Chapter 15
August
Nobody came to the market.
Not the guitar player. Not the cinnamon stall lady.
Not Cliff, who had texted me at six in the morning to say his knees were bad and the rain was worse and he would see me next week.
Not the tomato man two stalls down. Not the woman who sold handmade candles and always burned one at her booth so the whole market smelled like cedar and vanilla.
But I came.
I came because the rent was due in eleven days and I had flowers that wouldn’t last until next Saturday and I had nobody to call and say I need help today because I had never had that person and I was not going to start needing one now.
The rain was the kind that meant business.
It hit the market awning like it had a personal grudge.
The ground between the booths was already mud, soft and dark, pulling at my shoes every time I moved.
I had sold three bouquets in four hours.
Three. One to a woman who had sprinted in from the car park and grabbed the nearest thing.
Two to a man who bought them as an apology — I could tell from the way he looked at them, as if he was doing a poor girl a favor.
By the time I realized there would be no more customers, I was soaking wet, and my flower buckets were full with rainwater.
I started carrying the buckets back to Gerald.
They were heavy. They were always heavy but today they were heavier, the water in the bottom adding to the weight of the stems, and I was tired, and my arms hurt, and I had not slept properly in two days, and every bucket felt like it weighed twice what it should.
I thought about the money.
All these flowers. All these stems I had bought from the supplier on Tuesday morning, before I’d known what kind of day it was going to be, before the rain had decided to become this specific kind of rain.
I had spent money I didn’t have on flowers nobody had bought.
I would carry all of them back to Gerald and drive to the children’s ward and donate the whole lot because I would not let them go to waste, I would never let good flowers go to waste, but the money was gone and it wasn’t coming back. The rent was in eleven days.
I was almost at the van when my foot found the wrong piece of ground.
The mud gave way. My left foot slid. I grabbed for the bucket handle with both hands but it tipped wrong and then everything tipped — the bucket, the stems, me — and I went down hard on both knees and the buckets hit the ground. The flowers went everywhere.
All of them.
Peonies and dahlias and sunflowers and the last of the loose stems, all of them in the mud, petals pressing into the wet ground, stems bent at wrong angles.
I knelt in the mud and looked at all of it.
Something snapped in me. I gritted my teeth.
A full, raw scream came out of me, directed at nobody, at the rain, at the sky, at every decision I had ever made that had led to this moment of kneeling in the mud with ruined flowers in the rain at a farmer’s market with no customers. I screamed until my throat hurt.
Then I stopped.
I started picking up the flowers.
I picked up a peony and looked at the mud on the petals and I started scrubbing it.
With my thumb, with the hem of my apron, with my wet hands — scrubbing the mud off the petals like I could undo it, like I could make it not have happened, like I was strong enough to just fix it by trying hard enough.
The petals came off instead.
One, then another, then another, pulling away from the center with the pressure of my hands and dropping back into the mud.
I kept going anyway because stopping felt worse.
The stem was bare in under a minute. Just a stem.
Just a stick. Just what was left of something I had bought and carried and tended and lost all in one morning.
I held it.
I put my face in my arms and I cried.
Not the quiet kind. The full kind, the kind that came from the chest, that sounded ugly and felt worse, that I had been holding back for two days since a dark road and a dahlia on a highway barrier and a kitchen floor at six in the morning.
I cried into my own arms in the mud in the rain.
I felt someone sit down next to me.
I looked up.
Fletcher was sitting in the mud next to me.
His shirt was plastered to him, soaked completely through. His hair was flat with rain. He had no jacket. He looked like he had been standing in it for a while. He was sitting in the mud like it didn’t matter, which it clearly didn’t to him, because he was looking at me and nothing else.
“Go away,” I said. My voice was wrecked. “Fletcher, go away.”
He didn’t go away.
He reached past me and picked up a dahlia from the mud.
He picked up the bucket that had fallen and set it upright.
He reached for the other bucket, the one with water still in it, and pulled it close.
Then, very slowly, very carefully, he took the dahlia and dipped it in the clean water.
He swirled it gently. He lifted it out and looked at it. He dipped it again.
I watched him.
He cleaned the dahlia. Petal by petal, as much as it needed, as gently as anything I had ever seen him do. Then he placed it in the display bucket. He picked up a peony. He cleaned it the same way, and placed it next to the dahlia.
He worked through all of them.
Every stem. Every flower. He took each one from the mud and put it in the water and cleaned it and placed it in the bucket, and he did it without hurrying, without saying anything, just doing it, in the rain, sitting in the mud next to me.
I watched his hands.
His careful hands, working through my flowers one at a time.
