“Yes, Lisa, I am his mother,” I said, “and I have never lived in Arizona in my life.” I took the old plum crate out of the hands of her husband, gently, the way one removes a knife from a toddler, and set it on the dessert table next to the tart. The anniversary party hummed with strings of white lights over the patio, and a hundred guests held glasses of Chardonnay. A cellist had been playing near the pool, and she stopped mid phrase. Anthony stood with his hands empty and his mouth slightly open. His wife was staring at me with an expression I can only describe as the look of a woman discovering that her house has a basement.
The brother of Lisa, the man who had read the Sacramento envelope, was named Paul. He was a big, red faced man with a booming laugh, and he looked at me now with open awe. “Mrs. Vitale,” he said, “thirteen point six million dollars. That is the largest farm sale in the Valley this year.” I said, “Paul, it was four hundred acres of plums that the family of my husband planted in 1931. They were worth more than money. They were worth a name.” I let that sit. “I did not tell Anthony. I wanted him to be himself. I did not know that himself would sell the water out from under the trees.”
Anthony spoke at last. “Ma, it was a business decision. We had a surplus. It was only temporary. I sold the allotment to the Kern County growers, and I was going to buy it back when the prices came down.” I said, “Anthony, there was no surplus. The trees were thirsty. The branches were bare by August. I walked those rows with my own eyes and I counted the dead ones.” My voice cracked. “Do you know how it feels to see a tree that your husband planted die of thirst? It looks like a hand, reaching up.” Lisa put her palm over her mouth. A few of the guests turned away, embarrassed.
A wooden plum crate with a family name burned into the side brought a son back to the dry rows he sold the water from.
The face of Anthony crumpled. It was the face I remembered from boyhood, red and squinting, that precise instant before the tears broke. He had been a sensitive child, a boy who cried at the death of a stray cat, and who had left at nineteen because the farm had felt to him like a cage. I had never blamed him for leaving. I had only wished he would come back for one harvest. “Ma,” he said, hoarsely. “I hated it. I hated the smell of it, the dust. I wanted to be someone else. And then Dad died, and I was ashamed that I was not there, and I, I could not look at the trees.”
“So you sold the water,” I said, and I sat down heavily in a patio chair. My knees ached. It was close to eleven at night. “Anthony, listen to me. When your father was dying, he asked for you. Three times. I told him you were on your way. I told him you could not get a flight.” The face of my son went white. “That was not true. You did not come, because I did not call you until after. I did not want to disturb your work.” I swallowed. “That was my fault, son. I made the choice for you. I took away your last chance to say goodbye. And you have been carrying it ever since.”
Anthony dropped to his knees on the flagstones. The guests watched in a respectful hush. I put my hand on his bowed head, on the gray at his temples. “I forgive you for the water,” I said, “because I need you to forgive me for the telephone.” He sobbed, a deep, terrible sound, like something tearing. Lisa came around the table and knelt beside him and put her arms around us both. She smelled of jasmine and, unexpectedly, of the plum tart she had baked. We stayed that way for a long time, three people on a patio at the end of a long summer.
I laid out what would happen. Anthony would repay eighty six thousand dollars. He would do it by working harvest on the farm for the next three years, for the cooperative, which had agreed to hire him at a fair wage, and by sending a monthly check to me, which I would deposit in the account for the water rights. “And you will start,” I said, “on the first of September.” He stared. “Ma, I have a job.” I said, “You have a vacation, I believe. Two weeks. It is the perfect time to harvest plums.” Lisa laughed, through her tears. “Anthony, you are going.”
He went. I drove him to the orchard in my old pickup at four thirty in the morning, in the dark, with a thermos of coffee between us on the seat. The cooperative had left the rows untouched. The trees stood in the headlights like a silent army, heavy with fruit, purple under the dust. Anthony climbed down from the cab in his city shoes and stood in the dry dirt, looking up. He said, “Ma, I forgot how big they are.” I handed him a pair of gloves. “Shake them,” I said. “One row at a time. Do not look at the end.”
He drove the shaker for ten days. On the third day, he sunburned his neck. On the sixth, his hands cramped so badly that he could not hold a fork. On the ninth, he fell asleep in the truck, with his head on the steering wheel, and I took a photograph. On the last evening, I found him sitting alone on a crate at the end of the row, with a plum in his hand. He was biting into it. The juice ran down his chin. He looked up, and for the first time in twenty eight years, I saw my son smile all the way to his eyes. “Ma,” he said, “it tastes exactly the same.”
The plum crate sits in my kitchen now, on a shelf above the stove. The family name of Sal is burned into the side, in letters the color of old tobacco. Every September, Anthony and Lisa and their children come to the orchard for the harvest, and they bring a picnic and spread it on the grass at the end of the row. The grandchildren chase each other through the trees. Last year, my youngest granddaughter handed me a plum, still warm from the sun. “Grandma,” she said, “is this the one that makes Daddy cry?” I said, “It is the one that makes him come home.”
