now I kind of miss it.”
A shy, private smile played on her lips. “Yeah. We were actually really lucky to grow up there.”
This admission filled me with squirmy, hot joy, as if she had said she was lucky to have grown up with me. “And now you get to live in an exact replica of your childhood town!” I gestured grandly at the streets. “I mean, almost literally, right? I saw them shooting something when I was walking over.”
“They’re always filming. It actually gets to be a little annoying.” But she didn’t sound annoyed. There was a lightness in her voice I hadn’t heard before.
“It’s so meta, don’t you think? They’re replicating your childhood all around you.”
She laughed, a sound like cool water. “Yeah, totally.”
When we reached her building, she paused, and the same desperate drowning feeling overcame me. We’d been profoundly out of touch—I wasn’t on social media, and we’d cut ties long before email and cell phones—but now the ocean of fate had dumped her onto my shore, and I couldn’t bear for the waves to swallow her again. “So this is your place,” I said, craning my neck. A proper apartment building, six stories and made from brick, it was elaborately cut to maximize windows and balconies.
“Yep.” She looked, too, as if seeing it for the first time. “Umm,” she said, perhaps perplexed that I showed no sign of leaving. “Do you want to come up?”
“Sure.” I smiled. “I’d love to.”
Her foyer was dark and smelled of dried sweat. Following her lead, I kicked off my sandals and walked into a giant room of arrested chaos: a dining table cluttered with magazines and books, a drying rack of blouses and bras, and a small gray cat sleeping in an Amazon box.
I handed her the bags I had been carrying for her, and sank into the daybed, a veritable ship done up in red velvet with embroidered pillows of turquoise and tangerine. “Do you want coffee? Tea?” she called from the kitchen. The crisper door rattled on its track, and something clunked.