I had stopped crying. I didn’t know when exactly. I was just watching him.
When the last stem was in the bucket he picked up the display stand that had fallen and set it back upright.
Then he turned to me.
He was on his knees in the mud. He reached out and touched my arm, very gently, and I flinched before I could stop myself and he withdrew his hand immediately.
He looked at me.
Then he took my hands in both of his.
He bowed his head over them.
His whole body dropped, a heap of a person, folded over my hands in the mud and the rain, and I felt him shake. Not slightly. Not once. He shook.
“You are not a nobody, August.” His voice came out broken from the first word.
“You have never been a nobody. Not for one second. Not ever.” He lifted his head.
His eyes were red. The rain was running down his face and he didn’t wipe it.
“You are the person who hugs strangers on their first market day. You are the person who trims the stems of her flowers before she gives them away every morning so they last longer for children who need them.” He stopped.
He looked down at my hands in his. “You are the person I have loved since I was twenty-nine years old. And I have been too afraid of my own history to say so out loud. I have been keeping your name like something I didn’t have the right to say. ”
I was crying again. I hadn’t known I had more in me but I did.
“I said terrible things about you on that patio.” He looked up at me.
“I said them because Margaux was going to destroy your permits. Your van. Your market. She told me she would and she meant it and I panicked. I chose the words most likely to make her believe you meant nothing to me.” His jaw was working.
“And you heard them. But they were not true, August. Not one word. I’m so sorry, August. I am so deeply sorry. ”
I held his hands.
I didn’t say anything yet. I just held them.
“I am sorry for five years of almost,” he said.
“For every time I walked up to the line and walked away from it. For every Tuesday where I bought your flowers and left because staying felt like too much to ask of myself. For every moment on that porch, on that beach, in that kitchen making salad — every moment I wanted to say something and chose silence instead.” He shook his head.
“I am sorry for Margaux. For bringing her. For using her as a wall between us because I thought that having the wrong woman next to me would make it easier to stay away from the right one.” His voice dropped.
“It didn’t work. It was never going to work.
And she paid for it and you paid for it and I am sorry. ”
He was not holding himself together.
He was not managing this. He was just in it, kneeling in the mud in the rain, completely undone, with my hands in his.
“I love you,” he said. “I love you and I have been a coward about it for five years and I am asking you, right here, to let me be brave about it now. Starting today. Starting here.”
I looked at him for a long time.
I looked at his hands around mine. At his face, the open one, the real one — the one that was raw and vulnerable for the very first time. At the flowers he had cleaned and arranged behind him, standing in the bucket in the rain.
I was crying. Full, real sobs, the kind I hadn’t let myself have in front of anyone since I was young enough not to know how to stop them. I was holding his hands and I didn’t try to stop any of it.
“I love you too,” I said.
He went very still.
“I have loved you for as long as I can remember.” I shook my head. “I denied it to everyone. To Callie, to Poppy, to myself, every Tuesday morning for three years. But it was always true. It was always you.”
He moved.
He closed the space between us and his hands came up to my face and he kissed me in the rain in the mud at the empty farmer’s market and I kissed him back.
It was not a gentle kiss. It was five years of Tuesdays and the wave and the porch and the dahlias and everything I had been carrying folded up small, coming out all at once. His hands were in my hair and my hands were wrapped in his wet shirt and the rain kept coming and neither of us stopped.
When we finally did, I pulled back and looked at his face.
“Why did it take you so long,” I said.
He almost laughed. It came out rough. “Something horrible happened because of a decision I made seven years ago,” he said.
“I did something I thought made me unworthy of you. Of any of this.” He looked at me.
“I never thought I deserved to be happy. Not after what happened. I’ve been punishing myself with distance and wrong choices and dark roads at midnight and I—” He stopped.
“I didn’t think I could be this. For you. With you.”
I looked at him.
“Help me,” I said.
He blinked.
“Help me get these flowers in the van.” I stood up.
I reached down and he took my hand and stood with me.
“All of them. Every bucket.” I looked at Gerald, waiting under the oak tree.
“Then we’re driving to the children’s hospital.
They can have all of it.” I looked back at him.
“And then you are going to tell me everything. All of it. From the beginning. And I’m going to listen to every word. ”
“August—”
“And then we are going to figure out the rest of it together.” I held his eyes. “You don’t get to carry the dark alone anymore. That’s the deal.”
He looked at me for a long moment.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
We picked up the buckets.
I pulled Gerald out of the parking lot and drove toward the hospital, Fletcher’s hand finding mine on the gear shift somewhere on the first block, and I let him hold it the whole way there.
***