She called Hollis. He answered after several rings, his voice rough with sleep, although it was barely seven in the evening. Mary Ann told him the number. He was silent long enough that she thought the call had dropped.
"Hollis?"
"I'm here," he said. "Just making sure I heard you right."
"You did."
He gave a soft laugh. "Well, I'll be. All from those decisions."
"And a lot of work."
"The decisions are the work, Mary Ann. You ought to know that better than anyone by now."
He asked about the four selected lines, about the next seed trials, and whether she was keeping enough money aside for a bad spring. He sounded tired, but his questions were familiar and precise. Before hanging up, he said he was proud of her, a statement so direct and unexpected that Mary Ann found she could only thank him. She sat in the quiet kitchen afterward with the telephone beside her, feeling the pleasure of having told the news to the person who had watched her fail long before anybody began calling it success.
On New Year's Day she walked the farm slowly. The fields were bare, the hoop house covered against winter, and the old dumping area now looked like ordinary ground beside the shed. She could see the irrigation lines, the paths, and the places where new rows would begin after frost. None of it resembled the shallow, stinking lake of tomato pulp she had stood beside years earlier. Yet without that first mess, she might never have knelt down and asked whether anything useful was hidden in the seeds.
Hollis died before the eighth growing season began. His daughter, Marianne Pruitt, called Mary Ann on a cold morning in late January, speaking with the strained steadiness of someone who had already repeated the news more times than she could bear. He had been home, she said, and the end had come quickly. Mary Ann sat on the edge of the bed after hanging up, the telephone resting in her hands while Gus slept beside the dresser. Outside, winter light lay flat across the pasture, and for several minutes she could not make herself stand.
She had known Hollis was getting older. His back had troubled him for years, and during the last season he had walked more carefully, staying closer to his truck when he visited. But she had continued thinking of him as someone who would always be there when she needed a difficult answer. Now she kept remembering the camp chair, the folded list of buyer complaints, and the particular way he paused before telling her something he knew she would dislike.
At the gathering after the funeral, the room was filled with people from different parts of his long working life. Farmers remembered him showing up in fields with a clipboard and a fair price. Truck drivers spoke about his habit of helping unload even when it was not his job. Former coworkers laughed about the years he insisted on tasting produce before approving an order, no matter how impressive the paperwork looked.