Two Wrong Guesses, One Market

October second. We each had a number in our heads. That is the part I keep coming back to. Not the same number, different numbers, arrived at independently, using completely different reasoning, both incorrect, and incorrect in opposite directions. Simone thought it closed at noon. I thought it closed at one. It closed at eleven-thirty.

The thing is, we'd talked about going. It was a real plan, the kind with a day attached to it and a general intention of produce. The farmers market by the rec center does this thing in October where the summer stuff and the fall stuff overlap for exactly two or three weeks, you can get the last of the cherry tomatoes and the first of the small hard apples at the same table, and I had been thinking about that overlap since the end of September. I did not, apparently, think to look up when it ended. Neither did Simone. We each just had a number.

the reassessment phase

What we found when we got there: three stalls still technically open, two of which were consolidating. One vendor with apples. The particular end-of-morning quiet of a market past its hour, which is its own specific atmosphere, less disappointing than you'd expect, actually, more like arriving at a party after it's peaked, when the people left are the ones worth talking to. I bought the apple. Simone bought a jar of something she held up to the light for thirty seconds without speaking.

simultaneous realization, different math

The walk back was fine. We did not discuss whose number was more wrong because there's no good answer to that, being wrong by ninety minutes in one direction is not obviously better or worse than being wrong by thirty minutes in the other direction, and the math doesn't resolve into anything satisfying. Gerald, when I got home, had not grown any new leaves in my absence. The collapsed bowl on the shelf above the stove was exactly where I left it. The apartment was the same. The apple was good.