The Tomato Line My Daughter Needed

“Nine Decembers,” she said.

“Nine Decembers.”

“Mama, you ate them alone.”

I said, “I ate them at your place. It was the only way I knew to set your place.”

We sat on two overturned buckets in the lab greenhouse until after midnight.

She told me about her work, in words I could follow because she knew how to say it to somebody who grew things.

She had crossed her father’s tomato to a resistant wild line, and then backcrossed, and backcrossed, keeping each year only the seedlings that held the resistance and tasted most like home, until she had plants that stood green in a field that was dying all around them.

She needed the pure old parent for the last five percent of the flavor, the sweetness with the lemon edge. And I had been holding it in a cough drop tin and a row of envelopes for nine years.

She told me about Osmo, and that they had been married six years. And then she looked at me and said, carefully, “Mama, there’s one more thing. Don’t be angry.”

I said, “I’m all out of angry.”

She said, “You have a grandson.”

I put both hands flat on my knees. I said, “How old?”

“Four,” she said. “In January. His name is Theo. Theodore Thaddeus.”

I had not cried that much since the funeral, and I did it right there on the bucket. She held my hand. I said, “I would like to be introduced.”

She said, “Can we come Saturday?”

I said, “Camila, you can come right now. The lights are always on.”

They came Saturday. I will not tell you everything about that day. I will tell you that a little boy in rubber boots got out of a car and stood in my gravel driveway and looked at me for a long moment with his grandfather’s exact serious eyes.

I got down on my bad hip on the gravel and said, “Hello, Theo. I am your grandmother. I have some tomato plants I would like to show you.” And he took my hand without a word and walked me into the greenhouse, and showed me, in great detail, which plant was his favorite.

We did not fix nine years in an afternoon. We are two stubborn women, and some mornings she still goes quiet and I still go sharp. But we have a rule now, she and I, that when one of us goes cold, the other says, “Knock,” and we start over.

She came every weekend that spring with her stock and her forceps, and Foy and Osmo put up a plastic hoop house on the back lot, on the old half acre where Thaddeus’s rows had been.

We planted it in May. Her crosses on one side, and the pure Orcutt Pink from my envelopes on the other, so she could finish the last backcross with the real thing in her hands.

Foy came every Saturday with his thermos and set out a row of his own okra at the end, because he said he was not going to be left out of this one.

She asked me to keep one envelope back. I had meant to. She chose the one from the first December and wrote on it, in her careful hand, the one thing I had never put on any of them. Kept warm for Camila. I put it in the cough drop tin in Thaddeus’s drawer, where it lives.

The blight came in the third week of July.