The tomato had a name, which was the problem. Officially it was Scaffold Red 6. On row six it was Auntie, because an actual aunt had saved the first seeds in a tin that still smelled faintly of cardamom. Auntie failed the new salt assay by a margin Tomasz Bell could not, in conscience, round away.

"If I leave it on the recommended list," he told the block meeting, "I am telling a stranger it will set fruit in the beds we have now. It will set some fruit. It will also sulk, split, and blame the gardener. The assay is not a villain. It is a table."

Someone said the Guardian should decide, and someone else said the Guardian had ruined joy, and both sentences had been said in this city so often they had lost their seasoning. The slate, obligingly, showed yield per liter and sodium per mouthful. It did not show a winner. Tomasz had asked it, once, in a weaker year, to rank taste. It had answered: I do not have a mouth. He kept that reply in his desk and took it out when he was tempted to be mystical.

The compromise was invented by a girl of about twelve who was not trying to invent policy. "Put Auntie on the end, with a sign," she said. "Put the new one where the sun is better. Have a party if Auntie wins a bowl and don't lie if she doesn't."

The sign, when Tomasz wrote it, was not charming. HIGH SALT. VARIABLE YIELD. EAT IT BECAUSE YOU WANT TO. The new cultivar, a Graft oak-neighbor with no nickname yet, took the warm beds. Auntie kept the last three meters and a small ferocity of care. The festival was scheduled before anyone could call it a memorial.

On the day, the new fruit was correct. It was also a little dull, the way a person can be correct and dull and still be who you want beside you in a storm. Auntie was late, sweet, and salted like an olive that had opinions. People argued, which was the point of serving both. A man cried, briefly, into a napkin, and was brought water and not a speech. Tomasz ate one of each and logged them as what they were: a door kept open, a warning kept visible, a neighborhood that had declined to be optimized out of its own memory.

He filed the split-bed ruling under a code that meant exception, review in one season. The Channel stored the assay. The tin, empty of seeds and full of smell, stayed on a windowsill where the sun could not be managed. In the evening the better light went, as it usually did, to the plants that had not been given a legend. Tomasz did not apologize to them. He adjusted a tie, wrote the date, and walked home past a sign that trusted people to read.