AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Storming away was childish, I admit, but I almost fucking told her how infatuated I am with her. Even after all the years, the rejection, and never physically being intimate, I was about to confess to Gabrielle that I couldn’t ignore this deep feeling of need whenever I looked at her.
“Hey, boss, something you should see over here.” Todd’s voice slices through my musings, thank fuck.
I pick my head up slowly, wiping the sweat from my brow, and take a long pull from my water bottle before gingerly walking over to the section of crops he’s been harvesting.
“What’s up?” I ask.
He points to the ground a good distance away from us. “Caught my eye. It looks damaged, no?”
Immediately, my heart rate picks up. If everyone else in my family is solely focused and worried about the restaurant twenty-four seven, I’m that way with our farm. This place is my brainchild, and these plants are my babies. I know each square inch of this property; I sit out on the porch of the house I built five years ago, just over the property line from my parents, and catalog the blood, sweat, and tears I put into this land.
To see it damaged in any way, whether from animals, weather, or drought, absolutely guts me.
Todd and I walk to the area he was pointing to. It’s about four half-rows of tomato plants that aren’t quite ripened enough to be picked yet. Usually, I’d see green globes jutting from the leaves, produce that’s fighting its way to be juicy and delicious but not quite there as of now.
Instead, I see a bunch of plants that have been either stepped on, cut up, or something else. Bending down to inspect them, I can’t fully suss out what happened to these. All I know for sure is that we’ve lost about twenty plants for this harvest, and my blood boils in my veins.
Here is the secret as to why our sauce is so delicious, lauded, legendary, and every other name it’s been awarded in magazines, recipes, and such for years: we’ve been using the seeds from the tomatoes my great-grandfather brought over from Napoli when he moved here in nineteen twenty. They’re heirloom tomatoes, grown with the seeds of fourth-generation love, culture, sweat, and hard work. Search as far and wide as you want to, but you’ll find nothing like the tomatoes we grow here.
It’s why I’ve implemented such rigid security to protect our family’s lineage of special ingredient. The fact that someone or something bypassed that makes me question everything. I’ll have to pull the security footage tonight and see what happened, but this corner of the property may have a blind spot, and I curse myself for not putting more cameras up.
As if I don’t already have six spanning the fields after the extras I put in when Cassandra, Patrick’s wife, had a security incident on the property I bought from her a few years ago.
“You think it was an animal?” Todd asks, and I hear Jake coming up from behind us.
“Those breaks look too clean for it to be an animal, and there would be tracks.” Jake points to the ground.
He’s an amateur hunter and likes to dabble in survivalist tactics as a hobby, so he’d know best.
Per usual, I don’t use words to get my point across but rather inspect everything in silence. Words have never been my strong suit, and I personally think the world could solve a lot more problems if we all shut our fucking mouths sometimes.
Theories run through my head as I keep walking the land, both men having returned to their harvesting since they’re still on the clock. It could be as simple as a bunch of teenage idiots coming in and trampling the plants while trying to live out wild child fantasies before their senior year.
Except, as we learned with everything that Cassandra went through, sometimes things are more sinister than that. In fact, in the last couple of years, my family has been through its fair share of dangerous situations, my sister and her husband included.
Maybe I’m just spooked from those, which is why I try to shake it off. I decide to wait for a meltdown until I watch the security footage and begin convincing myself that it was just a stupid animal or maybe even a freak windstorm. Right, like we have many of those in Pennsylvania.
Either way, it might be a good thing that my mind is focused back on the work I do each day than a woman who wants nothing to do with me.
Another two hours of the monotonous chore that keeps my complicated thoughts at bay, and Jake and Todd tell me they’re calling it. The back of my old light blue pickup is loaded down with shallow crates of tomatoes, not packed too tightly so as not to put pressure on the fruit, which is a decent start on a season that looks like it’ll bring a huge harvest.
Just as I’m about to drive back to our building to unload and pack them for transport to the sauce manufacturer I work with, the sound of another vehicle approaching hits my back.
When I turn, finally taking my hat off as the sun gets lower and lower on the horizon, I see my father approaching on one of the quads we keep in the newer barn/garage we put up a year ago.
Dad makes his way off the four-wheeler just as I walk over to start the engine of the old pickup, and I curse myself for not moving faster. I love my father, I do, but he’s antsy in his retirement. Staying still is not in his blood, he must have passed that down to me, and my mother making him rest and relax is officially driving him crazy.
“You all done picking for today?” he asks, shoving his hands in his pockets like he’s some foreman on duty.
I blow out a breath, trying to keep my composure. It’s not that I’m in a bad mood, even though I’m technically always in a bad mood, but I had a nice day alone out here with my plants. Up until I saw the trampled corner of the property, I didn’t have a thing to complain about.
Now, I’m sure Dad will read something on my face, he’s always been able to do it with me more than my brothers and sister, and I’ll have to explain what Todd saw.
“Yeah, we got a good haul from our efforts. We’ll have a good season.” I keep it succinct, not meeting his eyes.
He removes his hands from his pockets as he moseys through the rows. “Good, good. The vines look good, growing well. If you need a hand one of these days, let me know. I did used to harvest almost everything back when I was still trying to make your grandfather agree that I could marry your mother.”
I chuckle, thinking about my nonno’s bushy eyebrows raising as he assessed my desperate and in love father. The old man was a stickler and a giant hole in the middle of my heart throbs for his absence. Obviously, life is like that, everyone dies eventually, and we all miss someone or something.
