The Neighbor Who Took My Harvest

I found out where they went four days later.

My friend Loretta called me on a Saturday morning. Loretta has run a booth at the farmers market on the courthouse square for as long as there has been a market, jams and jellies and her sweet pickles, and she calls me most Saturdays just to talk while she sits under her canopy. This time her voice was funny.

“Glenda,” she said. “You did not send your tomatoes down here with Tammy Vaughn, did you.”

I said what.

“Because Tammy’s got a booth. First time I ever seen her at this market in my life. And she has got a table full of the prettiest pink tomatoes I have seen since Gene passed, and a hand-lettered sign, and she is telling everybody she grew them, and honey, I have been buying Gene’s tomatoes off this square for twenty years. I know what I am looking at.”

I sat down at my kitchen table and I held the phone and I did not say anything for so long that Loretta said my name three times.

“What does the sign say,” I finally asked her.

Loretta got quiet. Then she said, “It says Heirloom Tomatoes, three dollars. And under that, in littler letters, it says Glenda’s Girl.”

She had kept the name. That is the part that undid me. It was not enough to take them. She had stood at her kitchen table with a marker and written my name on a sign so she could sell my dead husband’s life’s work by the pound on the town square, and she did not even know that Glenda was me. To her it was just a cute name that came with the tomatoes, a little detail that made them sell.

I could have driven down there and screamed. Believe me, I wanted to. I could see myself doing it, could see myself flipping that table over in front of God and the courthouse and everybody. But I sat at my table and I thought about what would happen if I did. Tammy would cry. Tammy was good at crying. She would tell everyone that poor Glenda Prewitt had lost her husband and then lost her mind, that she came down to the market and made a scene and screamed at a hardworking mother of two over some tomatoes, and half the square would cluck their tongues and feel sorry for her and go right on buying. She had already planted that seed with me. Grief is making you hysterical. Everybody can see you cannot keep up your yard. She had been telling this town a story about me for a week, quietly, over her fence and at the gas station and in the school pickup line, and if I came in hot and loud I would just be finishing the story for her.