Mary Ann stood beside a table holding photographs of Hollis beside trucks, warehouse loading docks, and family gatherings. One picture showed him much younger, a paper cup of coffee in one hand and a crate of tomatoes in the other. She stared at the photograph until Marianne approached her. The younger woman looked tired but pleased to have found someone who understood a part of her father's life she had not always seen.
"Dad talked about you all the time," Marianne said.
Mary Ann shook her head. "I can't imagine I was very interesting compared with everything else he had going on."
"You were the interesting part. He'd call and tell me the woman down the road was turning garbage into a business."
Mary Ann felt a tightness behind her ribs. "He said that?"
"More than once. And he never called it luck. He said you were the most stubborn person he'd met, and that for once the stubbornness was pointed in exactly the right direction."
The words made Mary Ann smile through tears she had been trying not to shed. Marianne took her hand, and they stood together in the quiet corner of the room while other conversations continued around them. Mary Ann wanted to tell her how much the advice had mattered, how many times she had heard Hollis's voice while deciding which plants not to save. She found she could manage only a few sentences.
"He taught me to pay attention to what I was actually choosing," she said. "I thought he was talking about tomatoes. I didn't understand how much more he meant."
Marianne squeezed her fingers. "Then I guess he taught you the right thing."
After the gathering, Mary Ann stopped at Hollis's property. The camp chair was folded beside the garage wall, waiting for the next visit that would never happen. Marianne had told her to take it if she wanted, because Hollis had bought it specifically to sit among the tomato rows. Mary Ann carried it to her truck and set it carefully on the passenger seat. Driving home, she found she could not turn on the radio.
The farm waited through the rest of winter. Mary Ann completed the seed inventory and checked orders with Teresa, but for several weeks the tasks felt more mechanical than they had before. It surprised her that success did not protect her from grief. She had learned to be active again after losing Walter, to build days worth living inside, yet Hollis's absence opened another space where a familiar voice should have been. There was no way to fill it with work, and she finally stopped trying.
One afternoon she unfolded the camp chair at the edge of the empty field and sat in it with her notebook. The air was too cold for much gardening, but the ground had begun to soften beneath the southern fence. She read pages from the first year, the notes about collapsing seedlings and cracked fruit and a system she hardly understood. Then she turned forward to the most recent entries, where the same questions had become more detailed but no less sincere.