Soft Spot

The heaters quit at ten past two.

Delia heard it before she understood it. The low roar under everything, the one she had stopped hearing years ago, wound down and stopped, and the glasshouse went quiet enough that she could hear the drip line in the lemon beds. Then the glass started ticking, all along the north wall, small dry sounds like someone tapping a fingernail on a window.

The overhead lights went with the heaters. Only the red exit signs over the doors stayed on.

"Is that bad?" Noa asked from the dark.

She was at the far end of the citrus row, a headlamp on over her knit hat, a clipboard against her chest. She did plant quarantine inspections for the state, and she had come in at eleven, late, apologizing, to finish reading the pest cards on the lemons before a shipment went out Monday. Delia had let her in and gone back to repotting cuttings, and had looked up from the bench more times than she would have admitted.

"It's bad," Delia said.

She brushed the potting mix off her hands and went to the north wall, and held her phone up to the thermometer. Thirty-one. The first hard frost of the year had been in the forecast all week. The doors had sealed themselves at nine, the way they did on every cold night, to hold the heat in, and they wouldn't open again until six. She called the facilities number. It rang in an empty office. She hung up and called it again, and stood there listening to it ring with her free hand flat on the glass. It was already cold enough to hurt.

"The lemons can take twenty-eight for an hour," she said. "Not four."

Noa's headlamp came bobbing down the row toward her. "So what do we do?"

Delia noticed the we. She put the phone in her back pocket. "There's a warm-water line off the boiler. The boiler's on its own circuit, so it should still be running. If you keep water on the roots, it gives off heat as it cools. Orchards do it on frost nights." She was already walking to the hose reel at the end of the bed, and she heard Noa's boots following. "It's all I've got. I need a light on the trunks. My phone's at twenty percent."

There was a big yellow flashlight on a hook by the door. Noa got it down before Delia could ask, thumbed it on, and pointed it at the reel so Delia could see the coupling.

They started at the north end, where the cold was coming through. Delia dragged the hose from tree to tree and soaked the soil around each trunk, then the lower bark, then the soil again, and Noa walked half a step ahead of her and put the light where the water was going to go. Steam came up off the beds in the beam. The hose was heavy and kept snagging on the corners of the raised beds, and every time it did, Noa went back without a word and flipped it free.

By three Delia's sleeves were wet to the elbow. By four they had gone stiff, and every time she bent her arm the cuffs cracked.

They didn't talk much. Around three-thirty Noa said, "Why lemons?"

Delia moved the hose to the next tree. "My grandmother had one. In a pot on her fire escape in Cleveland. She kept it alive for thirty-one years. She'd bring it into the bathroom every November and run the shower hot for it."

"Thirty-one," Noa said, like it was a number worth remembering. She moved the light to the next trunk before Delia could ask her to.

A while later, Noa said, "What are you going to do at six?"

"Go home and get in a bath," Delia said. "A real one. Hot. In air that isn't greenhouse air." Her teeth were chattering a little now, and she clenched her jaw to stop them. "And not get out until Tuesday."

Noa laughed, a quiet sound in the dark, and the flashlight beam shook with it.

The thermometer read twenty-nine at four-thirty. Twenty-nine at five. Delia stopped checking.

At some point the black squares of glass over them went gray. The ticking slowed. When Delia finally shut the water off, her hands wouldn't open all the way. She stood there with the dead hose in one fist, trying to make her fingers let go of it.

Noa set the flashlight down on the edge of a bed, still on, pointing at nothing. She took the hose out of Delia's hand and let it drop. Then she took both of Delia's hands and held them together between her own, and bent her head, and breathed on them.

It hurt. That was the first thing. The heat came back into Delia's fingers like needles, and she made a sound she would have been embarrassed by in daylight. Noa didn't let go. Her hands were cold too, but less cold, and her breath was warm, and she kept doing it, slow, until the needles faded into an ache.

Delia looked up. Noa's face was very close. Her headlamp had died hours ago and the strap had pushed her hat up crooked. There was a drop of water drying on her cheek. Their breath was fogging in the same small space between them.

Noa didn't step back.

Delia's heart was going hard enough that she could feel it in her wrists, right where Noa was holding them. She thought, very clearly, I'm going to. She leaned in. Noa's thumb moved, once, along the inside of her wrist, under the wet cuff.

