Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
The variety development section was not on the ranch tour.
It wasn't on the tour because it wasn't finished, which was the simplest reason, and because what was in progress there didn't benefit from observation, which was the more honest one.
Finn told himself he was showing Ivy the greenhouse because the competition dish required it.
She needed to understand the range of what was available to them.
The tasting section was directly relevant to the recipe development. This was the practical logic.
He told himself this for most of the walk from the barn to the north side, and it held up reasonably well until he opened the greenhouse door and watched her face when the air changed.
She didn't say anything. She stepped in and turned slowly, looking at the length of it — the trial rows, the integrated irrigation, the labeled stakes marching down the center aisle — with the attention she had when she forgot the camera was running.
He'd been cataloguing this expression for days without meaning to.
This was the version of her that he found most difficult to look away from.
"How many?" she asked.
"Current trials: thirty-one varieties. Seven in active development."
She moved to the first row and crouched at the nearest stake, reading it.
He watched her take in his notation system — the variety name, the year, the generation code — without asking for an explanation, just reading it until it made sense, which took about twenty seconds. He found this unreasonably satisfying.
"Walk me through them," she said. "I want to taste as we go."
"Some aren't ready."
"I'll tell you which ones I think are ready. You tell me if I'm wrong."
He almost said: that's not how it works. Instead, he said: "Start at the far end. Work toward the door."
They went through twelve. He pulled samples where he judged the fruit ready, and she tasted each one in sequence, standing over the soil trough, no ceremony, the way you'd taste something in a professional kitchen: present, focused, reporting back.
She was wrong on three counts.
On the first miss she said the acidity was integrated, when it was still slightly fractured; close, but the distinction mattered, and he told her so. She tasted it again and said, "Oh, yes, I hear it now," which was not how most people described flavor but was accurate.
On the second miss, she called a Brandywine selection under-complex when it was mid-development, and the complexity was there but latent, not yet expressed. She looked at him for a moment and then at the plant and then said: "I want to come back to this in three weeks."
Finn did not admit —especially to himself— that he was anticipating her next visit.
On the third miss she tasted a Green Zebra selection as higher-acid than it was, which was a common misread because of the color. He told her. She said: "I was reading the skin. The flesh is different."
Nine out of twelve. He'd tasted the same twelve and would have gotten twelve. But he'd been doing this for three years, and the three she'd missed she'd missed informatively, not carelessly.
"Try this," he said.
She did as she was told. She took the offering and bit into it.
The sound she made was not performed. That was the thing — he'd become somewhat of an expert, in the last several days, at distinguishing Ivy's performed responses from her real ones, and this was entirely real: a brief, involuntary sound of something being exactly what it should be, followed by her going quiet in a way that meant she was tasting rather than thinking, and then her eyes came up to his.
"Finn," she said. "This is the dish."
He did not disagree.
"Whatever we build — this is the center of it. Everything else is just the frame." She looked at the tomato in her hand. "You've been working on this for three years?"
He nodded.
"It's extraordinary." She said it the way she'd said things in the From Scratch series, without ego, just looking at the thing and reporting. "You know that."
He did know that. He also knew that he'd given her the first ripe fruit from the vine he'd been checking since August, and she'd eaten it over his planting trough and called it extraordinary, and the word had landed differently than he'd expected.
"I want to get some content," Ivy said. She was already reaching into her bag. "For the vlog. While we're in here."
"Fine," he said.
She had the phone on its small tripod in under a minute, angled to catch both of them against the backdrop of the trial row. She shook her hair out, checked the frame, and looked at him.
"Just talk normally," she said. "Pretend it's not there."
He looked at the phone. "It's there."
"Finn."
"I'm aware that it's there."
She pressed record anyway.
"Hey everyone," she said, and the voice shifted — half an octave up — "so I am here at The Purple Heart Ranch Farm in the most incredible greenhouse with Finn, who grows literally the best tomatoes I have ever tasted.
" She glanced at him. He was standing with his arms crossed, looking directly into the camera as if it had done something to him personally. "Finn, say hi."
"Hi," he said. To the camera. Like a man reading from a card.
Ivy smiled the smile of someone recalibrating. "Finn is going to tell us about these varieties." She gestured at the trial row. "In his own words. Finn."
He looked at the plants. Looked at the phone. "They're tomatoes."
"Great. Really great. Very illuminating." She looked back at him with an expression of professional patience that was doing very little to hide the fact that she found this funny.
He tried again. "We're developing new varieties for climate adaptation. The idea is to —" He stopped, searched for the words. "There are existing heirlooms that were developed for specific regional conditions, and the goal is to—" He stopped again.
This was not how he talked about this. He talked about this every day, to Boyd, to himself at five in the morning in the fields, and it did not sound like this. It sounded like something he knew. This sounded like a presentation.
The camera was still running.
"You know what's interesting," Ivy said, leaning against the potting bench with her arms crossed, head tilted, wearing the expression of someone about to say something they'd prepared, "these are very small. For tomatoes that are supposedly so special."
Finn looked at the trial pots. "They're not at full—"
"I've seen bigger tomatoes," she said, examining her nails. "At the grocery store, actually. Much bigger. Very red."
"Those are commercially grown for size and shelf stability; they have the flavor profile of wet cardboard, and comparing them to an heirloom trial variety is like comparing a photograph of a meal to an actual…"
Ivy was looking at him with her chin down and her eyes up, and a smile she was working very hard to keep contained.
He narrowed his eyes.
She smiled wider. Completely unrepentant.
"You did that on purpose," he said.
"I have no idea what you're talking about. Tell me more about the wet cardboard."
And somehow — he hadn't planned it, couldn't have accounted for it — he laughed. Short, genuine, surprised out of him.
She was close, and she was looking at him with something that wasn't the audience expression and wasn't the professional expression, and wasn't any expression he'd catalogued yet.
Finn looked at her mouth. It was a very brief look. The kind that happened before the conscious mind had a chance to weigh in on whether it was a good idea.
Her breath caught. Audible in the quiet of the greenhouse, under the soft sound of the irrigation system and the green-warm smell of growing things. Her tongue touched her lower lip — quick, unconscious — and she turned away. Her hand, reaching for the phone, was not entirely steady.
"So that's the trial row, everyone, and if you want to know more about why your grocery store tomatoes taste like disappointment, Finn is apparently very available to discuss that.
" She angled the phone toward him one more time.
He was still watching her when he caught sight of himself on her phone screen.
"We'll see you next time. Bye."
She stopped the recording. The greenhouse was very quiet.
"Good," she said to the phone. "That was good."
"Mm," Finn said.
That was all he said as he walked her back to her truck. He said nothing else as he helped her into the truck, and she turned the ignition over. He said nothing as he watched her drive away. Forty minutes later, he checked her social media profile.
The video had passed a million views. New comments were popping up every few seconds. Apparently, other people had a lot to say.