Mary Ann wrote everything down, then asked the practical question. "If you were starting with these piles, what would you do first?"
"I'd stop thinking of the piles as one variety," Lena answered. "They're a lottery of different parentage. If you find something worth keeping, identify the individual plant and follow its descendants. Otherwise you'll spend years being surprised and won't know why."
After Lena drove away, Mary Ann went from stake to stake and made a rough map of the bed. She tied matching cloth strips to small envelopes and numbered the plants from which she intended to save fruit. The notebook pages grew crowded with descriptions: early flower, low fruit count, crack at shoulder, sweet after ripening, survived dry week. For the first time she was not merely watching tomatoes grow. She was asking each plant a question she would remember next year.
The deliveries from the cannery continued through summer. Some days she stopped them because the unloading area was too wet, and Larry accepted her decision without argument. Other days she collected only a few buckets from an incoming load, then directed the rest toward the approved handling area rather than her planting rows. She learned quickly that fresh, heavy pulp could smell foul if left in deep heaps and that adding too much uncomposted material to a bed did not magically make good soil. She began composting portions separately and used only material she had judged suitable after the earlier tests and guidance, rather than treating every load as fertilizer.
Larry stood beside her one evening as she laid out an improvised row of experimental trays. "I thought you were helping me with a disposal problem," he said.
"I thought I was, too."
"Now you've got numbers on every pot."
"If I don't number them, I forget which ones came from where."
"You always did take Walter's bookkeeping too seriously."
Mary Ann looked at him sharply, then saw that he meant it kindly. "Walter didn't keep notes unless the bank made him."
Larry laughed. "True enough. You kept the notes and made him think he'd remembered everything himself."
For a moment both of them smiled at the same remembered man. Then Larry turned back toward his truck, his shoulders bending slightly under the years. "I'll bring you those clean-lined loads when I can. And if somebody at the plant asks why, I'll tell them my cousin's trying to grow tomatoes."
"They'll think you've lost your mind."
"They already do. That's why they let me drive a truck all day without a supervisor in it."
The first summer ended with baskets of tomatoes Mary Ann mostly gave away. She left a few on Evelyn's counter with a handwritten note asking customers to tell her honestly which ones they liked. One man said a red paste tomato was perfect for sauce but terrible for sandwiches. A woman said the dark, uneven one tasted better than anything she had bought all season, then admitted its soft shoulders made it difficult to slice neatly. A teenage customer said the yellow-streaked fruit looked beautiful but was too sweet for his mother's chili.