Where the Wild Roses Bloom: Saturday Market

The courthouse clock read 7:14 when Maren Jenkins turned her leased sedan off the mountain road and onto the two-lane that wound into Hollow Creek proper. The morning sat heavy over the valley, fog clinging to the ridges like unspun cotton, and the temperature inside the car had not yet caught up with the defroster she had forgotten to turn on. Her breath came out in small, deliberate clouds. She sat for a moment with both hands on the wheel, watching the fog lift in slow, breathing pulls across the pasture to her left. A brown cow stood utterly still at the fence line, its breath visible in the dim air. Beyond the cow, a tin roof caught the first suggestion of daylight and held it.

This was not how she had planned to spend her Saturday.

The plan had been a deposition in Charlotte, an eight o'clock call with a co-counsel in Singapore, and lunch with a client who collected politicians the way other people collected postage stamps. The plan had been clean, profitable, distant. Instead she had driven four hours through the dark because a phone call at eleven the previous evening, placed by a number she had not seen in eleven years, had carried a voice she had trained herself to forget.

Beatrice Porter, sixty-three years old and in possession of information Maren did not yet know she needed, had said: "Your grandmother is asking for you, Maren. I don't know how much longer. She asked for you by name."

Maren had not asked which name. She had known.

She pulled into the gravel lot behind the Baptist church and cut the engine. For a moment she did not move. The defroster gave up its last dry whisper. The ticking of the cooling engine settled into the larger tick of a morning she did not recognize. Somewhere down the slope of the road, a screen door closed, and a woman's voice called out a name that was not hers. A rooster answered, then another, then a third, each one more certain of its ground than the last.

She took her bag from the passenger side, locked the car, and stood for a moment on the gravel, breathing the particular air of this place. Cold creek water and turned earth. Woodsmoke from a chimney that might have been her grandmother's, might have been any of the seven chimneys visible from where she stood. Somewhere, someone was frying bacon, and the smell came to her with a specificity that should have been impossible after eleven years and three hundred miles of careful distance.

She had come back. She had told herself, all the way down the mountain in the dark, that she had come back for information. She had come back because Lillian Porter, before she died, would have left papers. People like Lillian left papers. There would be deeds, titles, trusts, perhaps a will that had been updated since the one Maren had been told existed, the one that named June and only June. People in extremis revised their paperwork. Maren Jenkins made her living on that kind of revision. She knew how much a piece of paper could be worth, and she knew how much it could be made to be worth, if the right hands touched it.

She had not come back because she had dreamed of the porch swing two nights in a row. She had not come back because the smell of bacon had made her hands shake on the steering wheel at the base of the mountain. She had come back because there was, possibly, an asset to be claimed, and she was, above all things, practical.

The fog thinned. The courthouse clock, half a block up the street, struck the half hour. Seven thirty. The Saturday market, Beatrice had told her, set up on the green in front of the old feed store between seven and nine. If she wanted to see who was in town, if she wanted to know what people were saying, the market was the place to do it.

Maren Jenkins had not set foot on the town green in fourteen years. She had not set foot in this town, period, in eleven. She had been twenty-three when she left, on a Tuesday, in a borrowed car, with a suitcase and a one-way ticket to a city she had only seen in photographs. The borrowed car had belonged to a man whose name she had also trained herself to forget, though his face, sometimes, surfaced in depositions given by men who had done worse things than borrow cars.

She began to walk.

The town was smaller than memory had made it, or larger, she could not decide which. The feed store had been repainted. The old Piggly Wiggly was now a place that sold organic dog food and reclaimed wood, its windows full of cheerful signs. The bench outside the post office was new, and so was the bench's occupant, a man she did not recognize who tipped an imaginary hat at her as she passed. She nodded back. Her smile was small, practiced, and entirely without warmth.

She had never been a warm person. She had made her peace with that, or thought she had.

At the corner where Main bent toward the green, she stopped. From here she could see the market. Three long rows of white pop-up tents, a few pickup trucks backed in at the far end, a hand-painted sign over the entrance that read SATURDAY MARKET in letters that had been repainted so many times the edges were soft. People moved between the tents in the slow, particular way of people who knew one another. A woman in a wide-brimmed hat laughed and touched the arm of a man selling honey. Two older men stood with their hands in their pockets, watching a third man demonstrate some kind of pocket knife. A child ran past with a sticky bun.

