“Where are we going?”
“We’ve got an invitation to a party. I’ve got some more questions for the host.”
Arriving at my ride on the top floor of the Collections Agency lot, blanketed in the harsh bronze light of day, I pause for a second to check the messages on my phone. Among the usual work-related memos is one from Myra with the subject line “Jessi Rodgers” and an address, some place at the southern edge of town in the shady, industry-heavy warehouse district.
“Son of an ass, Myra.” I said it aloud, scowling. The place is not on my way home, and I had just stopped worrying about the girl, but if I go home now I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep. Those bad thoughts creep in. The ones of Jessi Rodgers in the hospital, rasping. The ones from my childhood, the image of a box with a folded letter on top sitting on the cold gray cement floor of my parents’ house, just inside the faded yellow front door…
Damn you, Myra. You’ve wrecked my whole day.
I get on my ride and head out of the lot, annoyed and tired.
The address is a hydroponics warehouse set between old factories. The streets out here are lonely, the pavement cracked all around, the buildings built low and cheap, mostly aluminum poured with synth-foam. The block is deserted except for a single homeless man sleeping in the shadow of a rain collection overhang. The hydro farm itself, a structure of corrugated, ribbed aluminum with a mesh-covered glass roof, doubles my annoyance at Myra. I do not want to be here. The place is just like the one I worked in when I was a little girl, and those are not good memories.
Wanting to get this visit over with, I dismount my ride, walk to the front door, and hit the ringer. A minute or so later, a woman answers the door. She looks old at first glance but is actually middle-aged, her skin weathered by a lifetime of sun exposure and marginal nutrition, her hair thin and gray and brittle. I don’t see any purple spots, but she doesn’t look healthy, either.
“Hello,” she says, looking over my Collections blue-and-blacks with a little bit of fear, her voice soft and barely audible over the drone of machinery coming from nearby factories. “Can I help you?”
“Good morning. My name is Taryn Dare, I’m a Collections Agent. Is there someone here who has taken custody of a minor named Jessi Rodgers?”
The woman relaxes a bit, realizing that maybe I’m not here to toss the place. “Jessi’s my niece,” she says.
“So you’re the legal guardian?”
She tenses a little, like I’m accusing her of something. “I suppose I am. Hadn’t thought of it that way yet.” She offers a hand, dry and dirty with hydro fertilizer powder, and I shake it. The feel of it triggers tactile memories of my youth. “My name is Enna Rodgers,” she says. “What can I do for you?”
“If it’s okay, I’d like to see Jessi.”
“Why? Is something wrong?”
“No, nothing like that. I’m the Agent who found her.”
If Enna Rodgers is angry at me for killing Jessi’s grandfather, she doesn’t show it. “She’s working, but come on in.”
She steps aside, and I walk through the door into a long, spare warehouse lined with high racks of strawberry plants, their roots hooked into a lattice of hydro tubes. It’s a simple setup with reflective floors and walls bouncing the natural light flooding in from the transparent ceiling. Some farms use hydraulic adjusters to maximize sun exposure, but that’s not likely to be cost effective on a strawberry crop, and it looks like these people can’t afford that type of equipment anyhow.
“Nice looking farm,” I offer. “You guys doing well?”
“We’re surviving,” the woman replies, standoffish. She turns toward the long rows of green, leafy plants and shouts, “Jessi! Jessi! Come here!”
The sound of footsteps approaches from somewhere among the crops, neither slow nor fast, and after a few seconds, the leaves part and the little girl from the mine emerges, squeezing out from between two rows. She’s in a little gray work jumpsuit splashed with water and stained in places with green and brown streaks, and she’s carrying a pollination tool. She’s out of breath, and I can hear a slight wheezing every time she inhales.
“Someone’s here to see you,” says the aunt.
The little girl takes half a step back when she sees me. Of course she’s afraid. I kneel down to look her in the eye, and I ask, as gently as I can, “You recognize me, don’t you, Jessi?”
She looks away. “Yes.”
“You know,” I tell her, “I grew up on a farm a lot like this. Worked the racks, just like you.”
She has to pause before she speaks, her breath raspy and labored. “Why are you here?”
“Jessi,” her aunt scolds, “be polite.”
“It’s okay,” I tell her. The little girl has a good point. I can’t do her any good. Or I won’t, anyway. I’m here to make myself feel better, and I’m wasting these people’s time. “I came because I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry. And I wanted to make sure you’re all right.”
She says nothing for a second or two, and I can’t tell if she’s resentful or annoyed or just bored. “Is that it?” she asks.
“That’s it.”
Her face expressionless, she turns away and slips back into the plants, disappearing among the close-packed leaves and ripening berries. Take away the not-yet-ripe fruit, and it could be a moment from my own childhood. I remember sliding between rows of densely-packed leaves, pulling soybeans and dropping them into a bucket for hours on end. I remember the focused look on my dad’s face as he made tweaks and repairs to the hydro equipment. He was short, his hair dark and thick, his jaw square. He was born in a place called Austria, on Earth, and he talked with an accent. My mother was taller than he was, her hair slightly lighter, her eyes blue, a beautiful woman in her day. She came from some place called California, used to tell the story of how she met my father at Cal Tech when she sold him her refrigerator. I remember the way they would smile before times got bad. They used to enjoy working that farm, for reasons I could never understand. There was something like love there. Maybe they thought it was important.
Pulling myself back into the here and now, I stand back up feeling worse than I did before I came here. Stuff like this isn’t like me. I don’t know what I’m doing here. It didn’t turn out well, and it serves me right.
“She don’t mean nothin’ by it,” says Enna Rodgers, apologizing for Jessi.
“I know.” Trying not to sound judgmental, I add, “She’s in rough shape.”
“She’ll manage.”
“You put her to work a day after she leaves the hospital?”
“The doctors didn’t say not to. We need the help, and getting some activity will help her, maybe.”
“I was told she needs an operation.”
“Might,” the woman says defensively. “The doctors told us she might need one. We have to see how she does.”
That might be a lie, I don’t know. Either way, this woman is starting to reveal herself for what she is, and I like her less and less by the minute. “How close are you to paying for it?”
“They’re telling us that the forced sale of her grandpa’s mine won’t even cover the hospital bills she’s already run up. We own this farm, but we’re in the red on seed and fertilizer, and the doctors said the operation would cost something around six thousand. So we’re nowhere close, but we’ll see where we are after this month’s crop goes out.”
These people are one step up from dirt poor. They’ve got no chance of paying that bill, and Enna Rodgers is doing a junk job of convincing me that she’s even thought about trying to. As if wanting to apologize but unwilling to admit any wrongdoing, she offers, “I want you to know we don’t harbor any grudges against you, miss.”