And I got to.

I got to stand next to a sixteen-year-old the world had already half-written off and say, and mean, you have a gift for this, you should see what you can do, and watch something in his face that had been clenched for years begin, by August, to loosen.

His forty hours ended in July.

He kept coming until the frost.

When I asked him why, once, he shrugged and said, “Somebody’s gotta keep you from killing the tomatoes,” which was, I understood, a sixteen-year-old boy’s way of saying he had nowhere else that felt like this, and neither, God help me, did I.