Chapter 7 #2
She watched me pick it up, checking whether I knew where to take it, and when I looked at her she just tilted her head toward the square and went back to unloading.
A minute later, without looking up from the crate she was lifting, she said, "I'm Rina Lovett.
" That was the whole of the introduction.
She had been helping Pearl at the market for years, I gathered over the course of the morning, and she treated me from that first hour with the impersonality of a person with no particular investment in whether I stayed or went, but expected me to carry my share while I was here.
We worked mostly in silence, carrying tables, arranging the honey and the small selection of preserves and baked goods Pearl brought to supplement it. Once, when I moved a row of jars to the wrong end of the table, Rina appeared at my elbow and repositioned them without ceremony.
"Labels out, prices showing," she said, already moving to the next task. "People won't buy what they can't read."
I moved the rest of the jars the right way and said nothing.
The sun came up as we worked, the square gradually filling with other vendors, the sounds of setup becoming a kind of music, familiar even though I had never heard it before.
By eight the market was open, a slow stream of people moving through the stalls, and I stood behind Pearl's table and watched her work.
She knew everyone. Not just their names, but the details of their lives that she remembered and referenced without seeming to try.
Mrs. Henley whose husband's gout was acting up again, the Wilson boy who had gotten into the agricultural program at the state college, the elderly man who bought the same two jars of wildflower honey every week without variation.
She handled them all with the same quiet attention, never rushing, never lingering too long, the warmth of her Alpha presence settled into a register that made people feel steadied without knowing why.
I watched her and I thought of Nana, the way she had talked to people in the grocery store in Maren, the accumulated knowledge of a life spent in one place.
The comparison came without invitation and didn't hurt as much as I expected.
It was simply there, a recognition of something familiar in unfamiliar packaging.
By noon I had sold my first jar of honey, fumbling through the transaction with Rina watching from the corner of her eye, ready to step in if I failed.
I didn't fail. I counted the change correctly and thanked the customer and watched her walk away with the jar tucked in her bag.
A competence I had forgotten I possessed, small and quiet but real, had come back to me without announcement.
"Not bad," Rina said as the crowd thinned, her voice carrying no particular warmth but no criticism either. "You're not useless."
I looked at her, surprised by the bluntness, and she met my eyes with something that was almost amusement, the corner of her mouth twitching.
She was a Beta, her scent the neutral background against which the rest of the market's olfactory landscape stood out.
Designation was simply not a fact she spent energy on, in herself or in other people.
She didn't care what I was, only what I did.
"Thank you," I said, and meant it differently than I had meant it with Pearl. She shrugged and turned back to breaking down the empty crates, and I helped, and the morning passed into afternoon without requiring anything more from me than the work.
I came back the next day.
And the day after that.
I didn't have a reason. The kitchen was only offered on Thursdays, but the shop was open every day, and I found myself walking past it on my morning routes through the town, finding excuses to step inside.
A bottle of water. A cup of tea to take with me.
The small transactions that allowed me to sit in the corner and watch Pearl work, to learn the rhythms of the place, to become familiar without becoming known.
Pearl didn't ask why I kept coming. She simply made room, the way she made room for everyone who found their way to her.
She didn't ask about my past. She let me sit in the corner with my tea and my notebook, writing down the things I noticed, the recipes I remembered, the fragments of Nana's voice that came back to me at unexpected moments.
On my second Thursday in the kitchen, I cooked something more complicated.
A stew, heavy on the root vegetables, the kind of thing that took hours and filled the small space with smells that seeped into the front of the shop.
Pearl came back once, paused at the kitchen door for a moment without speaking, and left again.
When the stew was done I offered her some, the first thing I had made specifically for another person since Nana, and she tasted it with the careful attention she brought to everything.
"Good," she said. She set the spoon down and stayed where she was, her expression thoughtful. "You understand depth. Most people cook too shallow."
I looked at her. "My grandmother taught me." The words came out before I had decided to say them, arriving the way her name always did, before I was ready.
Pearl picked up the spoon again, turned it once between her fingers, set it back down.
"She sounds like she knew what she was doing," she said, and walked back to the front without asking anything else.
She let it sit the way she let most things sit.
I heard the bell over the door chime as a customer came in, and the afternoon went on around me.
I took my portion to the corner and ate it while she worked at the counter, and the afternoon light came through the window and turned everything gold for forty minutes, and the stew was warm and the tea was warm and the shop around me held no knowledge of who I had been anywhere else.
I was not healing. I knew better than to name it that. But I was somewhere, in a specific place with a specific quality of light, and that was more than I had had in months.
I kept coming back.