Page 43 of What August Heard
I sat on the patio alone for another minute.
The ocean kept going. It always kept going.
I stood up.
***
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 sayI need help todaybecause 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.
