On Friday night, she counted the money in her checking account twice. The stall fee and fuel were manageable, but she worried about having to carry every tomato home unsold. She had not attended a market as a vendor since she and Walter once sold extra hay bales through a farm auction, and that was an entirely different business. A person who bought hay needed it. She was asking strangers to take a chance on strange-looking tomatoes.
At five the next morning she was already in the kitchen, making coffee and checking the crates. Gus followed her to the back door but refused the invitation to climb into the truck. She put him back inside with fresh water and drove toward town under a sky still gray with early light. The road was nearly empty, and the silence in the cab made her doubt herself with every mile.
She set up near a woman selling honey and a young family with sweet corn. The market was held in the courthouse square, where a fountain that had not worked in years still attracted children and tourists taking photographs. Mary Ann arranged the tomatoes by color, set out a small cutting board for samples, and stepped back to examine the display. It looked peculiar among neat pyramids of apples and bags of uniform green beans.
The honey seller, an older woman named Della Finch, glanced over and said, "Those look like something out of a painting."
"I hope somebody thinks they look like lunch," Mary Ann answered.
For the first half hour, few customers stopped. They looked, smiled politely, then moved toward the sweet corn and peaches. One man asked if the purple tomatoes were spoiled. Another wondered whether the stripes meant they had been treated with something unusual. Mary Ann answered carefully and tried not to take the questions as insults.
Then a woman in a green sundress asked for a slice of the dark tomato. Mary Ann cut a small piece and offered it on a paper plate. The woman tasted it, stopped chewing for an instant, and looked back at the fruit. She took another sample, this time without waiting for an invitation.
"What is that?" she asked.
"An experimental line I've been saving seed from. I don't have a finished name for it."
"It tastes like the tomatoes my grandmother grew. I haven't had one like that in years."
She bought a bag, then crossed to the corn stall and told the woman standing there to come taste one. That customer brought her husband. A couple who had been on their way to the bakery stopped because they saw people gathering. Within twenty minutes Mary Ann found herself answering questions faster than she could make change, slicing samples, and trying to explain why one tomato tasted sweeter while another carried more acidity.
At nine forty-five she sold the last fruit from the fourth crate. There were still people approaching the table, looking for the purple ones, the striped ones, and the sauce tomatoes they had heard about from somebody across the square. She had nothing left to offer except an explanation and a promise to bring more if the plants kept producing. A man asked if she would be back the following week, and the question nearly undid her because she had been afraid she would be embarrassed into never returning at all.