The Unhurried Harvest of Her Heart

Drew again. Wednesday, same as always.

The crate of butternut squash rode shotgun in the truck like it had a ticket. I drove the back road past the orchards, past where the red brick of the campus starts showing up between the trees, and pulled into the loading dock behind the biology building at quarter past nine.

Brandon waved me in. He's the grad assistant, thirty, quiet, the kind of guy who fixed the copier before anyone asked.

"Squash delivery," I said. "Tell your people not to cook these. They're for looking at, right?"

"For looking at. Mostly." He took one end of the crate. "Dr. Constance is in, though. She had a question about your soil."

Nobody has questions about my soil. I knew that going in.

Her office is at the end of the hall, second door on the left. She had the door open and she was sitting behind her desk, forty-six years old, silver threading into dark hair she kept short, reading glasses pushed up on her head. She wasn't looking at me. She was looking at the wall calendar.

"Morning," I said.

She didn't jump. That's one thing about her. She never jumps. "Good morning, farmer."

"Constance."

"Set it anywhere. Not on the papers."

I set it on the floor and stood there like an idiot. She was still staring at the calendar. Not reading it. Staring.

"Big deadline?" I asked.

She laughed. Short, dry. "No. It's just... count the squares with me."

I counted. Three weeks marked off with a red line.

"Three weeks until what?"

"My birthday." She took the glasses off her head and put them down. "Forty-seven. I made a rule that I'd have my life figured out by fifty, and now I'm doing the math and it doesn't work."

"Nobody has their life figured out."

"You have a farm. You have soil. Dirt that does what you tell it to." She smiled at me then, the first time in weeks. "I have a hundred and forty students who call me Professor and a rental apartment with furniture somebody else picked."

"That furniture's not bad, though. I carried some of it."

"You did. You carried my desk up two flights and didn't complain once."

"It was a good desk."

We stood there a second. Brandon went past in the hallway with the crate, humming.

"Three weeks," she said again, to nobody. Then she shook it off like a dog shaking water. "Anyway. Are the squash good?"

"They're good."

"Then that's settled. Come back next week. Or don't. But come back."

I came back.

---

Sweet potatoes, the following Wednesday. Two crates, because I over plant sweet potatoes every single year and every single year I swear I'll stop.

It was raining. That mattered later, sort of, but mostly it just meant my boots squeaked on the linoleum all the way down the hall.

She had the door open again. Habit, maybe. Or maybe she heard the squeaking.

"Farmer," she said. "Sit down, I have coffee. It's terrible."

I sat. The coffee was terrible. She was right.

"You know what I did all day yesterday?" she said.

"Taught?"

"Taught about growing things." She held up her mug. "Photosynthesis. Germination. I stood in front of a hundred and forty twenty-year-olds and explained how a seed decides to become a plant. And do you know what struck me?"

"That I'm gonna hate this answer."

"I've never grown anything." She said it like a confession. "Not once. I know the mechanism. I can draw you the pathway on a napkin. I've never put a seed in dirt and waited."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. She gave me a look that said go ahead, laugh, I deserve it.

"You'd hate it," I said. "You'd be out there every hour digging it up to check."

"I would. I absolutely would." She was grinning now. "How do you stand the waiting?"

"You don't stand it. You do other things. The waiting does itself."

"That's very wise and very annoying."

"Thanks."

She pulled one of the sweet potatoes out of the crate and turned it over in her hands like it might teach her something. "Brandon says your fields have been in your family... what, three generations?"

"Four. My grandfather bought the back forty. My dad ran it. Now me. And I'll be honest, some days it feels less like owning it and more like working for it."

"That's called a job, Drew."

"Thanks, professor."

She put the potato back. There was a pause, the kind that goes on one beat longer than it should, and neither of us filled it. Then a student knocked about a lab report and the moment was gone, and I gathered my empty coffee cup and squeaked my way out.

But in the truck, sitting in the rain in the loading dock, I caught myself doing the math. Three weeks minus one. Two weeks until her birthday. I didn't like that I was counting. I did it anyway.

---

The wine bar is called the Graft, which the botany department thinks is hilarious. It's two blocks off campus, dark wood, bad lighting, and every grad student in the department is in there Thursday nights pretending not to talk about work.

I knew she graded papers there Thursdays. Brandon told me. Brandon tells me things the way a good friend plants a seed and walks away, and I see him now, I see exactly what he did.

I didn't dress up. Farmers don't dress up, mostly because we own one good shirt and it's for funerals. I just showed up at eight with rain still on my jacket and found her at the end of the long table, alone with a stack of grading and a glass of red.

"This seat taken?" I asked.

She looked up. Looked at the empty chair. Looked at me.

"It's taken by forty ungraded quizzes," she said. "But they're terrible company. Sit."

I sat. I moved the quizzes over a little so they wouldn't feel left out.

"You don't come here," she said. "I've never seen you here."

"I come here. Sometimes. Thursdays, sort of."

"You are a terrible liar for a man who spends all day with plants that can't call him out."

"Their loss." I flagged the bar guy. "Red for me too, whatever she's having."

"Bold," said Constance. "What if I drink something awful?"

"Then I'll know something new about you."

The bottle came. She poured. We clinked, no toast, just the sound of glass.

"Two weeks," I said, and then immediately wanted to eat the words.

Her eyebrows went up. "You've been counting."

"Maybe."

