2. Rourke
two
Rourke
The city girl is back before I've finished my second morning coffee.
Her boots are already muddy from cutting across the field instead of taking the gravel. Notebook already out, like she's been up since five running through questions she didn't get to yesterday.
"You said you'd walk me through a full day."
"Didn't say that."
"You implied it."
I didn't. But I hand her a bag anyway, because arguing with a woman who's already decided how her morning's going to go costs more energy than I've got to spend before eight a.m., and because some part of me wants to see if she'll actually use it or just carry it around for a photo she never takes.
She's bad at it at first. Grips too hard, bruises the skin under her thumb, the mistake every green hand makes on day one.
By the third row she's fixed it without me saying a word — watching how I hold the fruit, matching it without being told twice.
I notice that. You can tell more about a person from how they work a row than from an hour of talking at them, and what it tells me about her is that she doesn't like being bad at something and doesn't quit until she isn't.
"McIntosh first." Mostly to herself, checking the tree against her own memory. "Because it won't hold."
"Right. You remembered that."
"I remember everything you tell me." Plain. Not flirting. Fact, the way she says most things. I keep picking so I don't have to think about how I sort of wish she was flirting.
I’ve had reporters over the years. Polite, gone within the hour, notebooks already full of what they'd decided to write before they showed up. None of them could've named a varietal with a gun to their head.
We work most of the morning without much talking, which suits me fine.
Every so often she asks something that isn't for the piece at all — how long before a graft actually bears fruit, what happens to the ones that don't take, whether I've thought about grafting onto old rootstock instead of pulling a tree and starting from nothing.
Good questions. The kind that means she's looking at what's actually in front of her instead of what she came here to write, which is rarer than you'd think in someone carrying a recorder.
Around noon, I find her stopped again. Head back, staring at the canopy the way she was yesterday afternoon.
Doesn't matter that we're an hour into the pick and the crew's two rows ahead waiting on her hands to catch up.
She just stands there, apple forgotten in her palm, looking up like the trees are doing something worth watching, something that hasn't gotten old in the twenty-some years I've been climbing ladders under them.
Nobody looks at my trees like that. Buyers look at yield. My ex-wife looked at this place like it was the wall between her and Vancouver, and she wasn't wrong about that, not really, and it ended the way it had to — quiet, over one long winter, a signature on a form neither of us fought over.
Zara Okafor looks at thirty-eight acres of farmland as if it were built especially for her.
"You're doing it again."
"Doing what?"
"Stopping to stare."
"They're worth staring at." Not embarrassed about it, which I like more than I want to admit out loud. "Doesn't that ever get old? Being out here every single day?"
"No." Faster than I mean to answer, more honest than I usually let anything out. "Gets harder. Doesn't get old."
"Harder how?"
I could give her the easy version: weather risk, the co-op's cut going up two points last spring, margins thinner every year the fuel and fertilizer bills come in.
Instead I tell her about the wet September two years back that nearly cost the whole crop.
Three nights, radar app open at three in the morning like staring at it could change what it said.
I tell her about the October my grandfather died mid-harvest. About how I picked the entire east block alone that week because I couldn't stand the thought of anyone else's hands on that particular wood that particular week, not even the crew who'd worked here longer than I'd been alive.
His pruning shears are still hanging in the shed, his initials scratched into the handle with a pocketknife sometime in the seventies.
I sharpen them every spring before the season starts. I've never once used them.
I don't know why I'm telling her this. The recorder's still in her jacket pocket, red light blinking, mostly forgotten by both of us at this point in the morning.
"That's not going in the article," I say. Too late to matter.
"Wasn't planning to use it." She looks at me level, notebook closed now, pen tucked behind her ear instead of moving across the page the way it's been moving all morning. "I just wanted to hear it."
We keep walking. I show her more, how to read stress in a tree before it ever shows up in the fruit, the particular way bark color shifts a full season before yield drops, why I've never sprayed a single thing out here I wouldn't put my own bare hand in without thinking twice about it.
I tell myself it's for the article, that context makes better copy, that I'm only being this thorough because a good subject deserves it.
It isn't, and by the time the light starts going gold again over the west rows, I've stopped pretending otherwise, at least to myself, even if I'm not ready to say so out loud to her.
"You give every reporter this much?" Near the end of the row, an apple in each hand, sun catching the side of her face.
"No," I say, and don't explain it any further.
Zara nods and falls back into step beside me, close enough that our shoulders nearly brush on the narrow path between the trees, and neither one of us moves to put the distance back.
By the time the trucks pull out that evening, I've told her more about this place, about my grandfather, about the two years I've spent stalling on a decision I already know the answer to, than I've told anyone in the better part of a decade.
I don't know what to do with that. I don't try very hard to figure it out either — not yet, not with her still walking beside me in the dying light like she's got nowhere else in the world she'd rather be standing.