Page 11

"That's the point."

The camera's in my lap. The wind picks up, pushing my curls across my face. Before I can brush them back, his hand lifts. Then stops. Drops back to his thigh. He caught himself. Whatever impulse made him reach for my hair, he shut it down in half a second.

My skin buzzes anyway.

"Why'd you stay?" I ask. "After your parents left."

"Because it's mine."

"The farm?"

"The land. The work. The way it looks at five in the morning when the fog's sitting on the lower pasture." Something in his voice shifts. Gets quieter. Not softer, exactly. Just deeper. "My grandfather cleared this acreage. My dad built the barn. My mom planted the apple trees the year I was born. Walking away from that would be walking away from everything I understand about myself."

Nobody talks about land like that anymore. Nobody talks about anything with that kind of weight. The men I've met in Portland, in Boise, in every city between here and Oakland, they talk about careers and apartments and weekend plans. Not soil. Not roots that go back three generations.

"That's beautiful," I say.

"It's practical."

"It's both."

His jaw tightens. He's uncomfortable. Not with me, exactly. With the fact that he just said something real and I heard it.

"Your turn," he says. "Why do you travel?"

"Because I haven't found a reason to stop."

"That's a non-answer."

Fair. I pull one knee up on the tailgate, turning to face him. "My mom raised three kids in a two-bedroom apartment in Oakland. She cooked food that could make you cry. Pelau, callaloo, doubles from scratch on Sundays. Our neighbors would come over, and she'd feed everyone. Didn't matter if we had enough. She always made enough."

"Sounds like a good woman."

"She's the best woman. But she never left. Never traveled, never saw the places she cooked from. Trinidad, Tobago, Jamaica. She learned everything from her mother and her grandmother, all passed down through recipes and stories, never from actually being there."

Deck's watching me now. Full attention, no glancing away.

"So you travel for her."

"I travel because she couldn't. Every market, every farm, every kitchen I walk into, I'm collecting what she never got to collect."

The wind dies. The cottonwoods go still. Somewhere on the property, the goat bleats at whatever grievance it's carrying today.

"You're close," he says. Not a question.

"She's my favorite person."

"Mine too." He pauses. "My mom, I mean. Not your mom."

Something cracks open in my chest. Not because the joke is funny, though it is. Because he made one. This grumpy, closed-off, flannel-stripped farmer with the scar on his chin and the guarded eyes just cracked a joke at his own expense. On purpose.

I laugh. Full, real, the sound carrying across the empty patch.

He watches me laugh. His expression doesn't change, not really, but there's warmth behind his eyes now. Reluctant warmth. The warmth of a man who opened a door an inch and is already regretting it.

"Come on," he says, sliding off the tailgate. "I'll show you the orchard. Better light for your pictures."

The orchard runs along the eastern fence line. Apple trees planted in rows, old enough that their branches twist into each other. The fruit is going deep red, some of it still clinging, most of it in crates at the base of each tree. He picks while I shoot. Quick, efficient hands finding the ripe ones by touch.