By the end of the season, the first "cashew apple" had formed. Arthur sat on his porch, carefully roasting the single nut he had harvested, the smoke curling into the chilly mountain air. It was the most expensive, labor-intensive nut in the world, but as he took that first bite, he wasn't in the valley anymore. He was back on the coast, nineteen years old, with the whole world ahead of him.
The old hardware store in the valley didn't usually stock tropical curiosities, but there it was: a single, spindly sitting between the native oaks and bags of mulch. For Arthur, buying it wasn't just a gardening project; it was a gamble on a memory.
But Arthur was stubborn. He spent the autumn building a specialized greenhouse, a glass sanctuary filled with humidifiers and heat lamps to mimic a tropical paradise. He talked to the tree while he pruned it, telling it stories of the sun-drenched cliffs where its ancestors grew.
