Free Kindred by Tammar Stein Page A

lettuce and strawberries could squish. The flowers keep poking me in the eye. I feel a blush coming on; I must seem like such an amateur. There’s a reason mixing business and pleasure is usually a bad idea.
    “Your parents must be proud of you, beautiful,” she says, giving me a chance to finish writing her last quote.
    I look up from my notepad and smile. “Thanks.”
    “You should come by the farm one day,” she says. “Might make a nice story, and even if it doesn’t, you’d like it there.”
    “Really?”
    “Sure. We’ll put you to work. I can tell you’re a city girl. You should see where your food comes from.”
    “Yeah, I should. I’m Miriam,” I say, shifting my packages so we can shake hands.
    “Trudy,” she says. “That’s Hank over there.”
    She points to a man, wrinkled and tanned, unloading more produce, adding it to their table loaded with big juicy strawberries, long stalks of rhubarb, small mountains of sugar snap peas and a complicated structure of broccoli. He’s tall and thin, like a younger version of the farmer in
American Gothic
. He’s missing a pitchfork and glasses, and he has a trimmed beard, but he has the same patient look and gaunt frame of the man in the painting. He looks up when he hears his name. I wave.
    As I fumble for my wallet to pay for my purchase, Trudy pushes away the money. “This is your welcome present to Hamilton,” she says over my protests. “Come to the farm,” she says again, and squeezes my hand. She gives me a recipe for tomato-and-cheese pie, assures me it’s easy and delicious and turns to help the next person in line.
    I leave the market clutching my veggies, my flowers and my first story idea.
    I spend the rest of the weekend polishing up the farmers’ market piece. I’ve interviewed a young mom and her three-year-old, his mouth stained bright red from strawberries. A city official has given me a couple of statistics on how much revenue the market brings in, how long it’s been active. I move the quotes around in the story, write three different leads and e-mail my favorite three drafts to my mom, my dad and Mo to help me choose which is best. When they e-mailback with opinions and each with a different favorite opening, I spend another couple of hours debating whether to implement their suggestions or not. In the end, I keep the article as I first wrote it.
    On Monday, back at the office, I print out the article and show it to Frank. I hold my breath as he skims it, waiting for his reaction. Less than a minute after he’s started reading it, he nods and puts it down.
    “Good,” he says. “We’ll run it Friday.”
    I fight to pull off a blasé face, as if I regularly have articles accepted for publication. From Frank’s suppressed smile, I can tell I’m not fooling anyone.
    “I think there’s another story there,” I say with studied casualness. “That vendor I quoted from Sweetwater Farm is local. It’s the only CSA farm in the county.”
    Frank, now clicking at something on his computer screen, utters a distracted “Hmm?”
    “It’s where people pay for the farm costs and then get a share of the harvest. It’s all organic. All local.”
    He stops typing and thinks for a second. “Are they hippies?” he asks suspiciously.
    “Only a little.”
    His tongue pokes around his mouth. He sucks his teeth. I hold my breath.
    “Yes, it could work,” he finally says. “Is it safe to presume you’d like to cover this?”
    I try to play cool, but my whole face lights up in excitement. Frank laughs. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
    “Yes!”
    “All right, Miriam. Six hundred words. You have until the end of the month.”
    I float back to my desk, grinning like a fool.
    I e-mail Mo and my parents, so excited I can barely stand it. This is even better than my first published piece. This is my first story idea. I shoot Trudy an e-mail with the news and ask for a good time to come over for the interview. Although a lot of reporters