The door locks let go with a bang that went through the whole building.

They both jumped. The overhead lights came on, every bank at once, white and humming, and the heaters roared back to life under the floor. Across the house the main door swung open and Ray from the north range came in with two coffees and his hood up, already talking about the roads. He stopped when he saw them.

"Jesus," he said. "Did you two sleep here?"

Noa had let go of her hands. She picked her clipboard up off the bed and wiped the wet off it with her sleeve. "Heaters went out," she said. "She saved your lemons."

Ray looked at the steaming beds, and at Delia's sleeves, and back at Noa. "Huh," he said.

Noa went to the door and stopped there, with one hand on the frame, and looked back. "I'll text you about the scale insects," she said to Delia. Then she was gone, and the door swung shut behind her on its slow arm.

Ray held out one of the coffees. Delia took it with both hands. She could barely feel the cup.

"Scale insects," Ray said.

"Shut up, Ray," she said.

---

Noa texted on Monday.

Delia was in the propagation room when her phone buzzed in her apron pocket. She was potting up rosemary cuttings, and her hands were black to the wrist, so she wiped one finger on her pants and read it on the bench without picking it up.

lemons ok? also: market saturday. nectarines took a bounce in the cooler. peaches held. you?

She read it three times. Then she stood there with potting mix drying on her hands and tried to think of an answer. Lemons are fine, thanks for your help. Too stiff. Still thinking about Friday. No. I'm fine. Are you fine? She typed that one and looked at it and deleted it.

Ray came in eating a sandwich out of wax paper and leaned on the doorframe. "Who's that?"

"Nobody." She put the phone face down.

"Scale insects?"

She threw a rosemary cutting at him. It hit him in the chest and fell into his sandwich, and he picked it out and looked at it and kept eating.

She sent still upright at the end of her shift, sitting in her car in the staff lot with the engine running for the heat. Then she drove home and did not look at her phone again until she was in bed, and there was nothing new.

On Tuesday she stopped at the hardware store on the way home because the door of her bathroom cabinet had been hanging crooked since spring. She stood in front of the wall of cabinet hardware until a man in an orange vest asked if she needed help. She bought the one that looked the most like the old one, and carried it home in a small paper bag, and set the bag down on the floor of her hall by the shoe rack. She meant to put it in that night. She didn't. On Wednesday she stepped over it twice. On Thursday she kicked it by accident, in the dark, and heard the screws rattle around in the bottom of the bag.

On Thursday she also went and found Ray in the north range, where he was spraying down the walkways.

"I need Saturday," she said.

He turned the nozzle off. "You're on Saturday."

"I know. I'll take your Sunday."

"I already have Sunday off."

"Then I'll take next Sunday."

Ray coiled the hose over his arm and looked at her. "This is about the scale insects."

"Do you want the Sunday or not?"

"I want the Sunday," he said, "and a dozen from Dutch's. The good ones, not the day-olds."

"Fine."

"The maple ones."

"Fine, Ray."

The second text came on Friday night. She was on the couch with a bowl of cereal for dinner and the TV on with the sound off.

stall's by the coffee truck. you'll know it by the sign. come if you want. I'm there till 2

Delia put the bowl down on the floor. She read the text again, and then she got up and went to the hall, stepping over the hardware bag, and stood in the bathroom doorway looking at the crooked cabinet door for no reason at all.

She went to bed and set an alarm for six.

---

The market filled an old loading lot behind the rail spur, six blocks from Delia's building. She walked over in her heavy jacket with her hands in the pockets. It had rained in the night and the sidewalks were still dark with it. The air smelled like wet leaves and somebody's wood stove.

She could hear the market before she could see it, generators and a radio and somebody shouting a price. Then she came around the corner of the old freight building and it was all there at once, two long rows of white canopies and blue tarps, and people in fleece and rain boots moving between them with tote bags.

She went slowly, partly because she wasn't sure what she was doing. A baker was scoring loaves with a razor blade, steam coming up out of the cuts. A man was selling honey out of a cooler with the lid propped open on a brick. A woman sold hot peppers off a card table, with a baby asleep in a carrier against her chest, and she made change one-handed without waking it. Somebody's generator coughed and caught. At the end of the first row a city truck had left a little island of orange cones in the middle of the walkway, and everybody stepped around it.

