THE ALARM WENT OFF AT THREE O’CLOCK. Sarah and I climbed out of our sleeping bags and got dressed in the dark, holding onto one another for support while we pulled on our pants. One of the dogs had come down with us, and she got up and stood around awkwardly, not sure why we were so busy in the middle of the night. We headed up the hill and toward the barnyard. It was crisp and completely clear, and the walnut trees in the field above the road stood out sharply. We could see our breath, and Sarah had her shoulders up around her ears, rubbing her hands together as we hurried through the wet grass.

The packing shed was all lit up when we came into the barnyard, but the other buildings around were dark, and the yard light hadn’t been turned on. I could see the shadow of someone hurrying toward the summer kitchen, an apprentice going to brush her teeth. There were noises coming from the shed: the creak of the pallet jack, the heavy thump of the cooler door, the loud rolling of the pallets on the floor of the truck. Suddenly there was a crack of broken wood as a pallet was forced into place, followed by a series of crashing noises. I went up and saw my father throwing boxes of lettuce out of the truck.

His anger wasn’t normal; there was something frantic about it, slightly unhinged. He saw me and yelled, “This is all wrong! Everything is completely fucked up! Whoever put these pallets together completely fucked up. They won’t fit. There’s no way it’s going to fit!”

I started to pick up some of the boxes that he’d thrown.

“The beans are missing! I know those Jades aren’t here, they can’t be.”

This anger was a fever that fed on itself, a cycle of recrimination and regret. The farm, the place that he had given everything to, had betrayed him.

If he didn’t have complete control over those acres, over those fields of tomatoes, over the boxes of lettuce that he was trying to cram into the back of the truck now, then what could he control?

I thought now, not for the first time, that he might have a heart attack there on the concrete floor of the packing shed. What would I do if he suddenly collapsed? I would run to the phone down in his office, wake up the sleepy volunteer who manned the fire station in Three Springs. I would wait while he roused another EMT and they drove the ten miles to our house. Then I would wait while they took him to the hospital in McConnellsburg, forty minutes from the farm, the red flashing lights bouncing across the empty fields, and then I would sit outside in the bright light of the inadequate emergency room.

I managed the delicate process of bringing him back to reason. I kept working, agreed with him about the mistakes, and I asked him questions that would draw the focus away from the beans. After a few minutes two apprentices came into the shed, still bleary eyed. My father had calmed down almost completely by then, and the earlier scene didn’t seem like such a big deal; they helped him put the pallet back together, and one of them promised that he’d seen the beans go on the night before, so they had to be there now. The apprentices reassured him and stayed out of his way, and eventually he put the last pallet on the truck. It slid into place smoothly, filling the last square inches, and he pulled the door down roughly and latched it.

Sarah and I went to the kitchen to put coffee in our thermos, and thirty seconds later we heard one truck start and then another one, until there was a huge rumble in the barnyard. The first of them, the one my father was driving, went barreling down the hill toward the mailbox and then up and out of the hollow. The next truck stopped in front of the house and we ran out and climbed in. The apprentice driving lurched into gear and set off to catch my father. There was a little bunk behind the seats. Sarah climbed back and pulled a blanket over herself. I wiped down the foggy windshield so that the driver could see, cleaned off the mirrors, and adjusted the heat. I poured two cups of coffee from the thermos, one for me and one for the driver, and sat back.

We caught up to my father at the end of the driveway. The headlights of the third truck were behind us now, and the convoy all pulled out onto the paved road at once, my father in the lead. He drove very fast, lumbering down the center, the smaller trees and weeds on the shoulder whipping in the backdraft, a little storm in our headlights. We came out of the darkness of the trees and into the open fields. My father kept out a close eye for deer, but he didn’t slow down. He’d do his best to avoid a collision, but he’d also welded a special steel cage to the front of the trucks years ago, heavy enough to deflect a full-grown whitetail buck. The steel had been bent by past collisions, but it had always held, and on Monday, after market, someone could simply rinse it off with a hose if need be.

