The Neighbor Who Took My Harvest

Tammy gave him the bright voice. “Grew them myself. Family heirloom. My grandmother started the line.”

Merle set the tomato down very slowly.

“No,” he said. “You did not. This is Gene Prewitt’s tomato. I watched that man breed this tomato over eight years. I judged it at the fair. There is not another tomato that comes to a point just exactly like that in the state of Missouri, because Gene made it, and Gene is not two weeks in the ground.” His voice was carrying now. A couple of people at the next booth turned. “You want to tell me again where you got these.”

Tammy’s smile did not fall, but it changed. It got fixed, the way a smile does when the person behind it is scrambling.

“I do not know what you are talking about,” she said. “These are mine. My grandmother started the line.”

And that was when it happened. That was the moment I had come down there to be present for, and it came out sideways, from a place none of us could have planned.

Little Cody, on the grass with his dump truck, heard his mama getting talked to sharp by an old man, and he stood up to see what was wrong, the way little kids do. And he looked at the crates on the table, and his whole face lit up, because he recognized them, and he said the thing that a seven-year-old says when he sees something he knows.

He said, loud, happy, wanting to help: “Those are the tomatoes from the lady’s yard. From the mean nighttime when we filled up the truck. Daddy said do not tell but we already sold most of them so it is okay now, right?”

The square went quiet the way a room goes quiet. Not all at once. In a wave. The people close by heard it and stopped, and then the people behind them saw the people in front of them stop, and it rolled outward across the square until even the kettle corn man had turned around.

Rick came up out of his lawn chair. “Cody,” he said, sharp, “get over here.” And that was the wrong thing to do, because now every single person watching understood that the daddy did not want the boy to tell, which is the only thing you need to understand.

I stood up out of Loretta’s chair.

I did not have to say much. That was the mercy of it, and the justice of it too. I just walked down the north row, an old woman in her dead husband’s canvas jacket, holding Gene’s spiral notebook against my chest, and I stopped in front of Tammy’s table where everybody could see, and I did not scream. I had promised myself I would not scream.

“Tammy,” I said, and my voice came out level, which surprised me. “Do you know why they are called Glenda’s Girl?”