Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
The week's harvest loaded clean: four flats of Cherokee Purple, two of Brandywine, a half-flat of the Green Zebras he'd been trialing for three seasons, and the last of the summer squash packed in straw. Finn had been up since four-thirty. The truck was running by six.
This was the part of the week Finn liked best. The time before the town was awake, before people were on the street.
The highway was still gray and cool. The fields opened up on both sides as if they were making room.
He had a thermos of coffee and the radio off, and twenty miles of straight road to think in. Or not think. Mostly not think.
Especially not think about the woman on the side of the road.
The one with the fully charged phone who had somehow let her truck run out of oil.
Who had been out there in the middle of nowhere telling her situation to strangers on the internet when he'd pulled over, cheerful about it, like running dry on a county highway at seven in the morning was an adventure she was having rather than a problem she'd caused.
He'd stood there while she beamed at him like he'd done something remarkable instead of something any person with a driver's license and twenty minutes would have done.
He was not thinking about the smile.
He was also not thinking about the truck.
Pink. Not a working pink, not a faded-out pink, but a deliberate, committed, this-is-a-choice pink, with something written on the side in a cursive he hadn't stopped to read.
And the smell coming off it: sweet, thick, the kind of sweet that had nothing to do with actual food.
The kind that gave you a headache by association.
Whatever she was selling out of that thing, it wasn't anything he'd put in his mouth.
Finn Hargrove had been farming long enough to know the difference between something that looked good and something that was good. Between surface and substance. Between a woman who was passing through and a woman who was staying.
He knew the type. Curvy girl, bright smile, someone who made you feel like the most interesting thing in the room for exactly as long as it suited her. He'd been that interesting once. He remembered how that ended.
The fields opened up on his left. The sun was coming up. He was not thinking about her.
Twenty minutes later, Finn backed the truck to the Boots close on her face, then pulling back to catch the market behind her, then tilting toward the truck, then back to her face. He watched her do this for a full thirty seconds and understood.
Short attention spans. Keep it moving, keep it bright, don't let a single second settle long enough for someone to get bored and scroll away. That was today's society.
He looked at the sugar truck. Thought about sugar. Thought about what a steady diet of processed sweetness did to a person's ability to sit still.
"— so excited to be here at the Valor Farmers Market, and I am here to win the food truck competition, y'all, so stay tuned because things are about to get very delicious and very…"
Finn set the chalk down on the lip of the board with a care that had nothing to do with the chalk.
The food truck competition. That's what she was here for.
He picked the chalk back up. Put it down again.
Turned, slowly, and looked at the pink truck with its cursive logo and its cloud of headache-sweet smell and the woman in front of it who was still talking to her phone in that bright, manufactured voice, laughing at something she'd said, touching her hair.
Three years. He had been working toward this for three years.
Two wins already on the board — back to back — and this year was supposed to be the one that finished it.
The prize money plus what he'd put aside, enough to stop being a truck and start being a place.
Four walls. A real kitchen. A sign over the door that said Boots the standard everything else is measured against.
Across the gap, Ivy Lopez laughed at something on her phone screen — bright and unguarded— and he did not look up.
Finn was not thinking about the laugh either.
It was on.