Maren did not move.

She could see the wildflowers from here. The Porter lot, technically, the place that should have been hers by half-right if the original will had not been redrawn, had a small table at the edge of the second row, just past the beekeeper. The table held mason jars of cut stems, brown paper wrapping, a small wooden sign that read PORTER WILDFLOWERS in a hand she recognized. She knew that hand. She had watched her mother write that hand on every tag and every invoice and every grocery list for nineteen years.

Her mother had died eleven years and four months ago. Her mother had left the lot, the meadow, the meadow's edge, the porch swing, the cracked plaster, the wildflower farm, to June. To June alone. Maren had received a letter, posted from this same post office, on a Tuesday, while she was sitting in a law school lecture on contracts. The letter had been three sentences long and entirely without apology.

She had not opened it for six years.

At the table, a young woman with red hair tied back under a scarf was arranging a jar of coneflowers. June. Of course it was June. June would have been twenty-three now, the same age Maren had been when she left. June would have come back, because June had always been the one who came back. June had been the one who stayed.

Maren's hands, which had been at her sides, closed slowly into fists inside the pockets of her coat.

She was not here for June. She was not here for any sentiment. She was here because Lillian Porter, ninety-one years old and possibly dying in a room that smelled, Beatrice had said, of rose water and turpentine, had asked for her by name, and Maren Jenkins did not ignore the sound of her own name in a dying woman's mouth. Names had weight. Names had leverage. She had built a career on both.

She straightened her shoulders. She smoothed the front of her coat. She walked, with the unhurried precision of a woman who had learned long ago that the worst thing one could do in a small town was appear to hurry, into the Saturday market.

A man selling apples greeted her. She bought a small bag, because refusing would be noted. A woman selling soap told her the weather was going to turn. She agreed, because agreeing cost nothing. A boy of about ten, sitting on an overturned crate with a stack of comic books, watched her pass with the frank, unsettling attention of children who had not yet learned to look away from strangers.

She was three tents away from the Porter table when she saw him.

He was standing at the edge of the market with a paper coffee cup in one hand and the other hand tucked into the back pocket of a pair of jeans that had seen better decades. He was taller than she remembered, or she was shorter, or the fog was playing tricks. He was watching her with the particular stillness of a man who had seen her before she had seen him and had decided, for reasons of his own, to let her come the rest of the way.

Tobias Crane.

He looked older. Of course he looked older. Eleven years would have done that to any of them, and Tobias had been older than any of them to begin with, old enough, when she was a girl, to have seemed carved out of the same wood as the porch swing and the ridge. His hair was longer, and whiter, and tied back at the nape with a leather cord. His face had more lines. His hands, wrapped around the coffee cup, had the look of hands that still knew how to do every kind of work and chose, on a Saturday morning, to do none.

He lifted two fingers from the cup. Not a wave. An acknowledgment. A recognition. The kind of gesture one made to a person one had been expecting.

Maren stopped walking.

"You look like you swallowed a horseshoe," Tobias said, in a voice that carried the particular Appalachian music of a man who had been hearing his own voice against these hills for longer than most of the hills had been settled. "I can see it from here. The horseshoe. Right there, behind your teeth."

"I beg your pardon."

"Don't beg nothing. Stand up straight. You're not in a courtroom. Not yet."

Maren did not stand up straight. She stood, instead, very precisely where she was, and looked at him. "Mr. Crane."

"Tobias."

"Tobias. I didn't know if you'd remember me."

"I remember everybody. That's my job." He took a sip of the coffee. "I remember you left on a Tuesday. I remember you didn't say goodbye to your sister. I remember your mama stood on the porch and watched the road until it got dark, and then she went inside, and I don't know what she did in there because the curtains were drawn. I remember June found the note the next morning. I remember what the note said. I remember what it didn't say."

Maren's jaw tightened. "I didn't come here for a history lesson."

"No," Tobias agreed. "You came here because Lillian said your name. That's the only kind of history that brings you back, isn't it. A name in a dying mouth."

