Chapter 32
“It’s green.”
Emi told Bastian, “It ain’t poison hijo; it’s guacamole
[1]. We need to eat them before they start spoiling.”
“But they’re … green.”
Nate looked at Bastian sharply. “You telling me you aren’t hungry?”
Bastian got the message real quick and started nibbling the thick avocado salsa type dish with the pieces of flat bread that Emi had fried up to go with the light comida she had fixed for the last meal of the day. Darla was eating better than Bastian only instead of nibbling she was smearing as much around her mouth as she was getting in it. While the children ate – the day had been long and over warm so Don, Rob, and Benji had taken their portion of the meal back to the little guest house they used so they could undress down to their skivvies – Nate quizzed Emi on how far that she and Bastian had gotten on the chart.
“Don gave me a good estimate for some things that could go to market but I want your take. Besides the bananas and avocados what do you think we can offer the buyers coming tomorrow?”
Still confused over why Nate would want her “take” on anything, much less something as important as his business, she nevertheless reported to him what she’d found thus far. “Hmmm, to start there are sapodilla left on the trees, but they won’t last much longer. I made a sapodilla pie for your sweet tonight and I’ll make a smoothie from them for the kids’ snack tomorrow. But beyond that? I don’t know Nate. We only ever ate them fresh and in ice cream Poppy would make on special occasions. And he only had the two trees, not a small grove of them like you have.”
“Ice cream?”
“Yeah.”
“Hmmm. You remember how it’s done?”
“The ice cream? Puede ser … sorta … maybe. Why?”
“Enough to describe it to someone?”
“Like I said … maybe.”
“I got a particular buyer coming in on a boat in the morning. See what you can do with your maybe.”
“Uh … Gringo …”
“He has an upscale place in Ft. Myers and is always looking for something new … new but something that’ll give him a good profit. C’mon … just try. For me?” And he winked.
For some reason that wink made Emi want to giggle, something she hadn’t done for a long, long time. And wanting to giggle subsequently made her feel cranky. Rather than let him know any of it she shook her head. “You’re loco. What do I know about business?”
“Enough to know the difference between a good deal and a bad one. ‘Sides, I want you to get to know some of my customers. I want you to tell me what you think of them.”
Cautiously she asked, “Why?”
“Because you see things. Look at what you caught with Ernie.”
Emi muttered in disgust, “I almost caught something all right.”
With a matching look of disgust for what he’d missed for so long Nate said, “You know what I mean. You don’t have any preconceived notions of what people should be so you are less likely to be fooled.”
Emi slowly nodded. “So long as I don’t run into anyone I might know … or know of.”
“I doubt there are many that you would know but I’ll try to give you some warning if they are locals.”
“Yeah … might be best. But I’ll … I’ll try not to … let … oh forget it. I’ll try not to put my foot in it but no promises.”
Nate gave her a grin. “Stop worrying it to death woman. I trust you. Now let me have a kiss so we can finish up while my head is on straight.”
“Uh huh,” Emi said quietly. “Claro. Usted puede tener un beso. Pero dudo que dejará su cabeza bien puesta. Probablemente lo contrario.”
When Nate started laughing Bastian and Darla looked over and gave him a strange look before asking Emi, “What did you say?”
"Never mind. Your father is trying to be funny again,” she told the boy reminding him of the last time he’d caught them almost kissing. “Now finish up so I don’t have to wait all night to clean your dishes … or don’t you want that slice of pie already?”
Threatened with the loss of the treat he’d been eagerly awaiting all day Bastian finally consented to eat the avocado-based dish though he still didn’t go at it with the gusto he normally used. Emi turned back to Nate and said, “I been making a list, trying to figure out how much.”
Nate had been watching a bead of sweat slide down into Emi’s cleavage so took a moment to refocus. “Uh …”
Emi shook her head and muttered, “Loco.”
Finally, back to business Nate just grinned. “So tell me about this list.”
“I been looking around. You got more variety than my Abuelo really wanted. He said he liked to know what he knew and not worry about having to know too much about too much and have it get away from him. On the other hand, not putting all of your huevos in one basket is better for what you need these days.” Emi got up and brought back a single-page draft of the big chart that she and Bastian were working on. She tried to hand it to Nate but he indicated he wanted her to explain it to him. She shrugged and told him, “To start with you got six little trees that I think are June Apples. They ain’t been taken care of so good so what is coming off of them is small and hard. I … I … well I think I can do what Abuela would do to make them worth something but it’s gonna take most of the honey that is left in the bucket so maybe not. Depends on what you say.”
“Use it. That’s just the bucket that Arden kept for the house. I’ve got more in one of the storage containers if it isn’t enough. Like a couple of fifty gallon drums or so. Will that be enough?”
