The jar was fig. It was always fig. Margaret had peach, quince, apple butter, and a marmalade with whiskey that sold out by nine, but he bought the fig.
He didn’t eat preserves.
Saturday mornings, seven-forty, third stall from the north end of the market. Margaret set up at six. By the time he arrived she’d already sold four or five jars of the marmalade and was arranging the seconds — the ones where the seal hadn’t popped right, or the label was crooked. She sold those at a dollar off and people bought them feeling like they’d discovered something.
He’d say good morning. She’d say good morning. She’d ask how Linda was. He’d say fine. She’d wrap the jar in a square of newspaper — always the comics, though he suspected she had to save them specifically for this purpose — and he’d pay six dollars cash.
Linda had left in March. Not of this year. Not of last year. Linda had left in March four years ago. She’d taken the car and half the books and a colander he’d inherited from his mother, which he’d never mentioned because mentioning it would have meant the colander mattered more than the marriage, and it didn’t, but he noticed.
Margaret didn’t know. Margaret knew that a man named Gerald came every Saturday and bought one jar of fig preserves and had a wife named Linda who was fine. That was the version of Gerald that existed at the third stall from the north end, and it was the only version of Gerald that had a complete life.
The pantry had forty-one jars. He’d counted last Tuesday, standing in the kitchen with his coffee, looking at them the way you’d look at a calendar of a year that hadn’t happened. Each jar was a Saturday. Each Saturday was fine.
His daughter, when she visited, opened the pantry and said, “Dad.”
He said, “I know.”
She closed the pantry. She didn’t take any.
The next Saturday he bought the fig. Margaret wrapped it in the comics. He paid six dollars. She asked how Linda was. He said fine.
On the way home he held the jar on his lap on the bus and watched the buildings pass and thought about how a jar of preserves weighed almost nothing and how the bus turned left on Calder and right on Ninth and how the stop closest to his apartment was the one just past the dry cleaner’s, and how none of this would be different whether Linda was fine or not, and how the fig was good — it really was good, he’d tried it once — and how the comics on the wrapping paper were from three Sundays ago, and how Margaret saved them, which meant Margaret expected him, which meant he existed on Margaret’s calendar too, one square per week, a small penciled-in mark: Gerald. Fig.
He got off at the stop past the dry cleaner’s. He carried the jar upstairs. He put it in the pantry.
Forty-two.