The coffee truck was at the far end of the second row, with a line already. Next to it was a canopy with one corner sagging, and under the canopy, on a folding table, a sign in black marker on a square of cardboard:

YOU SQUEEZE IT, YOU BOUGHT IT

The letters had run in the rain and someone had gone over them again, darker.

Noa was behind the table in a canvas apron over a gray sweatshirt, with her hair tied back in a produce rubber band. She was making change for a woman with a stroller, and she counted it out into the woman's hand, then counted it again.

Delia stopped by the egg stall across the way and pretended to look at eggs.

A kid with a skateboard under one arm drifted past Noa's table and took a grape out of the sample cup, and then another one. Noa didn't look up from the scale. "Those are counted," she said, and the kid put the second grape back and kept walking.

The woman with the stroller left. Noa looked up, and saw Delia by the eggs. She didn't look surprised. She wiped her hands on her apron and waved Delia over with two fingers.

Delia went.

"You came," Noa said.

"I had the day off." Delia stopped at the edge of the table, her jacket zipped to her chin. Up close, Noa's nose was pink from the cold, and there was fruit juice dried on the back of one wrist. "I traded for it, actually."

"Yeah?" Noa licked her thumb and rubbed at the juice. It didn't come off. "Who'd you trade?"

"Ray."

"Ray with the coffees."

"I owe him a Sunday."

Noa looked at her for a second. "And donuts, probably."

"And donuts," Delia said.

Noa smiled at that, and lifted the low corner of the canopy so Delia could duck under.

Under there, it smelled like peaches a day from turning. The light came through a yellow tarp and made everyone a little sick-looking. A paper cup of coffee sat on the cash box, cold, with a skin on top.

Noa picked up a plum from the front flat, turned it over once, and held it out. It was dark and cool, and Delia could feel a soft spot on one side through the skin without pressing.

"I'm not buying anything," Delia said.

"Everybody says that." Noa kept holding it out until Delia took it. "Peaches held. The nectarines are done after today. The plums are getting soft, so I'm trying to get rid of them." She nodded at the one in Delia's hand. "That one's a goner. Take it."

Delia put it in her jacket pocket.

---

She meant to stay ten minutes.

By nine-thirty the line from the coffee truck had spilled over in front of Noa's table, and people kept stepping out of it to pick things up, and Noa was doing three things at once. She glanced back at Delia, standing under the canopy out of the way, and tipped her head at the stack of flats behind the table.

"Can you?" she said.

Delia took her jacket off and hung it on the canopy pole and went around behind the table.

The flats were heavier than they looked. She restacked them with the labels facing out, the way Noa's were, and moved the soft fruit to the back where strangers couldn't reach it. Under the table a box fan was taped to a cracked foam cooler, and melted ice was dripping out of the cooler into a paint tray. When the tray was full, Noa slid it toward Delia with the side of her boot while she talked to a customer, and Delia carried it to the storm drain at the edge of the lot and dumped it, and brought it back.

When Noa needed the mister, Delia kept the hose from kinking. The spray beaded up on the peaches. The cardboard under the cooler had gone soft from the melt, and while Delia was holding the hose, one corner of a flat gave out and three peaches rolled off the edge of the table. Noa caught two of them, one in each hand. The third one hit the asphalt and split.

"Goddammit," Noa told it. "You were the best one in the box."

Delia laughed before she could stop herself. Noa looked at her, then down at the split peach, and then she picked it up and handed it to Delia. "Here. You broke it."

"I didn't break it."

"You were holding the hose."

Delia ate it standing there behind the table. It was the best peach she'd had all year. The juice ran down to her wrist, and she let it.

She got the change wrong twice. The second time, Noa reached over and tapped the right coin in Delia's palm, and then took her hand back and went on bagging pears.

Noa's coffee was still on the cash box, cold. Delia drank half of it. Noa saw her do it and didn't say anything.

A man in a fleece vest picked up a nectarine from one flat and a nectarine from the other and held them side by side. "What's the difference?"

"That one's freestone," Noa said, pointing with her chin while she weighed someone else's pears. "Pit pops right out. That one's cling. You eat around it."

