Klay took a drink. “All right. So the first draft comes back. Porfle writes ‘balls size of grapefruit blowing in wind’ would be better as ‘testicles like grapefruit blowing in the wind.’ I say okay. Then I get another email marked urgent. ‘Urgent! Tom, worried about testicles in wind. Please respond ASAP!’ I write him back. He wants to know was there actually a wind on that day and was it strong enough to move such large balls? Or, ‘more likely, were they not in fact swinging because of the bull’s gait? Possibly there was only a breeze,’ he writes me. ‘So, not blowing.’

“I turn in my draft, he writes in the margin, ‘Tom, there are several varieties of grapefruit and we don’t know which one you’re referring to.’ He asks me to be more specific, ‘as with navel oranges, for example.’”

“Yeah,” Tenchant said. “We’d just done that evolution-of-citrus story. I asked him if he wanted a specific variety for your story. I didn’t know it would become a thing. I just—”

“So, I write back, ‘Readers know grapefruits vary in size. The point is they were unusually large fucking balls, which “grapefruit” connotes.’ I say navel oranges might be familiar to readers, but the balls on the bull I saw were definitely larger than navel oranges, which is why I called them grapefruits.”

“That’s probably when he called me to his office,” Tenchant said. “Er, cubicle now.”

“Cubicle?”

“Sharon’s moving the magazine staff into cubicles.”

“That’s going to suck for you,” Klay said.

“You, too. Don’t you read your emails?”

“Fuuuck.” Klay sighed. For a moment he’d forgotten this was his last assignment. He wasn’t going back to the magazine. You’re quitting, remember?

Tenchant said, “So, I walk into Porfle’s office, and he’s on the phone. He points at your manuscript with his pencil. ‘Check into this,’ he mouths to me.”

“Check into grapefruit?”

“Yeah,” Tenchant said. “So, I start researching grapefruit. It was pretty interesting. The American grapefruit started out in Malaysia. Spanish missionaries brought pomelos over here, and grapefruits grew out of that. The originals were all white. Then one day this Texas farmer finds a red one. It’s sweeter than the white ones. Americans go crazy for them. All of a sudden, grapefruit farmers start making money—this is the Great Depression. They patent a version and call it Ruby Red. It’s sweet and dark red. They make it the Texas state fruit.”

“Fascinating.” Klay sighed.

“Yeah. I thought so. Then one year there’s a huge storm and all the Ruby Reds fade to pink. Taste just as good, but the growers have this big ad campaign going about how delicious an apple-red grapefruit is, and now they’re gone . . .”

Klay told himself to stay engaged in Tenchant’s story. Teamwork, he reminded himself, might be important on this trip.