Free Laugh by Mary Ann Rivers Page A

share boxes. Plus, we have that whole field of banana peppers, which I know you’re worried about, but I think will be okay for rounding out this contract. Alison has the pickling recipe from Vadnais ready to go for the newsletter.”
    “When will the pickles be ready for the farm store?” Nina took careful notes. She was worried about the pepper field. She wanted to bask in Tay’s enthusiasm but felt a blunt nudge from experience that they weregoing to lose money.
    “They’ll be there for Cider Weekend in September. I called Dennis from the field to prep him for the yield and he’s positive the original contracts we put together will totally work.”
    “That’s a lot of pickles.”
    Tay grinned. “Fucking delicious pickles. People are going to go nuts. I can’t wait to approve that sauerkraut commission, we totally gotta get in on the fermented shit, Neens. Kombucha, sauerkraut, kimchi—it’s like a thing.”
    Nina laughed. “Well, you’re never wrong. I trust you.”
    Tay grinned. “Seriously. I’m never wrong. These pickles are going to make a pile and you and Dennis will be so happy, then I’ll be happy because I have my eye on this heirloom pickling cuke that all the old-timers tell me stays bright in the brine and I don’t know. Fucking satisfying to bring back varieties like that, you know me.”
    “You’re the comeback kid, I do know.” Nina let herself get excited, just a little, about the pickles, even though as a farmer she was categorically suspicious of counting any kind of chicken in advance. But Tay really wasn’t ever wrong and she was the comeback kid.
    Tay had been raised on a farm in Iowa and worked her way up to management for a consolidated ag company when her peers were still partying at college.
    Then, devastatingly, she was arrested and served eight years in prison on a guilt-by-association charge after her live-in boyfriend got his growing operation noticed, including the kitchen-table dealing and processing.
    In prison Tay started reading about small-scale agriculture and heirloom varieties, and got a community college extension degree in management.
    For two years, the conditions of her parole were that she couldn’t grow anything, not even a houseplant, and Tay stayed straight, because she had already found Nina on the internet, printed out the Paz Farms home page, and thumbtacked it over her kitchen sink.
    The day after Tay was released from her parole, Nina got her letter, all six pages of it plus a résumé.
    “Where’s Rach? I didn’t see her in the kitchen.”
    “She went to run the new menu copy to that letterpress I checked out. The one where Sam’s sister works.”
    Tay waited, her blue eyes bright.
    Nina just raised an eyebrow.
    “You like him.”
    “I’ve worked with him twice.” Nina had to look away. Tay was too open, too
accepting.
She was always wanting things for people, the people she loved. Wanting their happiness. Their success. She tended to peoplelike she did her fields, and people and plants grew for her.
    Tay always claimed she owed Nina her happiness, her livelihood, her life, but the truth was, without Tay, Nina’s business would still just be a muddy cooperative with barely enough left over to plant seeds in leased fields.
    And without Tay, there’d be barely enough left over of Nina Paz to grow another season.
    Tay had served time, worked her way out of parole and into another life, but Tay sprung Nina from her prison, let her escape when she felt like she didn’t deserve it.
    She couldn’t think about Sam and what she might want from him and look into the eyes of the woman who had given Nina everything she cared for in life.
    Not yet.
    “You spent two whole days with him, nearly.” Tay’s voice was patient. Tay knew Nina.
    “Working. He’d never even been in a field before.”
    “You hired his sister for the menus?”
    “Rachel checked her out, I just mentioned Sarah’s press—you know Rachel’s been wanting letterpress