Can't Stand the Heat - Louisa Edwards [31]
Adam wouldn’t normally venture downtown at noon; the travel time on the subway could hit half an hour, easy, and he needed to be up at the restaurant. He liked to get to Union Square at the ass-crack of dawn and open up the Greenmarket, help his buddies from Siren Falls Farm set up their stall. He’d made friends with all his favorite purveyors, so now they let him have first pick of all the produce and even occasionally slipped him tips about specialty items coming into the market.
Like today. Paul Corlie, one of the Siren Falls boys, had pulled Adam aside and whispered that he’d heard a rumor that one of their friends, a well-known shroomer, had gone on a very successful expedition for morels. Morels, those big, succulent members of the mushroom family, were not easy to come by. They stubbornly resisted all efforts at cultivation and continued to grow only in the wild. Shroomers guarded the secrets of their hunts jealously; it was impossible to predict when one would show up at the market, mushrooms in hand. This shroomer was only going to be in town for a few hours, and Adam couldn’t wait to work up a special using the tender, earthy delicacy. He’d promised Paul he’d meet the guy back at Union Square at noon.
So here he was. He’d been dreaming of dishes to highlight morels the whole trip down on the C train, so lost in thoughts of what he could do to twist up the traditional pairing with asparagus that he almost missed the transfer at Fourteenth Street.
Glancing around to orient himself—it was wild how different the market was all packed with people like anchovies in a tin—Adam waved at Dava Whitehurst, one of his supplier buddies. She waved back distractedly, her salt-and-pepper dreadlocks bound up in an intricate bundle on her head. She barely took her eyes off the scale where she was weighing out the lump of creamy white goat cheese one of her many customers had ordered.
Adam bulled his way through the crowd, trying to move quickly without knocking anyone down. He breathed a sigh of relief when he got to the Siren Falls stall and ducked around behind the table to escape the crush.
“It’s a madhouse out there,” he whooped, clapping Paul on the back. Broad and stocky, Paul spent a lot of his time in the sun doing backbreaking manual labor, and it showed. He was about Adam’s age, but he looked nearly ten years older, as if he were pushing forty instead of thirty.
“Yeah, man.” His friend grinned, teeth flashing white in his lined, weathered face. He gestured at the nearly empty table before him. The last time Adam saw it, the table had been groaning under the weight of slim, elegant asparagus spears, sweet baby peas, and the first small wild strawberries. “That’s what we like to see. We’re going home empty-handed tonight.”
“That rocks, Paulie,” Adam told him. “You’re the man.”
“Yes, I am,” Paul agreed, smug as all hell. “You’re gonna think so even more in a minute.”
“Why’s that? The morel guy here already? Tell me he got at least five pounds.” Adam’s head whipped around, searching the crowd for a man with a dirty sack of mushrooms over his shoulder. Surely he’d be pretty conspicuous.
“Down, boy.” Paul laughed. “He ain’t here yet. Naw, it’s just that I got your back.”
“What do you mean?”
Paul clucked his tongue, clearly enjoying dragging out the suspense. “And man, are you ever gonna owe me. You’ll never look at another guy’s tomatoes again once I tell you this.”
“Damn it, Paul, when are you going to let me live that down? It was one time! One time,” Adam groused. “And they weren’t even worth it. Pretty to look at, but the texture was for shit.”
“And let that be a lesson to you,” Paul said. “Just because it looks