Emi froze and just blinked at Nate while a piece of avocado hung half out of her mouth. “Eres un hombre muy loco. How can you be so … so …” Then she went off in a slew of Spanish of which Nate only understood to mean that she thought he was taking risks he had no business taking. “How can you just say you have fifty-gallon drums of honey like it’s no big deal?! Ayiiiii!”
“Chill woman. If you don’t want honey I’ve got twice that in raw sugar from down South and …”
Emi seriously considered throwing something at Nate. “You been salvaging too long. You don’t know how things work,” she complained. “Tomorrow all that gets brought to the house and we gonna finish making that storeroom like old Fort Knox.” She continued to mutter until she felt Nate’s bare toes nudge the back of her knee, causing her to startle and jump.
Nate grinned. “That’s better. Fine. We’ll move it tomorrow. And sure. I should have done it before now. Just relax already. All that bosom heaving is … distracting.”
Gritting her teeth at what she considered Nate’s unnecessary levity she nevertheless continued on after noting that she needed to find out what else Nate had stored in the outbuildings and get it rearranged and properly secured. “Fine. Abuela used to cook the little apples she would get into a mash that she would then seal in jars. I been emptying some of the jars that there was only bits and pieces left in and the seals around the lids look like they can be reused.”
Surprised and more than a little impressed Nate asked, “You can do that? Preserve stuff in jars?”
“Eh … like I said … busy work. My father’s mother taught my mother. Momma then taught Abuela and she liked it so well that she … well … Abuela …” Emi shrugged. “Reason I understand your mother in law …”
“Ex mother-in-law.”
Emi rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. “The reason why I get Mrs. Rivera … even if I don’t want to … is because she … Look Abuela wasn’t a snob and she wasn’t as cranky as Mrs. Rivera but she could be … starchy and set on having her way. And when Abuela … well she pulled the whole family into it like it had been her idea all along. All of us cousins had to help but being the youngest girl and to keep me out of trouble, they kept me busy with all of it. Sometimes Abuela would make me write lines … from the Bible mostly but sometimes recipes and just stuff she dictated … if she didn’t think I was paying enough attention to what was being said to me. She wasn’t satisfied until I could answer all her questions about how stuff was done and in what order.”
“She sounds … uh …”
“Naw. Abuela wasn’t … well … bad to us or anything. She could be fun and she had lots of good ideas and she put the whole family ahead of herself. It’s just that she had her own ideas of what was proper for a girl and I missed the mark a lotta the time. I wasn’t quiet or gentle or able to sit still and be good or most other things … the only thing she liked is that I could sing and play music better than my cousins though she wanted me to play el piso … the piano … instead of the guitar. Sometimes she would make my Momma mad because she would say that Momma and my father would let me get away with too much, that if they would just handle me the way she did I would change and be a little princess like the other girl cousins were.” Emi snorted. “Momma told me so long as I behaved most of the time she didn’t expect me to be like the other girl cousins. She said Abuela had standards that were kinda hard to live up to. When I got old enough it made me wonder how it was growing up as Abuela’s daughter.”
Emi chuckled causing Nate to ask, “What?”
She shrugged and said, “If Abuela had known how my cousins would act when she wasn’t around …” Then Emi’s smile faltered. “She would have been triste … sad. Family was everything to her. She had … had ideas of what her family was and what family meant. Sometimes my cousins would make fun of her for being old-fashioned. But Momma explained it to me one time … explained she needed things for reasons many of us were too young to understand. Abuela had it hard in her family growing up. Her mother died when she was a bebe and her stepmother pushed her aside for her own children. Her father … eh … he didn’t have much time for a girl child, especially one that at least should have been a boy to make up for killing her mama.” Before Nate could say anything Emi added, “But like my father always explained, it was different times and a different culture. When Abuela met Poppy, she married him even without her father’s consent and when Poppy became successful despite the cursing both families did … it is some of what caused the hard feelings.” Emi shook her head more than a little irritated at herself for getting caught up in history that was better left buried in the past. “Long ago and means nothing. Let us return to what you need.”
Nate reached over and put his hand on hers. “I like that you feel you can tell me about your family. It helps me to understand where you come from.”
“Why? I never hear about yours?”
Nate sighed. “I … I guess … sometimes when something hurts you … you just turn it off. Eventually if you leave it off too long … you forget.”
“That bad?”
Nate shook his head. “All families have their own problems, mine is no exception but my marriage to Gina … that is some of the worst drama there was. If anything my family was painfully and boringly normal. Then one day most of them were simply … gone. You never know what you have and how much it is worth to you until you’ve lost it and know there is no getting it back.”
