"For compost?" Emily asked.
"Probably. Maybe feed, if it's appropriate. I don't know. All I know is they've got apples they don't want and you've got land nobody's using."
She looked at the apple trees beyond the yard. The thought felt ridiculous at first, almost insulting in its simplicity. She had inherited an orchard that could barely produce a decent basket, and three miles down the road another orchard was paying to get rid of fruit by the truckload. Then she remembered Ruth at the market, searching the ugly bins while everybody else bought the polished apples.
She set her sandwich down and asked Frank for Grant's telephone number. Grant Ashby answered the phone with the flat suspicion of a man who had spent thirty years listening to people promise to solve problems they did not understand. He had managed harvest crews, refrigeration schedules, trucking contracts, and the miserable arithmetic of fruit that cost almost as much to discard as it had to grow. When Emily explained that she owned the Carter farm and might be able to receive some of his rejects, he asked whether she had ever stood downwind of forty tons of spoiled apples in August.
She said no. He told her that was an important qualification she was missing.
Nevertheless, he invited her to the orchard the following morning. Emily drove past long, straight rows of trees supported by trellises and pulled up beside a packing shed larger than Ruth's entire farmhouse. Forklifts moved pallets through open doors. Refrigeration fans hummed behind the building, and workers in reflective vests carried radios that crackled without pause. Grant met her beneath an awning with a clipboard under one arm and a pencil behind his ear, looking less like an important manager than a person who had forgotten how to stop working.
He showed her two streams of rejected apples. One contained clean, sound fruit with cosmetic defects: fruit damaged by hail, misshapen apples, and apples too small for retail specifications. The other contained damaged or spoiled material that could not safely enter a food product. Emily listened carefully while he explained the difference, then asked why they could not simply sell the first group at a discount. Grant gave a tired laugh and pointed toward the sorting line, where workers were already trying to meet the day's shipping deadline.
"We sell some of it," he said. "We juice some. We donate some when organizations can take it. But not every apple finds a buyer, and the equipment doesn't run on good intentions. We still end up paying to remove more than I'd like."
He took her outside, where a truck waited with fruit that had been removed from storage after quality checks. The apples were not uniformly rotten. Some were still firm and bright beneath their blemishes; others were collapsing beneath their own weight. The smell made Emily think of Ruth's compost heap after rain, only magnified a hundred times.