The Tomato Line My Daughter Needed

Foy thought I had lost my mind. He told me so about the third winter, leaning in the back greenhouse door with a seed flat balanced on one hip. “Sib, you are heating a building for one plant. Just call her. Or let it freeze and buy seed off the rack at the feed store like every other living soul.”

I said, “That’s my business, Foy.”

He said, “I’m only saying you’re paying for something you could just call and ask her about.”

I said, “Foy Ballentine, if you say her name to me in this greenhouse again, you can take your okra and sell it somewhere else.”

He did not say her name again. He did not stop coming, either. He came every Saturday for nine years with a thermos and a flat of whatever he had started, and I let a good man carry my silence the way Thaddeus used to carry the weather.

The cost of those years is hard to put in numbers, but I will try. I ate nine Thanksgivings at a table for one, or at the Hatchett house, where Imogene would set me a place and talk over the quiet.

I did not know my daughter was married until a woman at the feed store mentioned it three years after the fact. I did not know I had a grandson until this past March, and I will come to how I found out.

I got old in those years. Customers said I had gotten sharper, and they were being polite. I had gotten smaller. That is what happens when there is one door in the house you will not walk through.

Now to the Tuesday.

It was the second week of March. It had rained since Sunday, a cold slow rain, and it cleared that Tuesday morning to a hard bright sky.

I was in the front greenhouse flipping seedling trays under the vent fans when a gray car turned up the wet gravel and stopped by the porch.

A woman in a green rain jacket got out and looked around the way people do when they are not sure they are in the right place.

She was about forty, small, with a gray streak in her dark hair, and she carried an umbrella she did not open. She came to the greenhouse door and said, “Mrs. Orcutt? I’m sorry to come without calling. My name is Petra Voelker.”

I said, “If you are selling something, I have a sign.”

She laughed, a short surprised laugh. “No, ma’am. I’m a plant pathologist. I teach at the university in Raleigh. I came to ask you a favor, and I’m going to say it badly, so I may as well say it fast. I need to know whether you still have the Orcutt Pink.”

Everything in me went tight. I said, “Who sent you?”

She said, “Nobody sent me. I want to be clear about that. I came on my own.”

I said, “Then you came a long way for a tomato.”

“Yes, ma’am,” she said. “I did.”

Here is the second thing I am ashamed of from that day. I knew, the minute she said “university in Raleigh,” exactly who she was connected to. And what I felt was not hope.

It was a hot, quick flash of the old pride. I thought, so now somebody from her world drives up my road to take what is mine.

I said, “I don’t give out seed to strangers. The line is not for sale.”