From somewhere in the market, a rooster crowed, muffled by the fog. Maren could hear, beneath it, the laughter of the woman in the wide-brimmed hat. She could hear, closer, the small dry sound of Tobias's coffee being sipped.

"You're not going to ask me how she is," Tobias said. It was not a question.

"I'm going to ask Beatrice."

"Beatrice doesn't know what Beatrice knows. Beatrice knows what she's been told. There's a difference."

"And you know more than you've been told."

Tobias smiled, slightly, and only at one corner of his mouth. "I've been keeping a thing or two in my pocket for a while. I was beginning to think I'd take them to the grave with me. Now I'm not so sure."

Maren felt the weight of her own bag on her shoulder. Inside it, she had a folder with the original deed, the 1998 transfer document, a copy of the will she had not opened for six years, and a small leather notebook in which she had spent the last hundred miles of the drive writing questions she intended to ask. She did not reach for the bag. She did not show Tobias that she had prepared.

"Why now?" she asked.

Tobias looked at her over the rim of his cup. The fog moved between them, slow and indifferent. Down the row, June Porter laughed at something a customer had said, and the sound came to Maren with a clarity that felt, against every rule she had set for herself, like a hand laid against her cheek.

"Because Lillian asked me to wait," Tobias said. "And she told me, last week, that the waiting was done."

He set the empty cup on the edge of a nearby crate and straightened up, taller than he had seemed a moment ago, the way certain old men straighten when they have decided to say a thing they have been holding a long time.

"You go see your sister first," he said. "You owe her that. Then you come up the hill. The meadow's still there. The path through the woods is still there. You know the way."

He turned, then, and walked back into the market, where a man selling quilts was unfolding a long roll of fabric in the gray morning light, and Maren Jenkins, who had not been told what to do by anyone in eleven years, stood alone at the edge of the Saturday market with the smell of bacon in her coat and the sound of her sister's laughter in her ears, and did not, for the moment, know what to do at all.

June had seen Maren before Maren had seen her. That was the trouble with returning to a small town after ten years. The shapes of faces you loved rearranged themselves in your memory, and when the real versions appeared, you knew them by the way they walked, by the way they held their shoulders, by some gravity you could not name. June had looked up from a bundle of bee balm she was tying with twine, and there at the edge of the market, half-hidden by a canvas awning that smelled of damp canvas and old rain, stood a woman in a charcoal coat, and June's hands had gone still on the stems.

She set the bundle down.

She told herself she was being foolish. The woman was a stranger. The town had grown, or at least it had shifted, the way rivers do in a flood, bringing debris you did not recognize. People moved here. People returned. June had come back herself. Why should she assume every face in the crowd belonged to a history she had been trying, with great effort, to outrun.

But the woman was looking at her. Not the way strangers look, with the polite blankness of those who have no stake in you. This was a different sort of looking, weighted, almost surgical, the gaze of someone cataloging details for use later. June felt it across the twenty yards between them like a fingertip pressed to her sternum.

She crossed the grass without deciding to. Her boots were muddy. Her hands smelled of green stems and the faint bitterness of cut mint. The market sounds, the chatter and the distant fiddle, seemed to recede, the way sound recedes when you step into a cold river.

The woman turned.

June stopped.

She had prepared, in the back of her mind, for the possibility that the face belonged to who she feared it belonged to. She had even, on the long drive in from Asheville, rehearsed what she would say, the way you rehearse a speech you hope never to deliver. The words vanished now. What was left was simpler and older than language.

"Sarah," June said.

The name was not hers. The woman in the charcoal coat was not Sarah. June knew this before the sound had finished leaving her mouth, the way you know, half a second before the glass hits the floor, that it is going to break.

The woman's mouth thinned. A small movement, almost invisible, the kind that lawyers practice in front of mirrors until the muscles remember.

"June," the woman said. "It's Maren."

Of course it was. June felt the wrong name leave her like a held breath. Of course it was Maren. She had aged, of course she had aged. So had June. So had everyone. But the bones were the same, the jaw, the way she held her chin as though the air itself owed her something. The half-sister she had not seen in eleven years. The half-sister she had not, in the most private arithmetic of her heart, forgiven.

"I didn't recognize you," June said. It was the wrong thing to say, and she knew it was the wrong thing to say, but she could not yet make her mouth shape the right thing.