When we got to the end of the Boy Scout Road, my father stopped at the stop sign and the other truck idled behind him. Sarah sat up, sleepy and rumpled.

“What’s going on?”

“He’s eating his pie.”

She grunted and lay back down. My father always put an extra pie in the cab of his truck the night before, and he always stopped and ate a little bit of it once we’d cleared the Boy Scout Road. After a minute or two the brake lights flashed, and then he was out on the smoother, larger road, accelerating. Our truck jumped and pulled out, the one behind us came too, and we were all on our way, toward Washington.

THE DRIVE WAS 120 MILES, AND AN HOUR FROM THE CITY, JUST OVER SOUTH MOUNTAIN, THE SKY STARTED TO LIGHTEN. Here it was still farms and fields and looked probably much like it had when Confederate troops had marched through on the way to Gettysburg, misty hills and split rail fences. A few miles later, down the mountain and closer to Frederick, all the open space was filled with subdivisions and shopping centers, the road expanded to five lanes and then six, and then we were on the Beltway, driving into the city. The neighborhoods were quiet; the streetlights were still on. We passed a man in a hooded sweatshirt, a cup of coffee in one hand and the leash of his dog in the other. The dog turned his head toward the commotion of the trucks, and he and his master watched, slightly befuddled, as our battalion rolled into their quiet neighborhood and disappeared around a corner.

We stopped at the gas station on River Road, and the clerk handed over the bathroom key just as he’d been doing for fifteen years. We washed our faces in the sink, and someone brushed his teeth; then we gathered again in the parking lot. My father was already back in his truck and had started it, but the rest of us paused to pour cups of coffee from the thermos. We stretched our legs, talked about how hot it was going to get, and put off getting back into the trucks for as long as we could.

We pulled into the school yard at seven. My father parked the truck, coming in way too fast and then stopping exactly where he wanted to, his bumper just a few inches from the wall of the building that sat beside the lot where we were going to set up. He opened the back door, raising it just a few inches against some unexpected resistance, and the cold air we’d brought with us from the coolers at the farm flowed out. A few raspberries also rolled out of the gap, and we watched as they landed on the bumper. My father threw the door up all at once, and there were raspberries spilled everywhere; a few flats had collapsed, leaning drunkenly against the door, and they came pouring out, rolling across the pavement.

There wasn’t time to dwell on the loss. The doors of the other trucks rolled up noisily, and an apprentice jumped into the back of each one and started handing down boxes to everyone still standing at the back. Eight or nine local kids also helped at these markets, mostly high school kids, and everyone ran the boxes out into the open space, set them down, and came back for more. We worked quickly, my father’s constant patter in the background, “Let’s go everybody; we’re late, we’re late. Put that bread over there; the eggs go here beside the tree. We need more lettuce out here. Fix these mushroom boxes and get the tables up for the flowers.”

After an hour, there were three lines of vegetables set up, maybe fifty feet long, with aisles between them so that people could shop. There were two tables of herbs and another one of flowers. There was a set of tall wicker baskets filled with loaves of different breads, and a table filled with pies, cookies, and pastries. There were coolers of cheese and eggs, and one of frozen chickens. There was a huge arrangement of berries, flats of plums, and baskets of peaches. There were flat cases of lettuce, bunches of chard, a mountain of beets.

I stopped and looked at it for a second, all spread out there in the bright sun, waiting.

A few customers always came early and hung around watching. A man stuck his head in the back of the truck to ask if there were going to be any Nittany apples, but the guy unloading didn’t stop moving boxes, just paused for a second to make it clear that he was bothered. “Yeah, we’ve got them in here. We open at eight.” The man said thanks and reported back to the group of other customers, then returned to his car to sit alone and listen to the radio.

