Chapter 5: Thinning

"You leave one," I said. "One apple to a cluster, the biggest one."

"And the rest?"

"You pinch them off and let them drop."

Abram looked at the little green fruit in his hand and the six others still on the stem.

"They're babies."

"They're competition. If you leave them all, you get a hundred small apples that taste like wet cardboard."

"That's cold."

"That's farming."

It was the third week of June, and we were deep in the Cortland rows in the evening light.

He had shown up at my gate that afternoon with a pair of borrowed gloves and said he wanted to learn.

I had told him I couldn't pay him.

He had said, "I'm not asking to be paid, I'm asking to be taught."

I had said yes before I thought about it.

Ned was working three rows over, whistling too loudly.

Dessa was at the farm stand with my mother, selling the first strawberries and holding the cash box like a bank manager.

Abram worked the other side of the same tree.

I could see him through the leaves, his hands gentle and slow on the branches.

He was good at it.

He treated every cluster like it mattered.

"Is this right?" he called.

"Come around and let me see."

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