Bartering for Bruised Pears

The square wanted its cut before breakfast. Crates knocked under the awning, wheel-rims grated over the stones, and the fee notice pinned to the post made the stall look already tallied. Anya slid the crate lid back and the pears struck one another with a dry, small knock that moved up through the board and into her wrist.

Of course Basil had parked his cart in the lane again. Of course he had. His wheels sat at a slant that said apology to nobody, and his striped canopy shoved a slice of shade across the path where the first customers liked to drift. He was at the spice end of the square, polishing a brass scoop with a cloth that had once been white in some other decade.

The cracked enamel cup waited under the counter, rim chipped on the far side, its blue line faded to a ghost. It held the first sample slices every day because it had always held the first sample slices, and because the old cup had the right weight in the hand, the kind that kept people from asking whether the fruit had gone soft. Anya set one pear on the board and split it with the little knife. The calyx came away clean. Good sign. The knife made a neat, dry tick against the wood.

"Lower bruises first," Jonah said.

"Lower bruises first, if the buyers plan to pretend they have standards," Anya said.

He made a face that would have looked offended on anyone else and useful on him. He moved the baskets into a line by size, not bruise, because size was what people paid attention to when they were in a hurry and bruise was what they claimed to care about once they had already opened their purses. He still stacked the small ones too close to the edge. He always stacked the small ones too close to the edge.

A woman in a slate coat stopped at the front of the stall. She had a stitched sleeve and a basket with a dent in the handle. She tapped the counter twice and waited for the ritual of being addressed.

"For eating or pie?" Anya asked.

"Both, if they cooperate," the woman said.

Basil called from his cart, "In a strictly practical sense, all fruit cooperates if one speaks to it with respect."

The woman turned her head toward him, then back. She was not here for fruit philosophy. She pointed at the upper crate. Jonah opened his mouth to say the sweeter ones sat lower because the sun reached that side later, and Anya cut in before the sentence could wander.

"The top basket has the cleaner skins," she said. "The lower one has the better bite. If you want them for pie, take both."

The woman weighed that, coin against pie, and took one pear from the top basket anyway, which was exactly the kind of answer people gave when they had not asked for advice and had received it all the same.

Anya wrapped it in paper. The paper crackled. A cart behind her slammed a wheel into the curb, the brass scoop at Basil's cart rang once, and the fee notice shifted on its nail with a brisk little flap.

Saira Dene arrived without hurry and put a second notice on the post with the same blue stamp she used on every scrap of official trouble. Her thumb left a square bruise of ink on the edge of the paper.

"By dusk," she said.

Anya gave the notice one look and one look only, because more would have turned it into a person. What else now?