At eight, the cashiers threw their boxes open, and a line of customers formed. They brought up baskets of raspberries and bags of lettuce and piled it all on the table. The cashiers weighed everything, tallied the prices on calculators, and the line started to move. The customers handed over cash or wrote checks, and the cashiers made change. Then they bagged everything up and handed it over. The customers struggled off to their cars, lugging heavy canvas LL Bean bags they brought with them or the paper bags we provided, and another customer moved up and took a place at the table.

I was cashiering at the end of the table, and I didn’t look up again for the first hour. By eight fifteen the line already had fifty people in it, and it was getting longer, and the crowd still shopping was another hundred people. The orders were huge, sometimes three or four shopping baskets full of vegetables. I weighed four pounds of okra and two pounds of crimini mushrooms, counted three loaves of multigrain bread and two sourdough baguettes, bagged up three pints of blueberries and two quarts of apricots. I weighed chickens and blocks of yogurt cheese, bunches of dill and parsley, boxes of small red potatoes. I told the customer the total, sometimes more than a hundred dollars’ worth of vegetables, and they handed it over gladly.

The only time I stopped was when my father found out that he’d been right: the green beans weren’t all there. He got on the phone and called home. My mother reported that there were seven cases of them sitting on the other loading dock. He looked at his watch and made the calculation about when they’d get there, looked over at the quickly emptying cases of the beans we hadn’t forgotten. “I think we need them.” There was a pause while my mother argued. “Just send him, we need them. And tell him to drive fast.”

BY TEN THIRTY MY FATHER WAS SELLING VEGETABLES AS FAST AS HE COULD. He went around and opened new boxes of peas, heaped up the display of lettuce, directed the apprentices to get more bread or to consolidate the baskets of peaches. While he did this, he was talking to a constant stream of customers, telling someone how to cook something, someone else how much longer we’d have nectarines, someone else a price. A scrum of middle-aged women had developed around him, three or four of them waiting to ask him some question or another, and the woman he was talking to had her hand on his arm and was laughing at some joke he’d just made. I went over to ask him a question from a customer about how much longer we’d have blueberries, and I had to wait in line like everyone else.

By the time I got his attention a man holding a little boy was talking to him, and the little boy was smiling shyly. “Jim’s a farmer, Noah!” The boy looked at him and smiled again, then looked away. “He loves the raspberries,” the man said to my father, and he nodded gladly. “They are beautiful right now,” my father said. He smiled at the kid. “I remember you from when you were just a baby! How old are you now, four?” The boy looked away. My father asked him if he wanted to get up on the back of the truck. He couldn’t resist the offer and beamed while my father picked him up and set him down next to a stack of cabbage boxes.

My father left the boy and his father on the back of the truck and walked toward a pile of corn and picked up an ear. He opened it, looked at the kernels, and had a bite. Without looking up, he yelled, “Folks, we’ve got beautiful corn today! Really beautiful! It came out of the field yesterday morning, folks, and it’s fresh as can be. We’re so proud of this corn.” Two or three people came over while he walked away to check on the carrots. Within a minute there were ten people around the corn, squeezing the ears and filling up bags of it. A woman said to a stranger next to her, “He says it was picked yesterday,” as they both grabbed another ear.

“Folks, if you haven’t tried kohlrabi, you need to give it a chance. It’s right over here; we’ve got a great crop.” A woman picked up one of the weird green bulbs and looked at it suspiciously. “How do you eat this?” “Well, just peel it and slice it thinly, put a little salt on it. I eat it almost every day.” It was salesmanship but it was also the truth. “How do you pick them out?” the woman asked. “Well, they’re all good, really. These are two nice ones,” he said and handed them to her. She put them in her bag. He turned away, still talking. “Folks,” he said, “we’ve got some great green beans this week. They’re called Jade, and they’re some of the best we grow.”

