Mary Ann took the gloves and, for the first time in many months, felt a mild, almost unfamiliar excitement about getting home. It was not happiness exactly. Happiness still carried too much history for her to claim lightly. It was something narrower and more practical: a question she wanted answered, waiting in the soil behind her shed. Sometimes that was enough to get a person moving again.
Her first mistake was believing that a seed which could survive an industrial processing line would surely survive a little dirt and sunshine. She cleared a narrow strip beside the equipment shed with the garden tiller Walter had bought secondhand years earlier, spread several buckets of seed-rich pulp across it, and covered the mess with a thin layer of soil. The spring days were cool, and rain came often enough that she did not have to water every morning. She walked the length of the strip twice a day, searching for the first break in the surface as intently as she had once watched a cow nearing calving.
When green finally appeared, it looked miraculous. One morning the dark soil was almost bare; three days later it carried a fine carpet of seedlings, each with two tiny leaves unfolded toward the sky. Mary Ann stood over them smiling before she remembered she had nobody waiting in the house to hear the news. She went back inside anyway and told Gus, who lifted his head from the rug, blinked, and resumed sleeping.
By the following week, the miracle had become a problem. Seedlings crowded one another in thick mats, their stems long and pale because every plant was struggling to reach the light above its neighbors. Their leaves touched before they had room to form proper roots. Mary Ann tried pulling a few out by hand, then discovered that removing one usually disturbed six more.
She knelt between the rows for an entire afternoon, thinning with a pair of small scissors, her knee aching against a folded feed sack. She told herself that enough plants would survive to make the effort worthwhile. Then a stretch of humid weather arrived, followed by a night so warm that condensation formed on the windows. The next morning dozens of seedlings lay flat against the ground, their stems narrowed and darkened just above the soil.
She thought at first that a rabbit had passed through the bed. By evening the fallen plants numbered in the hundreds, although she had never counted the total. She lifted one and found its stem soft at the base. Others collapsed while she watched. Nothing had chewed them; they were dying where they stood.
Evelyn looked at the photographs on Mary Ann's phone and made a sympathetic sound. "That looks like damping off. Too crowded, too damp. Could be several organisms working together."
"Can I save them?"
"The ones already collapsed, probably not. You can try giving the survivors space and drier conditions, but don't pour more water on them."
Mary Ann drove home with a bag of fresh seed-starting mix she had paid for despite her employee discount. She separated a few surviving plants, set them in clean containers, and moved them to a bright place under the porch roof. Most were too weak to recover. Of the hundreds that had sprouted, fewer than two dozen reached a size that looked remotely like healthy tomato transplants.