Emi picked up the pitcher of sangria she’d made and poured him another glass while she said, “Tienes un agujero en tu corazón. I’m sorry that you sorrow so much you can’t even remember it.”
Nate drank deeply before changing the subject. “This sangria tastes different than the one you made yesterday.”
Accepting the change of subject gracefully she explained, “I use what fruit there is. And on that subject, are there more jars in these magic storage sheds of yours?”
Nate grinned, “A few.”
Emi gritted her teeth and vowed silently once again to explore the sheds before saying, “Good. We will need them to take care of all the fruit you don’t haul to market.”
“So you told me about the apples … and even small and pithy apples bring a good bit in the local market because very few grow anywhere near here. What else do we have to work with tomorrow?”
“There is something called an ambarella … Poppy said some people called it a June plum but it isn’t really. Why people want to call something by so many different names I don’t know. It’s not a plum … it’s an ambarella. The bananas and plaintains will keep giving to October so long as we can keep the possums and raccoons out of them. You need a bigger hanging shed that is more secure. Either that or you need to let Benji set some traps and catch the meanest and boldest. I’ll put them in a cage and fatten them up with good food and then …”
Curiously Nate asked, “You ate raccoon growing up? I wouldn’t have thought your grand … uh …”
Emi grinned. “Abuelo came from poor but never yearned to eat the mapache or zarigueya. My father’s people were even poorer than Abuelo’s family. My grandfather – my father’s father – said that if it moved his parents considered it fair game to feed their many children and other relatives that lived with them. Some of the things that my grandmother said her people ate …” Emi shuddered. “It sounded like they would even eat rotten fish to keep starvation away if that is what it took.”
Nate noticed that like all the other times before talking about her family slowly sank Emi into a funk but this time she surprised him by shaking it off and saying, “But you and the kids won’t have to do that. The trees will grow and fruit. The goats and chickens will live. And I will learn about the other good things that can come from the land here. It won’t be like it was before. Now let us finish this list before Darla has to be dunked in the trough to get all of the guacamole off of her.”
Nate smiled and said, “Yes … I love my daughter but there are things I’m more interested in doing besides scraping her clean.”
Emi was in no doubt of what Nate was interested in doing and truthfully she had no problem with it. A deal was a deal, but this deal seemed to be working well for both of them. Still, she wasn’t about to tell him that so she once again continued. “Rob said that here is a … a deshidratador … a thing that dries. He says it was used to dry bricks in olden times.”
Nate nodded. “Yeah.”
“Could it be made to dry other things? Like fruits?”
Nate thought for a moment then suddenly gave a wicked grin. “I think so. Rob … and if not him one of Miguel’s people maybe … could fix it so. You got ideas?”
Emi pulled out a sketch. “I saw it in a book that was in Poppy’s library when I was little. He wanted one but Abuela always talked him out of it as a waste of time. But it reminds me of the thing you have. If we could work a way to have big trays that could be pulled in and out I could do things without heating the house up so much … like make fruit paste or when the garden comes slice the vegetables so they will shrink and can be stored in smaller containers and make it harder for the ratas y ratones y cucarachas to get to.”
As Nate made a few notes of his own he said, “Continue.”
“Not much left. Mostly it is just to let you know what else is coming in and maybe some ideas how you can make people want to buy it.”
“So tell me already woman,” Nate said grinning around another drink of sangria.
“Loco,” Emi said though it was with a grin of her own. “The Barbados cherry … it is good with lots of Vitamin C, something your customers might like to know. The capulin … can be used like a sweet cherry and that too is good because like the apples there aren’t real cherry trees this far south. Abuelo would even make a wine from such fruit … much to Abuela’s sometimes disgust. Then there is the coconut you know, or you should since the wind threw one at your head this morning.”
Nate growled playfully. “Watch it.”
Emi just shrugged innocently … or as innocently as she could pretend to be. “You have the Chickasaw plum though they need to be cleaned and fenced off better to keep the cabras out. They eat the saw briar vines but then just continue on to everything else. Luckily we caught them before the poor goats could get sick. Next to the Chickasaw is the cocoplum and closer to the water’s edge are a stand of elderberries though I think those are natural and not part of the planted orchard. Some other things are … hmmm …” Nate saw her close her eyes momentarily before reciting, “Jamaica cherry, the lychee will finish this month, pitomba, sea grapes, white sapote, and those cactus that Benji doesn’t like are actually dragonfruit. Your buyers should also like the mangoes and papayas. There will be other things next month but mostly just a continuation of what is coming in this month. Is that enough? Is it good?”
Buzzing from the sangria Nate said, “Let’s get the kids to bed and I will show you how good.”
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