Charlie Junior winner of the greenhouse in master of planter of fresh trees's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

By morning the twenty-two unknown saplings on the bench looked worse than they had at dawn. Two buyers passed the doorway, saw the UNKNOWN tags, and walked on without asking a price. Charlie Junior counted three days since he had sold anything from that bench. A greenhouse with a quarantined third would not become the region's most trusted source. He needed an eye he did not have. He wiped his hands on his apron and walked the path to the older greenhouse across the settlement. Shannon Bell ran that house. She had grown seed cones back from ruin. His mother trusted her. If anyone could name a sapling by leaf and stem, it was her. He found her inside her glass house, kneeling by a tray of ink pine starts. Her goggles were pushed up on her cap. She was pinching a yellowed needle between her thumb and finger, frowning at it like it owed her money. "I need help," Charlie Junior said. "Twenty-two saplings. I can't name them. Buyers are walking off." Shannon set the needle down. "You tagged the rest?" "Every one. Parent tree, location, date." She stood and brushed her knees. "Then you already did the hard part. Show me." They walked back together. Shannon took her time at the bench. She lifted each sapling out of its planter, turned the leaves, rubbed a stem between her fingers, snapped a twig near her ear. She did not speak for a long time. Charlie Junior stood with the ledger open and a fresh cedar tag in his hand. "Red oak," she said, and he wrote it. "Red oak. Hornbeam. Another hornbeam. This one's a birch, not a maple. Somebody sold your father bad seed." She kept going. She named eighteen without pausing. At the nineteenth she stopped. She held it under the light and turned the pot slowly. "This one I don't know," she said. "And these last three match it. Four saplings from a parent neither of us has seen." Charlie Junior looked at the four. "Can you guess?" "I won't guess. Not for your buyers." She set the sapling down. "You've got eighteen back on the floor today. The four stay unknown until the parent shows itself. Could be a year. Could be never." He tagged the eighteen and moved them to numbered rows. He wrote four new lines in the ledger marked UNKNOWN with Shannon's initials beside them. By afternoon the tall buyer came back. Charlie Junior sold him a red oak and two hornbeams off the recovered bench. When the buyer left, Charlie Junior stood over the four remaining pots. Eighteen sales had cleared the doorway. Four saplings sat in a corner with no parent and no name. He had bought his trust back today. He had also learned there were trees growing in his greenhouse from a tree nobody in the settlement could identify.