"You did," Maren said. "At first."

The market moved around them. A child ran past chasing a dog. The quilt seller was draping a length of indigo over his arm. Somewhere, the fiddle had stopped, and the silence it left was thin and bright as a held blade.

June searched her sister's face for the thing she had been afraid of finding there, and she could not, in that first moment, tell whether she found it. Maren had always been difficult to read. That had been one of the great truisms of their childhood. June read people the way she read weather, by the angle of the light, by the pressure in her chest. Maren read people the way a locksmith reads a mechanism, and she did not let you watch her do it.

"How did you know I was here?" June asked.

"Mama," Maren said. "She called."

June's breath caught. She set her jaw so it would not show. The fog pressed against her neck. She could smell, faintly, the lavender sachets her mother used to keep in the linen closet, the ghost of a scent she had not allowed herself to think of in months.

"That isn't possible," June said.

"I know," Maren said. "I know that. I'm not a fool, June. I'm not sentimental. I didn't come back because I heard a voice in the dark. I came back because there was a voicemail on my phone, and it was her number, and the number hasn't been in service for a year. That's all. That's the whole of it. And I don't know what to do with that, and I thought, perhaps, you might."

June stared at her sister. The market sounds came back in a slow tide. A woman at the bread stall was laughing. The dog had caught something and was shaking it.

"Perhaps," June repeated. The word tasted metallic.

Wyatt Calhoun had been watching from the far side of his booth since the two women had begun to speak. He could not hear what they were saying, but he had spent enough years watching people to know the shape of certain conversations. He saw the way June's shoulders had come up, the way the woman in the charcoal coat had squared herself, the way the fog had seemed to thicken between them, as though the weather had decided to take a side.

He had not known Lillian Porter well. He had known her the way you know a neighbor whose land touches yours, by the sound of her truck on the road, by the occasional wave across a fence line, by the brief, polite exchanges at the post office. He had respected her. He had owed her more than he had been able to repay. He had let her down in a way that had nothing to do with money and everything to do with the slow erosion of a person who had once believed in him. When she died, he had sent flowers, and he had not attended the service, because he had not been sure his presence would be a comfort or a disturbance, and he had not had the courage to find out.

He thought of her now, standing behind his booth with a bundle of dogwood saplings at his elbow, watching the two sisters at the edge of the market. He thought of her hands, which he remembered as always being dirty, always smelling of soil, always gentle. He thought of the look she had given him once, across the fence, when he had come to apologize for something he could not name, and she had said only, "Wyatt. You're home." And he had not been able to answer her, because the truth was too complicated, and a lie would have been a worse offense than silence.

He untied his apron. He had a delivery to make, he told himself. The Audubon Society had asked for a flat of mountain laurel for the Sunday plant sale, and the truck was idling at the curb. He had meant to leave before nine. He had stayed to watch June, the way he always stayed to watch June, with the part of himself he could not discipline.

He stepped out from behind the booth and walked toward the two women. His boots were heavy on the grass. He smelled of loam and pine sap and the faint green scent of crushed galax.

"June," he said.

She turned. He watched the confusion move across her face, and then the recognition, and then the careful rearrangement of features into something he could read, which was, as always, very little.

"Wyatt," she said. "I didn't see you."

"I know," he said. "I keep getting told I'm hard to see. It's a gift."

The joke was not funny. He said it anyway, because the silence between the sisters had begun to feel like something that might shatter if he did not speak.

Maren Jenkins looked at him the way she looked at everything, with a quick, appraising precision that made him want to check that his pockets were zipped.

"You must be the botanist," she said.

"I must be," he said.

"My sister mentioned you once," she said. "She said you were honest. She also said you were stubborn. I find it difficult to imagine both being true at the same time."

"Most honest people are stubborn," Wyatt said. "It's one of the side effects."

Maren studied him. June watched the exchange with the expression of someone watching a fuse burn down a length of cord.

"I'm sorry," Wyatt said, turning back to June. "I didn't mean to interrupt. I have a delivery to make, and I came to tell you I'd be late getting the yarrow to your place. The truck's running, and I've spent the better part of an hour arguing with myself about whether to come over here and say hello, and the argument has finally been settled in the affirmative, so. Hello."

