The Divorce He Asked For, The Empire I Took Away novel · Chapter 8 of 32

Chapter 8: Night Pick

"Watch me," I said.

Dex laughed and went down the steps past me.

Augie came out behind me, tugging at a collar he clearly hated.

"Wednesday night," he said. "My crew's done at six. They'll come after."

"Augie, that's eight people."

"Nine. I count."

"It's twelve acres."

"Then we'd better find more people."

By Wednesday at sundown, we had.

I didn't call anybody.

Winona did.

She sat at the kitchen table on Tuesday night with Grandpa's old rotary phone and a list.

She called every family in the valley that Grandpa had ever helped.

The dairy family whose barn he rebuilt after the fire.

The old man whose well he paid to drill in the drought.

The widow up the road he plowed for every spring for twenty years, for free.

Their kids and grandkids.

By seven on Wednesday night there were sixty-one people standing at my gate with headlamps, picking knives and coolers.

I unlocked the chain myself.

Winona sat in a lawn chair at the top of the Old Block with a bullhorn somebody had found in a fire station.

"Rows one through ten, you're with Augie's crew. Eleven through twenty, with the Geyserville people. Anybody I catch eating more than they pick, I'll know."

"How?" somebody yelled.

"Your teeth'll be purple and I'm old, not blind."

Goldie wore a headlamp over her pigtails and a picking knife she wasn't allowed to unfold.

Her job was water.

She ran up and down the rows with a jug yelling "Hydrate!" like a tiny drill sergeant.

It was still eighty-five at midnight.

The old vines were low, so you picked on your knees in your own circle of light.

I was on my knees beside Augie for most of it.

He picked faster than anybody I'd ever seen, those big hands quick and careful under the leaves.

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