Literary Coming-of-Age

There is a quality of light in late July that doesn't exist at any other time of year. Sofie had been thinking about this since May, cataloguing the light the way she'd started cataloguing everything: the smell of her father's work shirts on the laundry line, the particular pitch of the screen door, the sound of her mother moving through the house in the early morning when she thought everyone was still asleep.

She was leaving in forty-three days. She had stopped telling people this.

The vegetable stand sat at the bend in Route 12 where the birch trees started. Her father had built it the summer she was born, according to family legend, though she suspected the story had been improved upon with telling. She'd worked it every summer she could remember, and this summer she had volunteered for every shift available, without explaining why.

"You're so good with the customers," her mother said, as though this explained it.

Sofie had learned long ago that some things were easier to let be misunderstood.

That afternoon, a girl her age came to buy tomatoes and spent twenty minutes talking about nothing in particular — her car, her summer job, a boy she was uncertain about. Sofie listened and wrapped the tomatoes carefully in newspaper and thought: I will remember this. I will remember exactly this.