He held out his hand to Maren Jenkins. Not to June. To Maren. The gesture was deliberate. He had seen, in the few minutes he had watched them, that the current between the sisters ran in a particular direction, and he had decided, without quite deciding, that he was going to stand on the side that needed standing on, and it was not, at this moment, June's side.

Maren looked at his hand. She looked at his face. She took the hand, and her grip was firmer than he had expected, the grip of someone who had learned to shake a thousand hands and had decided, early on, to leave an impression.

"Wyatt Calhoun," she said.

"Yes ma'am," he said.

"You're the one who runs the native species nursery," she said. "The one my mother used to buy starts from in the spring."

"Yes ma'am," he said again. "Though she didn't buy them. She traded. She'd bring me a jar of her pepper jelly and I'd bring her a flat of columbine. That was the arrangement."

"Generous of her," Maren said.

"Generous of both of us," Wyatt said. "She had better pepper jelly than I had columbine, and we both knew it."

Something moved in Maren's face. It was not a smile. It was the memory of a smile, the place where a smile had once lived, before the muscles had been trained out of the habit.

"You talk like her," Maren said.

Wyatt did not answer. He held her hand a moment longer than was necessary, and then he let it go, and the fog had moved again, and the light had shifted, and the market sounded different than it had sounded a minute ago, the way a room sounds different when someone opens a window.

"I have to go," Wyatt said. "But I'll be back this afternoon, June. With the yarrow. Unless you'd rather I bring it tomorrow."

"Today," June said. "If you can."

"I can," he said. "I'll see you at the farm."

He nodded to Maren. He did not nod to June. That was also deliberate. He did not want to make it seem that he was choosing between them, because he was not, and he did not want June to feel that he was abandoning her to the sister who had returned from a place June could not imagine, and he did not want Maren to feel that he was offering her any alliance she had not asked for.

He walked back to his booth. He untied the apron he had just tied. He loaded the flat of mountain laurel into the back of the truck, and the dogwood saplings, and the Audubon paperwork, and he climbed into the cab, and he sat there for a long moment with his hands on the wheel, looking at the two women through the fogged windshield.

They were still standing where he had left them. June had her arms crossed. Maren had her hands in the pockets of her coat. They were not speaking. The distance between them was about four feet, and it was, he thought, the most carefully measured four feet he had ever seen.

The truck door slammed behind Wyatt Calhoun. The sound carried across the market square the way a stone carries when dropped into still water, in widening rings. Maren Jenkins watched the truck pull out onto the county road, its taillights blooming red through the fog, and then disappearing entirely, as if some hand had drawn a curtain across the stage.

June Porter did not move. Her arms were still crossed, her weight still settled onto her back foot, her chin still lifted at the angle that Maren recognized from childhood, the angle that meant June had decided something and would not be moved from it.

"You're cold," Maren said. "Your hands are shaking."

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine. You're shivering. Come sit in my car. I have heat."

"I have a booth to run."

"June."

"I have customers coming in an hour, Maren. I have to be here when they arrive."

"I can watch the booth for you."

The words came out before Maren had time to weigh them. She heard them leave her mouth and recognized, with the particular clarity of a woman who had spent two decades listening to herself speak, that she had offered something she did not know how to offer. June heard it too. The angle of her chin shifted by a degree, and her eyes, which had been fixed on some middle distance, came into focus on Maren's face.

"You don't know my prices," June said.

"Tell me your prices."

"You don't know which flowers are which."

"Point them out."

"You'll mess up the stems."

"I am a fast learner, June. I have been a fast learner my entire life. That is, in fact, the only consistent fact about me."

A small sound came from June's throat. It might have been a laugh. It might have been the beginning of a cough. It might have been nothing at all, just air being moved by a body that had decided to exhale.

"Five minutes," June said. "Just to get the blood moving. You can come back to the booth with me and I'll show you what to do. But you will not negotiate with anyone. You will not charm anyone. You will not offer anyone a discount of any kind. You will hand them their flowers and you will take their money and you will give them correct change. That is all."

"That is all," Maren agreed.

"And you will tell me why you're here."

"Yes," Maren said. "I will tell you why I'm here."

