"Selection pressure over generations. I've been choosing the fruit with the most integrated flavor — not the most complex individually, but the most coherent together. It's not stable yet. This year's are the best so far."
Ivy thought about the competition dish. She thought about what a plate could do with a tomato that was doing this — not as an ingredient but as the point.
"This should be in the dish," she said.
"It's not ready for?—"
"By state competition, it will be." She looked at him. "You know it will."
He looked at the plant for a long moment. "Maybe."
CHAPTER TWELVE
The variety development section was not on the ranch tour. It wasn't on the tour because it wasn't finished, which was the simplest reason, and because what was in progress there didn't benefit from observation, which was the more honest one. Finn told himself he was showing Ivy the greenhouse because the competition dish required it. She needed to understand the range of what was available to them. The tasting section was directly relevant to the recipe development. This was the practical logic.
He told himself this for most of the walk from the barn to the north side, and it held up reasonably well until he opened the greenhouse door and watched her face when the air changed.
She didn't say anything. She stepped in and turned slowly, looking at the length of it — the trial rows, the integrated irrigation, the labeled stakes marching down the center aisle — with the attention she had when she forgot the camera was running. He'd been cataloguing this expression for days without meaning to. This was the version of her that he found most difficult to look away from.
"How many?" she asked.
"Current trials: thirty-one varieties. Seven in active development."
She moved to the first row and crouched at the nearest stake, reading it. He watched her take in his notation system — the variety name, the year, the generation code — without asking for an explanation, just reading it until it made sense, which took about twenty seconds. He found this unreasonably satisfying.
"Walk me through them," she said. "I want to taste as we go."
"Some aren't ready."
"I'll tell you which ones I think are ready. You tell me if I'm wrong."
He almost said:that's not how it works. Instead, he said: "Start at the far end. Work toward the door."
They went through twelve. He pulled samples where he judged the fruit ready, and she tasted each one in sequence, standing over the soil trough, no ceremony, the way you'd taste something in a professional kitchen: present, focused, reporting back.
She was wrong on three counts.
On the first miss she said the acidity was integrated, when it was still slightly fractured; close, but the distinction mattered, and he told her so. She tasted it again and said, "Oh, yes, I hear it now," which was not how most people described flavor but was accurate.
On the second miss, she called a Brandywine selection under-complex when it was mid-development, and the complexity was there but latent, not yet expressed. She looked at him for a moment and then at the plant and then said: "I want to come back to this in three weeks."
Finn did not admit —especially to himself— that he was anticipating her next visit.
On the third miss she tasted a Green Zebra selection as higher-acid than it was, which was a common misread becauseof the color. He told her. She said: "I was reading the skin. The flesh is different."
Nine out of twelve. He'd tasted the same twelve and would have gotten twelve. But he'd been doing this for three years, and the three she'd missed she'd missed informatively, not carelessly.
"Try this," he said.
She did as she was told. She took the offering and bit into it. The sound she made was not performed. That was the thing — he'd become somewhat of an expert, in the last several days, at distinguishing Ivy's performed responses from her real ones, and this was entirely real: a brief, involuntary sound of something being exactly what it should be, followed by her going quiet in a way that meant she was tasting rather than thinking, and then her eyes came up to his.
"Finn," she said. "This is the dish."
He did not disagree.
"Whatever we build — this is the center of it. Everything else is just the frame." She looked at the tomato in her hand. "You've been working on this for three years?"
He nodded.
