For the record, he said it would take twenty minutes.
He said this at 9:15 on a Saturday morning in late May, standing in my kitchen in the specific way boys stand when they are trying to seem casual about a plan they have already fully committed to. It was cloudy out, maybe sixty degrees, the kind of Durham morning that smells like wet mulch and possibility. He said: farmers market, in and out, he just wanted to see if the mushroom guy was back.
I want to be clear that I knew. I knew when I put on shoes anyway.
Ezra has what I would describe as a collectors relationship with the farmers market. Not a buyers relationship — a collectors one. He does not go to purchase things. He goes to form opinions, gather data, and report back to me in real time as though I am not standing directly next to him. He picked up a bunch of radishes and said, "these are extremely good radishes," then put them down. He did this with three different vendors. He told a man selling hot sauce that he had "been following his trajectory." The man seemed genuinely moved.
By 9:45 he had acquired: one small jar of honey he described as "responsible," a single peach that he said he needed to smell, and a very intense conversation with a woman about the Duke Street closure and whether it would affect her setup next month. It would, she said. He nodded gravely. He did not buy anything from her.
The yoga class was starting in the grass nearby and he stopped to watch for a minute, which turned into four minutes, which turned into him saying "I feel like I could do that." I said you've never done yoga. He said he felt like he could, though. This is an important distinction for Ezra.
It started spitting rain sometime around ten. Just a little. The forecast had been very upfront about this and I had mentioned it and he had said "yeah but look at the sky, it's basically fine." The sky was not basically fine. The sky was doing exactly what it said it was going to do on my weather app, which I showed him, and he looked at it with genuine surprise as though the clouds had broken a verbal agreement.
We stood under the pavilion for a while. He bought a breakfast biscuit from someone and ate it in the specific way boys eat food they didn't expect to be good, which is silently and with mounting respect. He said it was a contender. I asked for a bite. He gave me the smaller half.
The mushroom guy was, eventually, located. His name was apparently Kieran, a fact Ezra conveyed with the warmth of someone confirming a friend had made it home safe. They discussed varieties. Ezra bought a small bag of something he couldn't fully pronounce and held it the rest of the time like it was a relic. On the walk back to the car — which was now definitely raining, fully, in the way that feels like a personal critique — he said we should make pasta tonight.
I said I thought we didn't have time.
He said he'd found a recipe that was "pretty fast," which is something Ezra says about recipes the same way he says "pretty quick" about farmers markets and "probably just parking" about downtown and "shouldn't take long" about anything he is enthusiastic about and therefore has no accurate sense of.
I said okay.
He put the mushrooms in my tote bag very carefully, like they were sleeping.
It is now almost noon and we are home and damp and he is googling pasta recipes on his phone with the specific focused energy he should have applied to, I don't know, leaving when he said we would. The honey is on the counter. The peach is in a bowl. The mushrooms are "resting," apparently.
He said it would take twenty minutes.
It took two hours and forty-five minutes and I got rained on and a man told me about hot sauce trajectories and I have to say, honestly, genuinely, as a person with a functional relationship to time and weather forecasts and realistic expectations —
the biscuit really was a contender.