The Tomato Line My Daughter Needed

Camila looked at me for a while. I have thought about that look for nine years. It was not anger. Anger I could have worked with. It was the look of someone setting down something she had carried a long way and had just been told was not wanted.

She rinsed the cup, turned it upside down on the drainer, and dried her hands on her jeans.

She did not say a word. She went upstairs and packed in about forty minutes, and she left the next morning before I came down. I stood at the window and watched her taillights go down Dobbins Mill Road.

She sent a card at Christmas the first year. I did not answer it. She sent an announcement the second spring, heavy cream paper, about some award, and I put it in the drawer under the register and did not call. A card the third Christmas. Then nothing. I told myself that she was the one who stayed gone.

That is the part I have to be honest about. I never once picked up the phone. Nine years. I had her number memorized and I could not make my thumb do it, because to call her I would have had to say I was wrong, and in my family you could be wrong for thirty years before you said it out loud.

Here is the other thing I did. I have never told anybody why I did it, not my pastor, and not Foy, though he saw enough of it to wonder.

The August after she left, with her birthday four months off, I went out to the back greenhouse, the oldest one, the one Thaddeus built from the schoolhouse windows. In the bottom drawer of his potting bench, in a little cough drop tin, was a pinch of seed.

Camila’s tomato, the Orcutt Pink as she and her father had refined it, from the last good year before the blight. It was all I had that was both of theirs.

I did not decide to do anything with it. I planted one seed in a four-inch pot, set it by the propane heater at the end of the bench, and turned on the grow light. Sixty-one days later I had a plant in bloom. Fifty-some days after that I had a tomato.

I want you to understand how foolish this is, in money. The nursery goes dormant from November until February, and a greenhouse in the foothills sits empty unless you heat it.

I kept that back greenhouse at sixty degrees all winter, for one plant. The propane ran three hundred and some dollars a month. I never told Foy what it cost, but he saw the truck.

The first December, the tomato came ripe on the seventeenth. I let it go two more days on the vine. On the nineteenth, I cut it, carried it up to the house, set it on the kitchen table in a saucer, and sat across from it.

Camila’s chair. I ate it by myself with a little salt, and it tasted like her father’s field, and I cried so hard I had to put my fork down.

Then I saved the seed. That was the rule I made, and I never broke it: one plant a year, one tomato by the nineteenth of December, one year’s seed, dried on a paper towel on the windowsill and folded into an envelope with the year on it.

Nine Decembers. Nine envelopes. So that if she ever came home and said, Mama, do you still have it, I could say yes. Not “I think so.” Yes.