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Jack was standing and watching Maggie as she drove off.
    “What about him?”
    “It’s obvious he’s taken a shine to your Maggie.”
    “Has he now?” Ray studied the man. He was tall and broad shouldered with long limbs. His hair was blond hair and it curled up at the nape of the man’s neck - a touch too long in Ray’s opinion. He couldn’t see the man’s face as he had his back to them, but he could tell from the admiring glances other women were giving the man and the way they pushed out their chests and fluffed up their hair that he must be what women considered good looking.
    “It’s been a heck of a long time since Jon left,” Sam went on. “She’s a beautiful girl. It’s not right for her to be on her own.”
    “She’s not on her own. She’s got me and her mother and Willow.”
    “You know that’s not what I meant. A woman like her deserves to be loved.”
    “ Maybe so, but you know she’s not about to start anything. She can’t. Not with the way things are with Willow.”
    “You guys are still pulling that shit? Man that’s crazy. That kid is old enough to know better. You underestimate her. Be straight up, she’ll understand.”
    Ray held up his hands in agreement. “Hey it’s not up to me, it’s her mother’s thing and I’m staying out of it.”
    They watched as Maggie appeared around a corner lugging two suitcases behind her. They could see that her expression was cross even from all the way across the square, and as she passed underneath trees the leaves shuddered and shrivelled away from her wrath.
    Ray sighed and got to his feet, his knees creaking in protest like the branches on the ancient oak above him. “I’d better go help her,” he said. “See you guys tonight.”

Chapter five
     
    With Ray’s help Maggie managed to set her stand up in preparation for the night ahead in record time. There wasn’t a great deal she could do in advance anyway, as she never put the soaps out until just before the market started. In the heat of the day they would start to soften and melt quickly, but once the sun went behind the big oak they would be ok. So it was simply a matter of setting up the tables. Three tables made up her little area, and she arranged them as usual in a U shape, with one in front of her and another on each side. The front table she covered with a pale lemon coloured cotton table cloth, the one on her right in mint green and the one on her left in rose pink. She loved colour, could never stand plain white anything. In fact, when she married Jon twelve years previously she had worn a dress made from dusky orange silk, with matching baby rose buds woven through her hair. It was quite out of the norm and hadn’t been a popular choice with everyone who’d attended, but she and Jon had loved it and at the end of the day that was all that mattered.
    Once the cloths were laid she opened the suitcases containing her stands. Ray carefully peeled off the layers of newspaper and passed them to her to arrange on the tables. She fingered their cool surfaces lovingly as she placed them where she wanted them.
    A few years back she’d grown tired of using wicker baskets to display her soaps in. The baskets gathered dust in the months between markets, and if it wasn’t dust it was dirt from the garden after Dot ‘borrowed’ her baskets to go fruit or flower picking or to collect the eggs from the chickens. Maggie would have to scrub them clean every time she needed to use them, and over time the wicker had started to fray and fall apart and look messy.
    By chance she had ducked into the second-hand shop one day to have a word to Mavis behind the counter about her goat breaking through the fence wires and raiding their vegetable garden again, and while there she had fallen in love on the spot with a vintage blue glass cake stand. It was gorgeous. Straight away she knew she had found a new way to display her soaps. She bought that stand and another one Mavis had, three tiered,