The Tomato Line My Daughter Needed

Nine years I had thought of myself as the one who was left, the wronged party keeping a lonely vigil, and the whole time my daughter had been on her knees in a lab doing the thing I had told her was worth nothing, for the man we had both loved, and I had stood in my kitchen and called it vanity.

I sat down hard on an upturned bucket and stared at the floor drain. I am not a woman who does that in front of a customer. I did it in front of a customer and a neighbor, and neither of them looked away.

When I could, I said, “The flood.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Everything she had of the original.”

“All of it,” Dr. Voelker said. “She doesn’t know I’m here. When it happened, she didn’t say a word for two days.”

“And then she said, ‘It’s all right. I’ll rebuild it from the crosses.’ And I said that you can’t, not the last backcross, not without the pure parent. And she said, ‘Then I’ll have to ask my mother.’ And then she laughed, not a nice laugh, and said, ‘That’s not a door I can knock on.'”

I said, “She thinks I would turn her away.”

“Mrs. Orcutt,” said Dr. Voelker gently, “I think she’s afraid you would be right to.”

I stood up from that bucket. My knees did not want to, and I did it anyway. I said, “Foy, I need you to mind the greenhouses tomorrow. All three. And the heater in the back house. You keep it at sixty.”

He said, “Sib, I’ve kept it at sixty every time you were off this place for nine years. I wasn’t going to tell you.”

I looked at him. I had not known that. I had assumed the thermostat was good.

I said, “Thank you.”

He said, “Go on.”

I went into the back greenhouse and opened the bottom drawer of Thaddeus’s bench, and I took out nine envelopes in my own handwriting and put them in a quart mason jar with the lid on tight.

I took the plant too, the one from last December, in its black pot, with the small blushing fruit still hanging on it. I wrapped the pot in a towel and set it on the passenger seat of the nursery truck and belted it in, which Dr. Voelker watched me do without a word.

She said, “You don’t have to drive up there tonight. I can call her.”

I said, “No. I have had nine years of phone. I’m going to drive.”

It is three hours and forty minutes from Vesper Glen to Raleigh if the interstate cooperates, and I made it in four. I had not driven that far since Thaddeus’s funeral.

I stopped once, at a gas station near Greensboro, and said out loud, to the empty cab, the thing I was going to say. I said it eleven times. It did not sound any better the eleventh time than the first.

Dr. Voelker had given me the address of the greenhouse behind the plant science building. She had also, I found out later, called Camila’s husband, a quiet man named Osmo, and told him only that Camila should be at the lab that night.

So when I pushed open the glass door at a quarter past nine, with a mason jar of seed under one arm and a tomato plant in the other, my daughter was standing at a bench under the work lights with her back to me, in a gray sweatshirt, with a pair of forceps in her hand.