Before we move odeward: I’ll be on tour in Mass, NYC, and CA this summer. I hope to see you at one of my events!

Only a few weeks left until Foundling Fathers is out, which means pre-orders are more important than ever. Get it on your doorstep the day it comes out, get it signed from The Strand!

I spotted the fruit market when I came up from the subway tunnel before I saw my apartment. It was a gorgeous New York October day, sky bright blue and the wind playing with everything it touched. A green awning wrapped around the whole corner, flying banners from a Flags of the World set with only a little nod to the neighborhood: USA, Dominican Republic, and Haiti up front, wrapped on either side by eastern European nations with their black eagles and African stars and moons. I noted the store’s convenient location; if I was going to live here, it would be a short walk from my front door.

After my soon-to-be husband and I had rented the one-bedroom ground-floor apartment with the good wood floors and the faulty heat and the view of St. Paul’s Church in the Village, I got the lay of the land. We were right on top of the Church St B/Q station; if I lowered my ears into the water in the bath, I could hear the announcements to stand clear of the closing doors. We were also scenic quarter-mile walk to Prospect Park and a scant half-mile to the worst post office in Brooklyn, where I could stand in line for hours behind a family with six children applying for passports so I could get yelled at for wanting stamps. And my front door was about ninety paces from Church Fruit Farm: a fresh fruits and vegetables market that was open twenty-four hours and was about to become my favorite place on earth.

“It’s like living in Paris!” I said chirpily to my best friend on the phone as I walked back home with a little basket on my arm. And it was, in some ways. I lived in a walkable part of Brooklyn, with ready access to everything from an urgent care to a counterfeit purse vendor. But the thing I was bragging about was walking to the little market up the street to procure fresh leeks, or just a lime to squeeze over tacos. I could get wine on the same block from a man with a lazy eye who always left a line of people standing at his lotto counter to fetch me my Riesling, and I could see the halal butcher across the street after for a whole chicken with its head and feet tied in a little bag for my stockpot.

I felt so spoiled, poring over ripe melons and dripping strawberries, deciding whether the local kimchi was going to be any good (it wasn’t) and calculating how long it had been since I’d eaten a Chips Ahoy (not long enough). This store offered a motley combination of goods and I could never really keep track of what I could and could not get there. An amazing array of Asian pantry staples: chili crisp and oyster sauce and sesame oil, constantly in supply. A good selection of pasta and canned tomatoes, and they always had fresh basil so I could make a respectable Sunday gravy. But no decent olive oil, and no fresh meat to fatten the sauce.

Which is not to say they didn’t sell meat at all. A freezer on the far inside wall held a shocking amount of frozen squid, and a lidless cooler up front spoke loudly of salted cod in the open air. Canned soup but no bouillon. German Ritter chocolate bars, but the only fresh bread in stock was a Haitian variety I had never seen or heard of before. Entenmann’s donuts and Pringles were orange-tagged from an old-fashioned sticker gun with a spectacular pricetag, but I learned that anything I bought there in cardboard inevitably tasted strongly of the store’s fishy, moldy, viciously vegetal terroir.

This is not one of those New York stories that pines for a deli counter, or the sandwich of my dreams. The Fruit Farm was not a bodega in the strictest sense, and the ladies at the counter held on their secure shelves only the condoms and NyQuil that would save one’s life, not the bacon egg and cheese that could make it worthwhile. This is, instead, more the story of a strange and beautiful grocery store where there was often an onion or a cabbage in the gutter, rolled out of the phalanx of stocked cardboard boxes that formed the front lines. In winter, the men who constantly stocked and restocked from pallets for unknown farm origin bolted together an armor of plexiglass and metal mesh that kept their wares safe from the wind, but the heat emanating from all that compost and rot fogged them up like a fat kid’s glasses. They might as well have been walls of white stone.

The Fruit Farm was there for me at odd times: coming home at two in the morning from a gig in the village and ravenous, I could get ramen and a half-dozen eggs and make myself a bowl of comfort from which to snatch my sobriety. On blooming spring mornings when working from home allowed me the luxury, I’d go and buy fresh raspberries and a pint of cream, whip it all a mason jar and freeze it into a delectable pink treat. On a bad day, I could trudge the miserably short length of sidewalk toward it and find myself a king-size Cadbury fruit and nut bar, or an oversweet bottle of Ting that they’d open at the counter.

By the time I knew I was going to leave Brooklyn, the list of things I would mourn to leave behind was long. I live in a walkable Massachusetts town now, but no subway links it to a nearby island of nightmares and dreamscapes like the Q did. The bells of a different church toll my lauds and vespers, and new strange stores beckon me to explore (shout-out to everyone who tried to tell me about Ocean State Job Lot). But on my last trip to the Fruit Farm, when I was picking up a few Bartlett pears for our final breakfast in the empty apartment before we mopped the golden wood floor and said our goodbye, something darted past my feet on the store’s dingy red clay tile and ran away from the huge ripe pomegranates, toward the salted cod.

Inured to rats, I wasn’t perturbed. But my eye registered a green collar and realized it couldn’t be one of those. Coming around quietly behind, I spotted a black and white kitten, eyes taking up half her face, looking carefully across the cracked floor for her quarry.

I offered her my knuckles and she rubbed her face in, eager for scritches. Behind me, a man was wiping his hands on his apron, covered in the green smears of life and putrescence and smelling like the sweet corn that was just starting to come in.

“Don’t keep her for long,” he said, his voice warm and mocking. “She’s got a job to do.”