"Which is better?"

"Depends how much you like a fight."

He bought the freestone.

Near ten another man came back with a paper bag, holding it out in front of him like evidence. He pushed through to the front of the table and set it down on the scale.

"I bought these yesterday," he said. "Look at them."

Noa opened the bag and tipped it toward herself. Delia leaned to see. All four peaches had gone soft and brown, and all on the same side.

"They were fine when I bought them. I want my money back."

"Where'd you keep them?" Noa asked.

"On the counter."

"In this bag?"

He hesitated. "Yeah."

"How warm's your kitchen?"

"I don't know. Seventy-five? Seventy-six?"

"Next to anything?"

"The toaster," he said, and then he heard it.

Noa folded the top of the bag back down. "They bruise when they're ripe and somebody cooks them. Yesterday's were ripe. I told you they were ripe." She pushed a pint of apricots across the table at him. "Take these for the difference. That's what I can do."

He took the apricots. On his way out Delia heard him say "toaster" to himself, disgusted, and she bent down over the paint tray so Noa wouldn't see her face.

"What?" Noa said, without looking up from the till.

"Nothing." Delia straightened up. "You were kind of hard on him."

"He cooked them." Noa shut the till drawer with her hip. "When it slows down I've got to load the empties into the truck. Out back. You want to help?"

"Sure."

"You don't have to."

"I said sure."

---

It slowed down around eleven. Noa asked the honey man to watch the table, and he waved at her without looking, and she picked up two empty crates and nodded at the rest. Delia stacked three and followed her.

They went down the gap between the coffee truck and the freight building, single file because it was narrow. The ground back there was gravel and broken glass and wet cardboard. Delia's crates kept catching on the wall. Noa didn't look back, but she slowed down at the corner, where there was a puddle the whole width of the alley, and waited until Delia was right behind her, and then they both stepped over it on the same stone.

The loading bay was concrete that never quite dried, with a rainbow of oil around the drain and a pallet jack left with one wheel turned out. Sodium lights hummed under the overhang even though it was daytime. Somewhere a refrigerated truck's compressor kicked on, filled the whole bay with noise for a minute, and cut out again. It was colder back here. The plum in Delia's jacket pocket bumped against her hip.

Noa's pickup was backed up to the dock with the tailgate down. She set her crates in the bed and hopped up onto the tailgate, and turned around and held her hands out. Delia handed the crates up one at a time. On the third one their fingers overlapped on the handle, and Noa didn't move hers.

Delia didn't either.

"A week," Noa said, quietly.

Delia knew what she meant. She let go of the crate. Noa set it in the bed behind her without looking at it.

"I kept thinking about the hose," Delia said.

"The hose."

"You holding the light." Delia put her hands in her back pockets, then took them out again. "Nobody's ever done that for me without being asked." She stopped. "And the part at the end."

"The part at the end," Noa said. She sat down on the tailgate with her boots hanging off the edge, and pulled the rubber band out of her hair, and put it back in again, tighter. "I almost didn't send the second text. I wrote it on Wednesday and sat on it. Then I thought, well. She answered the first one." She looked down at Delia. "Took you all day, though."

"I was working."

"Uh huh."

Delia had ended up standing between Noa's knees. The tailgate put Noa a few inches higher, so for once Delia was the one looking up. Two bays down, somebody was hosing out a truck bed and singing along to a radio, badly.

"I bought a hinge," Delia said.

Noa waited.

"For my bathroom cabinet. The door hangs crooked. It's been sitting in a bag in my hall since Tuesday. I keep stepping over it."

"Why?"

"I don't know how to put it in."

Noa's knee pressed against Delia's hip. It stayed there. "I do," she said. "Show me later."

A produce truck started backing into the bay with its beeper going, and somebody from the flower stall came around the corner shouting about whose hose was across the walkway. Noa shouted back that it wasn't hers, without really raising her voice, and slid down off the tailgate. She landed close enough that Delia had to take a step back.

"Come on," Noa said. "Honey guy's going to sell everything for a dollar."

---

The afternoon lull came after one. Noa started breaking down the front display, and Delia helped her without being told what to do now, because she had watched it done all morning. She folded the empty flats flat. Wet cardboard came apart in her hands. Juice ran down her wrist and she wiped it on her jeans, and when she looked up, Noa was watching her.