Over the years, my father had developed relationships with hundreds of people at his market. Some of them had been buying vegetables from him for forty years, and he knew their sons and daughters, and often their grandkids too. Some of the conversations were just about how well the apricots had worked in a tart the week before or about how much basil was needed to make a cup of pesto, but some were more serious. At one point he stepped away and spoke quietly with a woman whose husband was sick, and later a very old man found him and pulled him aside to talk about the problems he’d been having with his hip. He spent time with each person, patiently, and he also worked while they talked, adjusting a display of leeks or picking out a few bad raspberries.

Lots of these customers knew me and my sister too, and when they came up to the table to have their purchases rung up, they asked me about how I’d liked living in Massachusetts, about Sarah, about how my sister was doing and if she liked living in Pittsburgh. Sometimes some of the older ones, women especially, would ask me what my plans were, if I was going to get married soon and if I had a good plan for finding work after the season was over, and sometimes they gave unsolicited advice about how I should go about finding an apartment, or demanded that I e-mail someone they knew who might have a lead on a good job.

During the first two decades that my father set up markets in these neighborhoods, he had always alerted his customers that he was there by holding a bell out the window of the truck and hitting it with a wrench as he drove slowly along. There were a few other simple marketing techniques; on days in January when the weather was horrible, he handed out “corn coupons,” which entitled people to three free ears of corn when they came back in August, and every spring he mailed out a schedule of markets to a mailing list he kept in an old manila folder.

His relationships were the most important part of marketing his business. The co-op handled most of the wholesale business, to chefs and stores, and so almost all of my father’s customers were people from the neighborhood. Most people walked to market, but some of them drove, and they often owned old Volvos or Mercedes with stickers in the back window from Princeton and Grinnell College. It was a crowd typical of the neighborhoods in Washington where he’d always set up, Cleveland Park and the Palisades. They generally leaned liberal, and many of them worked somehow with the government.

There was a general counsel for the congressional Republicans, along with the directors of organizations that covered food safety and another who handled consumer protection. There were hundreds of lawyers, and just as many mid-level bureaucrats, and there were ambassadors and journalists. A curator of Dutch painting from the National Gallery came, and a woman who had worked at National Geographic for forty years. My father knew some of these people very well, and even occasionally socialized with some of them outside of market, but he was extremely proud of all his customers.

At eleven, the green pickup from the farm pulled up with the missing beans. My father ran down to the truck and started to pull the boxes from the back, ran them up, and set them in the empty space.

“Folks, everyone should know that the beans just got here. We love these beans, folks, really love them; they’re called Jade, and they’re some of the best ones we grow.”

A few people came over and started to pick up handfuls.

“Really, folks, you can trust me about these beans. They’re a great size right now, and this is the peak of the season for them.”

Now there was a small knot of people filling bags, a slight frenzy around the boxes.

“I’m serious, folks, these beans really are delicious. I ate them for dinner last night with just a little butter, and that was all they needed.”

Half of the box was gone in a minute or two, and my father opened up another one.

He set it to the side and stood back, watching people take his good advice, and then he moved on to the snap peas.

It was hot by now, the grubby heat that Washington was known for, and everyone was sweating. There were frozen jugs of water in the coolers with the cheese, and every few minutes someone checked them to see if they had melted into water they could drink. There were ten cashiers working now, all full tilt, and when someone left to use the bathroom, the line in front of the tables swelled noticeably. A cashier’s calculator stopped working, so she tallied the orders on a paper bag while she waited for a replacement. Another cashier tried to eat a pear and had to set it down after a single bite, abandoning it to the yellow jackets while she helped the next customer.

The people stocking the vegetables never stopped either. They ran a constant circuit, taking out full boxes and coming back with a stack of empties in their arms, reporting back to the people in the trucks which supplies were getting low. An apprentice with a fifty-pound box of watermelons in his hands shouldered his way through the crowd, and another person tried to empty a few new sacks of corn onto the pile. The customers couldn’t wait and grabbed the new ears directly out of the bag—he had to gently nudge them away, like kittens at a bowl of milk. The crowd had been this steady for four hours, and there were no signs of it slowing down.