Plot Twelve
Episode 1 of 3 of The Tomatoes Were His by Ada Rowe
“That one’s mine,” he said.
My hand was already around it. The tomato hung off a vine that came out of the dirt on his side of the chain link, pushed through a gap at knee height, and dangled a good foot into my plot. It was the size of a softball. The color of a clay pot left out all summer.
“It’s hanging in twelve,” I said. “I’m not trying to start anything on a Tuesday, but the part of this plant I am currently holding is in the plot I paid thirty dollars for in April.”
“Roots are in eleven.”
“So?”
“So it’s my plant.”
He was somewhere past forty, in a gray work shirt with LASKO stitched over the pocket, carrying a five gallon bucket in one hand like he had been born holding it. I let go. The fence rattled and the whole vine shook, and two green ones knocked together down by his boots.
The Fairlawn garden sits behind the old middle school here in Bellamy, twenty-two plots in two rows, and the dividers are chain link the district pulled off the tennis courts in 1998. Four feet high. High enough to be a rule. Low enough to be a suggestion.
“I water that side,” I said. “Every other day since the middle of May, because you are never here on Tuesdays.”
“Thursdays.”
“What?”
“I’m not here Thursdays,” he said. “Tuesdays I come at six.”
“Six in the morning?”
He nodded and went back to watering his peppers, which I understood to mean the conversation was finished. It was not finished.
I got my stakes out of the wagon and started down the bean row, driving them in with the flat of my hand, harder than the ground called for. My aunt Ruth held plot twelve for nineteen years. She died in February and left me the house on Quill Street, a chest freezer with eleven bags of peaches in it, forty-one dollars in a coffee can, and a garden plot I had no idea how to keep. I had been in town five months. I could name six people. Two of them were her doctors.
“You’re new,” he said.
“I’m aware.”
“Not a criticism.”
“It arrived like one.”
He worked his way down the fence with the hose, and the water ran off his mulch and came under the chain link into my row the way it did every evening, which I had already decided I was never going to mention. He had eleven. I had twelve. Hanging between us in the wire, four inches off my soil, was better than a pound of fruit that belonged to one of us.
“I’ll give you six dollars for it,” he said.
“For a tomato.”
“For that tomato.”
“You cannot buy a thing off me that you keep saying is already yours,” I said. “That is not an offer. That is a bribe with bad paperwork.”
The corner of his mouth moved. He put it away fast.
Over in nine, Carl Pinsky had stopped weeding to listen with his whole body. Carl is seventy-one and wears a headlamp after seven o’clock. He had been leaning on the same hoe for four minutes.
“Cut it in half,” I said. “You take the top. I’ll take the bottom.”
“You don’t cut one like that.”
“Why not?”
“Because then you’ve got half a tomato,” he said.
The field lights came on over the softball diamond and the gnats found the two of us at the same moment. He kept watering. I kept staking. Neither of us left, which I noticed and did not examine.
“Look,” I said. “I came down here tonight to stand in my aunt’s dirt and feel something decent about the fact that she is gone and I am here and her raspberries are still coming in. That was the plan for the evening. Instead I am negotiating.”
“You started it.”
“I picked a tomato that was in my plot.”
“You reached,” he said.
“I reached six inches.”
“Six inches into eleven.”
I straightened up and looked at him properly for the first time. He had a ring of dirt worked into the skin at both wrists and a key blank in his shirt pocket, and he was watering my side of the fence on purpose, and had been, probably, all summer.
“Fine,” I said. “Then tell me what it is. If I am losing the biggest tomato I have ever seen in my life, I would like to know the name of what I am losing.”
“Aggies.”
Something in my chest went sideways. There is a jar in Ruth’s pantry, third shelf, masking tape across the lid, and the tape says AGGIES 61 in her small square capitals. I have moved that jar twice to get at the flour.
“My aunt grew these,” I said. “The seed is in her kitchen with the year written on it.”
He set the bucket down in the dirt.
“Ruth gave me that seed herself.”