"What," Delia said.

Noa put down the flat she was holding and wiped her hands on her apron, front and back, for longer than they needed.

"Can I come over after?" she said. "To your place."

Delia's face went hot. "For the hinge."

"Sure. The hinge." Noa was looking at the flat, not at her. "I just. Last week I left. I walked out to my car and sat there for twenty minutes with the engine running, and then I drove home. I don't want to do that again. So if that's not what this is, tell me now, and I'll still come fix your stupid cabinet."

The lot was loud around them: generators winding down, somebody's radio, a vendor two stalls over counting money out loud. Delia stacked the last flat on the others and lined up the corners. She could feel her pulse in her neck.

"It's not about the hinge," she said.

Noa nodded. She picked up the tarp and started folding it, and she got the corners wrong twice.

---

Closing took an hour. Noa counted the till into a zip bag, licking her thumb for the bills. She paid the mushroom guy next door for their half of the water with two damp fives, and he tucked them in his shirt pocket and said, "Who's your helper?" and Noa said, "That's Delia," and nothing else, and the mushroom guy said, "Hi, Delia," and went back to his boxes.

Then Noa hosed down the table. She did it in one wide arc, and it went right across Delia's boots, because Delia was standing too close and didn't step back in time.

Delia looked down at her boots. Then at Noa.

Noa laughed. "Sorry." She shut off the water. "Ready?"

They loaded the last of it into the truck together, the folded canopy and the table and the cooler with the fan still taped to it. The cab smelled like peaches and old coffee and the vinyl seats. There was a pair of work gloves on the dash, and a parking ticket, and a jar of loose change in the cup holder. Delia moved the gloves to sit down.

"I live six blocks that way," she said, and pointed.

"I know. You told me at the glasshouse." Noa started the truck. It took two tries. "Around three in the morning."

Delia didn't remember telling her.

It started to rain before they got out of the lot. Not hard at first, and then hard. Cold October rain that came down straight and loud on the roof of the cab. The wipers were old and left a smeared arc in the middle of the windshield, and Noa leaned forward over the wheel to see past it. Her hair was coming loose again. At the light on Fifth she reached over without looking and turned the heat up, and then turned the fan down because it rattled, and then turned it back up.

Delia watched her hands do it.

"There," Delia said. "The brick one with the green door."

There was no parking on the block. Noa went around once, slowly, and then pulled half up onto the curb in front of a hydrant and put the hazards on.

"You'll get a ticket," Delia said.

Noa took the parking ticket off the dash and held it up. "I already have one," she said, and turned the truck off.

They ran for it. It was only thirty feet, but the rain was coming down so hard that by the time Delia got to the door her hair was stuck to her forehead and the back of her jacket was soaked through. Noa came up the steps behind her with her apron held up over her head like a hood, which didn't help at all, and stood close behind Delia, dripping, while Delia found the key.

The front door stuck on wet days. Delia put her shoulder into it, and it gave all at once, and they both stumbled into the entryway.

It was quiet in there after the rain. The stairwell smelled like somebody else's laundry soap. Their boots squeaked on the tile. Delia started up the stairs, and Noa came up two steps behind her, and Delia could feel her looking the whole way up. On the second floor landing a neighbor's door was open a crack, and a TV was going inside, a game show, people clapping. Noa's hand touched the small of Delia's back for a second as they passed it, and then it was gone.

At the third floor Delia got her keys out of her jacket pocket. Her hands were wet and cold and they didn't work right, and the keys slipped out of her fingers and hit the landing, loud.

They both crouched for them at the same time. Their hands met on the ring.

Neither of them let go.

They stayed like that, crouched on the landing, their knees almost touching, rainwater dripping off Noa's hair onto the floor between them. Noa smelled like the market. Soap and wet canvas and peaches. There was a smear of peach on her apron strap. Delia could hear her breathing.

"You can still say no," Noa said.

"I know," Delia said.

She stood up, keys in one hand and Noa's hand still in the other, and pulled Noa up with her. She got the key in the lock without looking at it. The door opened onto her dark hall, and the hardware bag on the floor by the shoe rack, right where she'd left it.

"Inside," she said.