"You've been counting." She said it slow, tasting it. She turned her glass a quarter turn on the table. "Nobody's counted my birthdays in... well. A long while."

"Somebody should."

"Careful," she said, but she was smiling behind the glass. "Careful, farmer. That sounded like a plan."

"It might be a plan."

"It might." She drank. Set the glass down. "I have a whole speech about this, you know. I've been drafting it for two weeks. It has parts. There's a section where I explain that I'm not fragile, and a section where I explain what I want, and a section that I keep cutting and rewriting because every version sounds insane out loud."

"Don't give the speech."

"No?"

"Just tell me the insane part. Skip the rest."

She looked at the table. Then at me, dead on, the way she looks at a bad data set.

"The insane part is I've been lonely for years and I only noticed it when you started showing up with squash." She held up a hand before I could talk. "Not loneliness like pity. Loneliness like a thing I chose. I chose quiet after forty and it was fine, it was honestly fine, and then some guy in muddy boots started complimenting my calendar count and now it's not fine, it's itchy, and I don't know what to do with itchy."

The rain ticked on the window. Somebody laughed too loud at the other end of the table.

"Okay," I said. "That's not insane."

"It's a little insane."

"It's a little insane," I agreed. "But I've been doing math in a truck about your birthday, so we're probably both a little insane."

She laughed, a real one, the kind that made two grad students look over. She lowered her voice anyway.

"Here's what I'd like," she said. "Slow. I want it slow. I've been moving fast for thirty years, tenure, grants, deadlines, and I want one thing that just takes the time it takes. Like the waiting. The waiting does itself, you said."

"Like the waiting," I said.

"Good." She refilled both glasses. "Because my birthday's in two weeks and I already know what I want for it, and I'm not telling you yet."

"That's cruel."

"That's slow," she said, and touched her glass to mine.

She got about a page into her grading before she gave up on it. I watched her push the stack around, re-square the corners, move her wine glass to the other side so it wouldn't sweat on the quizzes. Busy work. The kind of thing you do when your mouth is working up to something.

"You should know," she said, "that when you sat down, my first thought was that I'm too old for this."

"For quizzes?"

"For being flirted with. Sit there and be flirted with like it's a thing that still happens." She said it flat, like it was a line item on a budget. "Almost forty-seven, Drew. There's a whole stretch of life where a man talks to me and it's just talk. Collegial. Then it stops being a thing I even check for. You stop scanning the room. You know what I mean?"

"I know what you mean."

"And then you walked in with rain on your jacket and sat down and ordered my wine, and for one second I thought, oh no, I'm out of practice. That's the embarrassing part. Not the age. The rust."

I turned my glass a quarter turn on the table, the way she does it, which she noticed, which was the point.

"Constance. Can I tell you something?"

"If it's devastating, yes!"

"I've been flirting with you for a week and a half."

Her head came up. "You have not."

"Squash. The calendar count. Carrying your desk up two flights. That wasn't customer service. That was me flirting, badly, the whole time, and you didn't notice, which means the rust might be on my end too."

She stared at me. Then she laughed, and it wasn't the polite table laugh, it was the loud one, and she had to put her hand over her mouth because the grad students were already looking.

"Two weeks," she said. "And I thought I was being so composed. I thought I was handling it with dignity." She wiped her eye with the heel of her hand. "I was being flirted with and I didn't even clock it. God. Almost forty-seven."

"Forty-seven," I agreed.

"The squash was flirting."

"The squash was flirting."

"The desk was flirting."

"The desk was the boldest move yet. You don't hump furniture up two flights of stairs for a colleague."

She was still laughing, pressing her knuckles to her mouth, and I don't think I'd ever felt so pleased by anything as I was by that. She caught her breath and looked at me over her reading glasses, which she'd put on to grade and forgotten to take off.

"Well," she said. "For the record, I'm pleased. I'm absurdly pleased. A twenty-eight-year-old farmer has been courting me via root vegetables and I missed it entirely."

"That's not the record, that's my confession."

"Same thing in a bar." She took off the glasses and folded them. "Okay. New rule. No more missing it. If you're going to say something like that, I want to hear it when it happens. Slow doesn't mean blind."

"Deal."

"And I'm going to reciprocate. Fair warning. I've been out of practice since roughly the second Obama election, so it may come out strange."

"It'll come out fine."

"It might come out as a fact about germination. I can't promise quality control."

I grinned and finished my wine. She got through four more quizzes that night, which was three fewer than usual, and we both pretended not to notice why.

---

The next Wednesday was squash again, and the Wednesday after that would be sweet potatoes, but Thursday came around soon after, and there we were at the Graft again like it was a standing appointment, which apparently it now was. Nobody had said it out loud. We just both showed up at eight and the grad students had learned to leave the end of the table alone.

She had a flower on the table. That's the part I keep coming back to. She'd brought an actual flower, a lily, in a water glass she'd borrowed from the bar, and she was using it to prep a Monday lecture, and she was talking about it with her hands.

"So the anther sits here, on the stamen, see, and it's just sitting there full of pollen like a powder keg, doing nothing, waiting." She tapped it. "And then something has to come along and carry it. A bee, a moth, the wind. The flower can't move. It can't go find anyone. It just has to be worth finding."

"That seems like a system that works."

"It works beautifully. It's just..." She pulled her reading glasses down her nose and looked at me over them. "It's slow. That's what