The market sits like a cluster of old wives at the edge of the park.
Long thin from winter, the number of white-capped stalls is finally beginning to swell again, drops of color dotting the square where new produce springs up between the root vegetables, meat and bread, and other staples resistant to the cold.
Addie weaves between the people, heading to the little white tent nestled by the front gates of Prospect. Rise and Shine is a coffee and pastry stall run by a pair of sisters that remind Addie of Estele, if the old woman had been two instead of one, divided along the lines of temper. If she had been kinder, softer, or perhaps if she had simply lived another life, another time.
The sisters are here year-round, come snow or sun, a small constant in an ever-changing city.
“Hey, sugar,” says Mel, all broad shoulders, and wild curls, and the kind of sweetness that makes strangers feel like family. Addie loves that, the easy warmth, wants to nestle into it like a well-worn sweater.
“What can we get for you?” asks Maggie, older, leaner, laugh lines around her eyes belying the idea she rarely smiles.
Addie orders a large coffee and two muffins, one blueberry and the other chocolate chip, and then hands over a crumpled ten that she’d found on Toby’s coffee table. She could steal something from the market, of course, but she likes this little stand, and the two women who run it.
“Got a dime?” asks Maggie.
Addie digs the change from her pocket, coming up with a few quarters, a nickel—and there it is again, warm among the cold metal coins. Her fingers graze the wooden ring and she clenches her teeth at the feel of it. Like a
nagging thought, impossible to shed. Sifting through the coins, Addie is careful not to touch the wooden band again as she searches her change, resists the urge to fling the ring into the weeds, knows it will not make a difference if she does. It will always find its way back.
The darkness whispers in her ear, arms wrapped like a scarf around her throat.
I am always with you.
Addie plucks out a dime and pockets the rest. Maggie hands back four dollars.
“Where you from, doll?” asks Mel, noticing the faintest edge of an accent in the corners of Addie’s voice, reduced these days to the vanishing end of an s, the slight softening of a t. It has been so long, and yet, she cannot seem to let it go.
“Here and there,” she says, “but I was born in France.” “Oh la la,” says Mel in her flat Brooklyn drawl.
“Here you go, sunshine,” says Maggie, passing her a bag of pastries and a tall cup. Addie curls her fingers around the paper, relishing the heat on her cold palms. The coffee is strong, and dark, and when she takes a sip, she feels the warmth all the way down, and she is back in Paris again, in Istanbul, in Naples.
A mouthful of memory.
She starts toward the park gates.
“Au revoir!” calls Mel, landing hard on every letter, and Addie smiles into the steam.
The air is crisp inside the park. The sun is out, fighting for warmth, but the shade still belongs to winter, so Addie follows the light, sinking onto a grassy slope beneath the cloudless sky.
She sits the blueberry muffin on top of the paper bag, and sips her coffee, examining the book she borrowed from Fred’s table. She hadn’t bothered to look at what she was taking, but now her heart sinks a little at the sight of the paperback, the cover soft with wear, the title in German.
Kinder und Hausmärchen it reads, by Brüder Grimm.
Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
Her German is rusty, kept in the back of her mind, in a corner she hasn’t used much since the war. Now she dusts it off, knows that beneath the layer
of grime she will find the space intact, undisturbed. The boon of memory. She turns through the fragile old pages, eyes tripping over the words.
Once upon a time, she loved this kind of story.
When she was still a child, and the world was small, and she dreamed of open doors.
But Addie knows too well now, knows that these stories are full of foolish humans doing foolish things, warning tales of gods and monsters and greedy mortals who want too much, and then fail to understand what they’ve lost. Until the price is paid, and it’s too late to claim it back.
A voice rises like smoke inside her chest.
Never pray to the gods who answer after dark.
Addie tosses the book aside and slumps back into the grass, closing her eyes as she tries to savor the sun.