The fog was lifting by degrees. The sun, which had been a pale disc somewhere above the cloud cover, began to press through in places, and where it pressed through, the air warmed, and the market sounds clarified. Someone was selling boiled peanuts at the corner of the square, and the smell of them drifted across the asphalt, salty and warm, and underneath the smell of peanuts was the smell of wet wool, and underneath that the smell of pine pitch, and underneath that the smell of damp earth, the smell of the hills themselves exhaling after the rain.

They walked back to the booth together. June did not link her arm through Maren's. Maren did not offer her hand. They walked four feet apart, the distance Maren had been measuring since she arrived, and the four feet held.

At the booth, June showed her the buckets. She showed her which flowers were which. She showed her the difference between the Bachelor Buttons and the Cornflowers, which to Maren looked identical, and the difference between the Lemon Mint and the Bee Balm, which to Maren also looked identical, and the difference between the Mountain Mint and the Mountain Balm, which June said was a distinction that mattered to the bees but not to anyone else.

"The bees," Maren said.

"The bees," June said.

Customers came. A woman in a plaid jacket bought a bundle of foxglove for her mother-in-law's funeral. A man in a feed cap bought a flat of zinnia starts for his wife's birthday. Two teenage girls bought a single sunflower each and took selfies with it. June, when she returned from the truck where she had been getting more inventory, watched Maren hand the teenage girls their change and saw that Maren had counted it out correctly, had not smiled at them in the way Maren usually smiled at people, which was the smile that made them feel chosen, but had given them only the polite neutral expression of a woman performing a transaction.

"She learned fast," June said, when the girls had gone.

"She always did," Maren said, and did not look up from the stems she was stripping of their lower leaves.

At half past eleven, June said she had to drive out to the farm to meet Wyatt, who was coming with the yarrow, and to check on a delivery, and to make sure the dogs had water, because she had forgotten to fill the bowls that morning in her hurry to get to the market, and Maren said she would close up the booth, and June said, "You know how," and Maren said, "I know how," and June went.

The square emptied by degrees as the morning turned toward noon. The vegetable sellers packed up their tomatoes and their corn. The egg lady, who had a sign that said EGGS 4 and which she interpreted strictly, loaded her cartons. The man with the boiled peanuts sold out and began breaking down his pot. Maren stood at the booth with her hands in her pockets, watching the square perform its weekly ritual of dispersal, and she thought about Lillian Porter, her mother, who had once stood in this same square with her hands in her pockets, watching the same dispersal, and who had once told Maren, when Maren was eight years old and already beginning to calculate the angles of the world, that the market was the truest church she knew.

"Your grandmother understood things I never will," Lillian had said. She had been sitting on the tailgate of her truck, and Maren had been sitting beside her, and June had been somewhere in the front of the truck, arranging zinnias in a bucket, and the light had been the same gray light it was now. "Your grandmother understood that people come to a market to be seen. Not to be sold to. To be seen."

Maren had not understood then. She was not sure she understood now. She stood at the booth and waited.

Wyatt came back at half past one. He was driving the truck with the flat of yarrow in the back, and he pulled up beside the booth and climbed out and looked at Maren with an expression she could not read, which was unusual, because Maren could read most expressions, and which meant, she suspected, that he was trying not to be read.

"June at the farm?" he said.

"On her way."

"I have the yarrow. And I have the Audubon paperwork, which I forgot to give her this morning. And I have a question I have been meaning to ask you, Miss Jenkins."

"Ask it."

"How long are you planning to stay in town?"

The question arrived clean. No hedge, no softening, no apology for its directness. Maren respected that. She had spent two decades working with men who could not ask a direct question to save their lives, who buried every inquiry in three layers of qualification.

"I don't know," she said. "As long as it takes."

"As long as what takes?"

"To finish what I came to do."

"And what did you come to do?"

"I came to read a will, Mr. Calhoun. That is what I came to do. I came to read a document I have not yet seen, which my mother signed, which concerns a piece of property I have not yet seen, which I may or may not have a claim to. That is what I came to do. And then I came to find out why my mother left me out."

Wyatt nodded. He did not offer sympathy. He did not offer denial. He climbed into the back of the truck and began unloading the yarrow, and he set the flat beside the booth, and he brushed the dirt from his hands onto his jeans, and he looked at her again.

