Free Weekends in Carolina by Jennifer Lohmann

organic and fair-trade coffee.
    Trey stopped in front of a packaged-meat case and stared at the small tubs of pimento cheese. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a pimento cheese sandwich, though they had been a staple of his childhood. Max came up behind him. “You should buy some. They make it fresh in the store.”
    Her breath was soft and intimate in his ear, and suddenly the entire stop had a casually familiar feel. Stopping in for a few groceries was something couples did together. “Are you a regular here?” he asked, reaching forward to grab a tub, more to put some distance between them than because he actually wanted it.
    “Anyone who comes here more than once is a regular.” She reached past him to grab her own tub, the movement defeating his desire for space. “Plus, they support local farms and businesses, so it’s hard not to return the favor.
    “Do you sell here?”
    Max waved at the butcher behind the counter before answering. “No, but I know the baker for some of the bread they sell here and the brewer of some of the Durham beer. If I gave up on the diversity of my farm and specialized in one product, maybe I would. Right now I don’t produce enough of any one thing to sell at a store.” She looked back over her shoulder at him. “I’m not sure I would want to.”
    Here in the store, Max wasn’t just the farmer on his dad’s land, but a real person—related to the farm and his past but not of the farm and his past. It was like realizing your parents had a life before you were born. The thought made him laugh and realize how self-centered he’d been this entire week.
    Trey followed Max to the front of the store, put his tub of pimento cheese on the conveyor belt and pulled his wallet out of his back pocket. He no more knew what to do with his tub of pimento cheese than his newfound realization.
    * * *
    T HOUGH T REY AND Kelly had packed up enough of their dad’s stuff that he could’ve driven back to D.C. Friday morning, Trey kept to his original plan of leaving Saturday. He had made a tentative date with Max for another basketball game and he wanted to keep it. He drove to Chapel Hill for a late lunch with Jerome, took a side trip through Orange County for Maple View Farms ice cream and stopped for more barbecue takeout for dinner with Max. He didn’t plan on returning to North Carolina until Kelly got married—which probably depended more on politics than Kelly—so the memory of this barbecue would have to last him a while.
    When he opened the door to Max’s knock, he was surprised to see her in jeans. “Does access to your own washing machine starting tomorrow mean no bunny-print pajama bottoms?”
    When she turned from hanging her coat up, a flush rose up her neck, turning the pale parts of her skin bright red and her freckles a deep oak.
    “The pajamas were cute, but the jeans look nice, too,” he offered as a lame apology for whatever he had said to make her blush. Nice was a weak description of how Max looked.
    The long sleeves of her dark purple T-shirt covered her arms, but his eyes followed the trail of freckles down into the deep V of the fitted shirt’s neck, and his hands wanted to accompany them. Her hair was pulled back into a long, tangled braid that looked like a fraying piece of rope with strands and ringlets sticking out every which way, giving her otherwise tidy look a wild quality. Max hadn’t lost the unsullied glow he’d discovered in her yesterday, even back on this contaminated soil. A pleasant, but uncomfortable realization.
    “Mama would say I know how to treat a girl right,” Trey said as they walked into the living room with their plates of barbecue. “TV trays.” He gestured to the room he’d set up for their evening. “No low-class eating with the plate on your lap tonight.” She laughed, as he had known she would. “I think these were my grandmother’s and I didn’t know they were still around until I found them in the attic.