Tab

tab
verb, transitive. To mark or identify with a projecting piece of material. To identify as being of a specified type or suitable for a specified position.

The market was not too crowded this late in the morning. Most customers arrived soon after the gates were unlocked, stocked up, and left with plenty of time to get home and prepare a big Saturday-noontime spread with some of their purchases. Phoebe was pretty sure that the only ones still shopping were single people like herself, who slept late and had no one at home waiting for them.

She approached a stand whose vendor she had never seen before: an elderly woman, wizened and white-haired, who possessed that rapidly-moving, nervous quality some people display all their lives and never lose, not even with age. As she worked on her stock, she reminded Phoebe of a wren.

The woman was selling plants in four-inch pots. They were larger than seedlings, but still quite young--just big enough to be transplanted. Phoebe wondered what they were. None were blooming. Each pot was tabbed with a yellow Post-it, so she moved closer in order to read them. The labels each bore a price, below an incomprehensible name. Was it in Latin? Phoebe picked up one pot to study the plant’s form.

“He’s never going to ask you to move in with him, much less marry him. You might as well move on.”

Phoebe nearly dropped the plant, she was so surprised. She glanced from side to side, but the old woman was the only person within earshot. Phoebe squinted at her. Did she know this woman? Was she a heretofore-unknown neighbor who was in a position to have observed Phoebe’s wrangling and desperate ploys with Don?

No, she was certain she had never seen the woman before in her life, so what had prompted that statement? The woman’s face was impassive, cool. Her eyes were on her own hands as she fashioned something out of twigs, or handled a group of twigs. Phoebe wasn’t sure. She appeared to take a handful of dark-green stems and drop them on the stained wooden board before her, then bend slightly and gaze at the patterns they made when they fell. Phoebe began to feel breathless, almost dizzy. Then she began to doubt whether the woman had even spoken. What if the words had issued from her own mind? What did that mean? How could she be sure?

There was only one way to find out. “Why did you say that?” Phoebe addressed the vendor.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.