"I have known your mother for thirty years," he said. "I have known your sister for the same thirty years. I have known Tobias Crane for the same thirty years. And I have known you, Miss Jenkins, for about ninety minutes, which is not long enough for me to say what I think of you. But I will tell you one thing I have learned in those ninety minutes."

"What is that?"

"You came back."

"I did."

"People who come back are different from people who never left. People who come back have to live with the fact that they left. People who never left have to live with the fact that they stayed. Both kinds of people have a weight. I don't know which is heavier. But I know that you came back, and that your sister stayed, and that you both have a weight, and that the weight is not the same weight, and that you will not be able to set yours down by reading a will."

"I am aware of that, Mr. Calhoun."

"Wyatt."

"I am aware of that, Wyatt."

He nodded. He climbed back into the truck. He did not offer to take her to the farm. She did not ask. She watched him drive away, and then she began to close up the booth, which was a task she had not done in twenty years, which required folding the table and carrying it to the truck and wrapping the buckets in wet newspaper and loading them into the flatbed, and which she did without help, because no one offered, and she did not ask.

By three o'clock the square was empty. The fog had lifted entirely, and the sun had come through in earnest, and the light on the wet asphalt was sharp and almost silver. Maren sat on the tailgate of her rented car and ate a peanut butter sandwich she had packed that morning, and she watched a single leaf turn end over end in the gutter, and she thought about nothing in particular, which was a state she had not achieved in a very long time.

Her phone rang. The sound was startling in the empty square. She looked at the screen. The name said Beatrice Porter, and beneath the name, in smaller letters, the label Daughter.

"Hello," Maren said.

"Mom." Beatrice's voice was cautious, the voice of a daughter who had learned to measure her mother's silences. "Did you find it?"

"Not yet."

"Are you okay?"

"I am at the market. I am eating a sandwich."

"That's not what I asked."

"I am okay, Bee."

"Grandma's friend called me. The old man with the meadow."

"Tobias."

"He said to tell you that the wildflowers know your name. He said you would know what that meant."

Maren was quiet for a moment. The leaf in the gutter had stopped turning. It lay flat against the wet asphalt, and the sun came through it, and for an instant the leaf glowed, a small gold lantern against the gray ground.

"I don't know what it means," Maren said. "But I will find out."

"Are you coming home tonight?"

"I am coming home tomorrow, Bee."

"Will you call me when you know?"

"Yes."

She hung up. She sat on the tailgate. She finished her sandwich. The sun moved across the square, and the shadows of the empty booths lengthened, and somewhere in the hills a dog barked once and then was quiet, and the market square settled into the particular stillness of a place that had been full of people and was now full of their absence, and Maren sat in the stillness and did not try to fill it.

At four o'clock she drove out to the farm. She did not call ahead. She followed the road she had driven that morning, past the kudzu-covered barn, past the creek with the sulfur smell, past the fence where the horses had been watching her. The horses were gone. The creek was still. The fog had lifted entirely, and the hills were sharp against the sky, and the sky was the particular blue that comes after rain in the southern Appalachians, a blue that has weight, that you could almost lay a hand on.

The truck was parked by the porch. June was on the porch steps, and Wyatt was beside her, and between them was a flat of yarrow, the same flat he had brought to the market, and beside the yarrow was a small rosebush in a clay pot, the kind of pot June's mother had used, the kind of pot that holds a root ball the size of a fist.

Maren parked. She got out. She did not lock the car. She walked across the yard to the porch, and the dogs came to meet her, and she let them smell her hand, and they let her pass.

"We are planting the rosebush," June said. "Mama's rosebush. The one from the cutting. Would you like to help?"

"I would," Maren said.

She knelt beside the hole Wyatt had dug, a hole the depth of the pot and twice as wide, and she held the pot while June eased the root ball out, and the roots were pale and fibrous and they smelled of green tea, and the soil that fell away from them was dark and crumbly and alive with the particular smell of a thing that had been growing for a long time.

Wyatt took the spade and broke up the soil at the bottom of the hole. June held the rosebush by the crown and centered it. Maren knelt beside her and pushed the soil back in with her hands, and the soil was cold, and the cold traveled up her wrists and into her arms, and she did not flinch from it.