By midday the creek behind Blush Rosewood's flower stand had gone quiet. She noticed it first at the herb beds, where the soil pulled away from the roots of her chamomile and echinacea in the oak half-barrel. She pressed a finger into the dirt. Dry to the second knuckle. The pink water wheel that fed her irrigation channels was barely turning, one paddle slapping the shallow water like a lame hand. Without it, her herbs would wilt by supper, and the cows and chickens would be licking empty troughs by dark. Blush had spent two years turning this patch of land into a working homestead. She was not going to lose it to a stuck wheel. She walked the channel to the source. A snarl of branches and mud had jammed the upper blades, and one wooden paddle had split clean down the grain. Water pooled behind the debris and spilled sideways into the grass, going nowhere useful. Her long planter of basil and lavender sat on the low wall beside the wheel, leaves already curling. She counted the cost in her head. Two herb beds. Six laying hens. Three cows. A daughter who liked cold water in her cup at lunch. Blush walked back to the barn and found Bear tightening a hinge on the coop door. "The wheel's split a paddle," she said. "Beds are drying. I need your hands." Bear wiped his palms on his jeans and nodded once. "Grab the pink box. I'll cut a new slat from the fence scrap." He didn't ask more. That was the thing about her farmer. He heard the problem and moved. She fetched the pink toolbox from the shed. Bear met her at the wheel with a fresh oak board and his saw. He waded in first, boots sinking, and cleared the jam by hand, hauling out a mat of branches and one bloated clump of reeds. Blush knelt on the stones and unscrewed the broken paddle while he steadied the axle. Her fingers went numb in the cold water. She kept working. Bear shaped the new slat against the old one, three quick strokes with the plane, and passed it to her. She fit it into the slot. He drove the screws. The wheel shuddered, caught the current, and began to turn. Water climbed the blades and poured down the channel toward the herb beds. Blush watched the first dark line of wet soak into the planter dirt. The chamomile lifted within a minute. She let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding. Bear stood dripping beside her, grinning under his beard. "Good as new," he said. Then he pointed downstream. The channel ran full past the herbs, past the cow trough, and kept going. Water was cutting a new path through the low ground below the coop, pooling fast against the chicken run's back wall. Blush closed the toolbox. The wheel was fixed. Now the flood was hers to solve.

The flood took Blush an hour to tame. She dug a spur channel with Bear's spade and sent the extra water into the low pasture, where the cows would drink it down by evening. By the time she washed the mud off her boots, the sun sat high and the herb beds were drinking steady. Blush stood at the edge of her garden and looked at what she had. Rows of yarrow in creamy bloom. A round cluster of marjoram, bright green and silver. St. John's Wort with butterflies working the yellow petals. Red clover thick along the fence. More than her small family could use. More than she could dry before it spoiled. She had thought about a stand for months. Teas for sleep. Salves for scrapes. Tinctures for the winter cough that ran through town every February. Today the thought sat down and would not leave. If she waited another season, half this harvest would rot in the shed. She walked to the barn and told Bear. He was oiling the hinge he had abandoned that morning. "I want to sell what I grow," she said. "Teas. Dried bundles. Small bottles. Out by the road, where people can stop." Bear set the can down. "You have the plants for it." "I need a stand," she said. "Something that keeps the sun off the bottles." He nodded toward the back of the barn. "There's the pink cabinet your aunt left. Shelves already built in. Roof over the top." Blush had forgotten the cabinet. She pulled the tarp off and found it dusty but sound. Pale pink boards. A shingled hood. Three shelves inside and two low cupboards below. She wiped it down with a wet rag while Bear hauled it out on the flatbed and set it near the front gate, where the road bent close. She worked through the afternoon. She cut yarrow and hung it in bundles from the top shelf. She stripped marjoram leaves into a bowl and filled small jars. She poured dried clover into paper sachets and labeled each one in pencil. She set a white planter of mixed cuttings on the ground beside the stand so people could see the plants alive before they bought them dried. She wrote prices on a slate. Tea, three dollars. Salve, five. Bundles, two. A woman in a dusty sedan slowed at the gate before Blush had finished stocking. She rolled down her window and asked if the yarrow was for sale. Blush handed her a bundle and took four dollars. The woman drove off with the stems on her passenger seat. Blush stood at the stand with the bills folded in her palm and counted them twice. By sundown she had sold nine bundles, three jars of marjoram, and every sachet of clover. The shelves were nearly bare. She would need to harvest again tomorrow, and the day after, and she would need more jars than she owned.

Word of the sold-out stand traveled fast, but not only to people. Blush walked out at dawn to cut a fresh round of bundles and stopped short at the edge of her beds. Hoof prints pocked the soft dirt. The sage was chewed to stubs. Half the plantain stalks lay bent and stripped of their brown-tipped heads. The yellow flower spikes she counted on for tea were snapped clean. She knelt and pressed her hand flat to a print. Small. A young one, and not alone. She followed the tracks to the far corner of the garden. A young doe stood there, head low, nosing the last of her marjoram. The deer looked up, ears twitching, and did not run. It chewed once, slow, then stepped back into the tall grass beyond the fence line. Blush counted the damage in her head. Three days of harvest, maybe four. If the herd came back tonight, the stand would sit empty by the weekend. She found Bear at the barn, filling a bucket. "Deer got into the beds," she said. "They'll be back at dusk. I need a fence. A real one. Tall enough they won't jump." Bear set the bucket down. "How tall?" "Six feet. All the way around the herb rows." He wiped his hands on his jeans. "I've got cedar posts behind the barn. Wire in the loft. We can start after breakfast." They worked through the morning. Bear dug the post holes and Blush held each cedar upright while he tamped the dirt. The sun climbed. Sweat ran down her back. By noon they had the corners set and the long side strung with wire. Kitten brought them water in a jar and stayed to hand her mother staples from a tin. By late afternoon the wire ran the full perimeter. Bear hung a pale pink iron gate at the front, a piece Blush had kept in the shed for a year without a place to put it. Climbing roses already twined up one side. Bear tested the latch twice. "That'll hold," he said. "Unless one gets over the top." "Six feet," Blush said. "They won't try." She waited at the kitchen window after supper. The light went blue, then gray. Around nine, three shapes moved along the tree line. The young doe stepped out first. It walked to the wire, lifted its nose, and pressed against the fence. The wire held. It circled once, tried the far corner, then turned and led the others back into the trees. Blush let out the breath she had been holding. The beds were safe for tonight. But she had seen the deer test the corner, and she had seen how thin the wire looked against a full-grown buck. Tomorrow she would need to think about what else the herd might try, and what the rest of the garden still had no fence to guard.