Billy and I went to work setting up the table. It didn’t take much to make it pretty. The flowers and produce were beautiful enough, but Julia had also tucked woven baskets into the crates, and twine to tie the flowers. Billy and I worked together, filling the baskets with bright red tomatoes, tying the basil into bunches and scattering them around, stacking yellow squashes and arranging the flowers into bouquets, small ones for ten dollars, larger for twenty.

I saw Liz set down her ice, so I returned to her and opened the box. I rubbed my hands with alcohol and looked at the scrape again, right along the sharp bone of her hip. It was deeper than I had realized, the skin bruising around it.

“Should we put alcohol on it?” I asked her. “I think we should, but it’ll hurt.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Probably.”

So I found gauze and wetted it.

“What was it, again?” I asked, eyes on the gauze, too shy to look at her face. “As you feel the pain begin . . . ?”

“Press it close and count to ten,” she said.

I touched the gauze to the cut, felt her flinch.

“One . . . two . . . three . . . ”—I removed the gauze and set it down—“four . . . five . . . six . . . ”—tore open a bandage and covered the center with antiseptic—“seven . . . eight . . . nine . . . ”—lined the bandage up and gently pressed it to her skin—“ten.”

I snuck a look at her face. She narrowed her eyes and smiled.

I had impressed her.

“You can just watch at first,” Liz said, when she took position behind the cashbox and scale. “And refill the tables whenever they look picked over. And then, if you want to, you can help us with the weighing and the money.”

“It’s as simple as it sounds,” Billy said. “The trick is not to let the line intimidate you. Everyone can wait a few minutes for flowers. There’s no rush.”