For the first time that morning, Leon laughed at her rather than at the ponds. "You haven't seen whether these survive a week." Delaney tucked the receipt into her clipboard. "I know. That's why I'm asking about next month instead of promising to take them." His expression changed slightly, and he stopped arguing.
The last truck left shortly before noon. Delaney remained on the bank with the kind of silence that comes after a room full of people has gone away, except she was outdoors and the room was four acres of uncertain water. She had arranged to receive approximately six thousand fingerlings, enough to frighten her whenever she said the number aloud. Now they were no longer numbers on Carol Reyes's inventory sheet. They were alive, moving, consuming oxygen, and depending on choices Delaney had never had to make before.
She crouched at the edge of the pond and watched one fish circle through a shaft of sunlight. Her grandfather would have liked this moment, not because he understood aquaculture, but because he always paused when something apparently useless began doing what it was supposed to do. Delaney could almost hear his voice above the wind. "Don't celebrate the first green leaf, Dee. Make sure you know how to keep it alive through August."
A year earlier, she would have driven past this same road without turning her head. Back then her life was measured in monthly rent, the distance from her apartment to the medical billing office where she worked, and the number of times she could decline a social invitation without friends deciding she had disappeared. She was good at her job because she was accurate and patient, qualities that earned her more work but rarely better pay. At night she lay awake listening to the neighbor's television through the wall and wondering whether she had already mistaken survival for a plan.
She had been raised mostly by her grandfather, Henry Cross, after her parents separated when she was nine. Her mother moved west for steady employment and sent money when she could; her father remained a pleasant, intermittent presence, offering birthdays and excuses in roughly equal amounts. Henry never made either parent a villain in front of Delaney. He simply cleared a space at the kitchen table for her schoolbooks and learned which cereal she liked.
His orchard lay on twelve uneven acres outside Bell Creek, two counties from the ponds. There were peach trees on the high ground, apples by the fence, and a line of old pear trees that Henry refused to cut down despite their unreliable yield. Everything on the property had been repaired at least twice. Delaney had grown up distinguishing the sounds of healthy equipment from equipment her grandfather was pretending not to hear.
He was not a man who confused thrift with magic. Sometimes an irrigation valve truly needed replacing, and sometimes a tree had to come down because rot had reached its roots. But Henry always inspected things before deciding they were finished. He could spend an entire afternoon figuring out why one row of trees had stopped producing while the rest of the orchard looked fine. When Delaney complained that nobody else spent so much time on a losing problem, he would answer, "Then maybe nobody else knows what the problem is yet."