Elena came every few days while the affected blocks were under observation. She was careful not to declare a harvest loss before harvest. She took soil readings at consistent depths, compared stressed rows with unaffected control rows, and identified trees that might need special attention when dormancy arrived. Sam and I walked with her, answering questions about dates, irrigation cycles, fruit size, and whether the condition of any particular tree predated the water diversion.
"The insurance people will want a number," Sam said after one visit.
"So do I," Elena answered. "But wanting a number doesn't make it accurate."
She pointed to a peach hanging beneath a leaf on the lower side of Block Five. The fruit was smaller than we would have liked, but not obviously ruined. She explained that it might gain sufficient size with careful irrigation and favorable weather, or it might end up in a lower-paying processing grade. We would learn the difference when we picked, sorted, and sold it.
I was glad she said it in front of Sam. He worried almost as fiercely about the orchard as I did, and when he saw me studying the trees in silence, he sometimes tried to reassure me before he had anything solid to reassure me with. We had worked through enough frost scares and equipment failures together to know that hope did not need to be the same thing as a forecast.
One evening we sat on the tailgate of his truck while the sunset turned the canyon walls red. The young peach rows were running on shortened irrigation cycles, and the portable pump we had borrowed from a neighbor hummed beyond the fence. Sam took off his hat and ran a hand through his hair.
"My dad used to say water is like a paycheck," he told me. "You don't feel the shortage the moment somebody takes part of it. You feel it when everything you were counting on comes due."
I thought about our fertilizer invoices, the packing deposit, and the cost of workers who had rearranged their week to handle emergency watering instead of regular harvest preparation. I thought about the irrigation district charges that would still be due regardless of whether somebody had stolen part of a delivery after the meter.
"Your dad was right," I said.
"He usually was. Annoying habit."
For the first time that week, we laughed. Then Sam put his hat back on and stood to check the filter station again.
The theft made me remember my own father in ways I had not expected. His name was Thomas Pierce. He had been a difficult man to work beside until I was old enough to understand that much of what I called stubbornness was fear accumulated over forty years of trying to keep a farm running through weather, prices, and decisions made by people who were not the ones growing fruit.
He taught me to read a ditch before he taught me to drive a tractor. When I was eleven, he made me walk the lateral with a shovel after a spring delivery fell short. I complained that the water looked perfectly normal at the headgate. He told me a pipe or a ditch only had to lose a small portion at the wrong place to starve the thing at the end. We found a collapsed bank under a clump of willows and spent the afternoon shoring it up.