Ornate heart with red swirls

The graft took, though you'd never have believed it from the state of the stock. Dad cut the two Bramley whips in March, one from the north wall and one from the old tree by the gate, and bound them the way he always did, tongue into tongue, so the cambium lined up like two halves of a folded page. I told him they'd never agree with each other. He said that was rather the point.

Now, in August, the join is thick and the fruit is hanging off both sides at once, red-cheeked on the one and green on the other, and the wasps have found it before the pickers. I walked the rows this morning with the basket on my hip and counted fifty-one apples on the grafted limb alone. Dad would have counted them twice and then pretended he hadn't.

I found his pencil in the shed, the stub he used for marking trees, and on the back of an old seed packet he'd written the first line of that poem you used to recite at the wedding, the one about counting the ways. Under it, in his square capitals, he'd drawn two curls that met at the bottom like a heart. I didn't know he could draw. I think he was practising for something, and I think it was this.

Come home for the picking. Bring the girls. I'll leave the ladder against the wall, and the top rung will be yours, the way it always was.

Love, Mum