After she packed the empty crates, she sat in her truck with the cash envelope on her lap. The amount was not enormous. Once she subtracted expenses, it would not even cover the irrigation improvements she had made two years earlier. But the money had come from people who wanted something she had grown, and the distinction made it feel unlike any paycheck she had received in years.
She drove to Hollis's place before going home. He was in the yard beside his truck, trying to move a heavy garden pot without aggravating his back. She helped him settle the pot, then handed him the empty crate he had lent her. He studied it, looked inside as though a tomato might be hiding under a corner, and raised an eyebrow.
"Where's the fruit?"
"Sold."
"Some of it?"
"All four crates. By ten."
Hollis stood perfectly still for a moment. Then he smiled, a wide and almost boyish expression that made him look decades younger. "Well, I'll be," he said. "Looks like somebody finally found a buyer for your decisions."
Mary Ann laughed, and something in her throat tightened unexpectedly. "I thought you'd tell me not to get carried away."
"Don't get carried away," he said promptly. "One Saturday isn't a business. But you'd better start figuring out how to get more tomatoes to the next one."
The advice sent her home thinking about planting space, harvest intervals, containers, and customer orders rather than about whether the experiment was foolish. She counted the remaining fruit on each promising vine and noted which plants were producing steadily. She drew a larger field plan in the notebook and estimated what a quarter acre might require in supplies and labor. It frightened her, but not in the old way.
For three seasons she had spent money on questions that might have no commercial answer. Now, for the first time, she had a small pile of cash, four empty crates, and evidence that some people valued the fruit as much as she did. She placed the sales envelope beside Walter's photograph in the kitchen and left it there until evening. It was the first farm income she had earned since selling the cattle, and she wanted him to see it even though she knew perfectly well he could not.
That night she wrote in the notebook: Market. Four crates. Sold out before ten. Customers liked flavor better than appearance. The last entry on the page was underlined twice: Next year, grow enough to go back.
The market success changed Mary Ann's calculations, though it did not change her bank balance enough to make decisions easy. The next morning she made coffee, opened the notebook, and tried estimating the cost of growing a quarter acre of tomatoes. The number was larger than she wanted to see, especially after she added stakes, trellis materials, better irrigation, packaging, and the fuel needed for regular deliveries. She crossed out an optimistic yield estimate, wrote a smaller one, and calculated again. The honest numbers suggested she could afford the attempt only if she kept her feed-store job and expanded in stages.