The Starlite Drive-In

Lancaster County. Saturday.

By Saturday the rental no longer smelled surprising, and Jasper had a system: drive an hour, find a parking lot with a signal, call everyone in range, repeat.

The Starlite was a drive-in of the eat-in-your-car variety — a curl of neon, a kid on roller skates who clipped a tray to the window with the bored grace of someone doing it for the four-thousandth time. Jasper ordered a root beer and a burger he’d actually finish, because despair, it turned out, burned calories.

He’d sent Noah the whole tangled list the night before, and Noah — who did not do anything by halves once he’d decided to do it at all — had turned it into a spreadsheet by morning, cross-referencing nurseries against seed-catalog records, pruning the dead ends before Jasper could waste a call on them. Skip the first six, Noah had texted at 6 a.m. Ornamental only. Try the three I starred — they actually carry heirloom capsicum.

The first starred number was a seed supplier outside Lancaster. The woman who answered knew exactly what a Fish Pepper was. “Green and white stripes, goes red? Nearly-lost variety. We don’t carry it — hardly anybody grows it anymore.” A pause. “There’s a place that does. Some collective, out past the city. Share the land, grow the old seeds. I sent them a few packets a couple seasons back.”

Jasper sat up so fast he nearly upended the tray. “Do you have a name? An address?”

“Somewhere. Meadow-something. Let me dig up the invoice.”

He texted Noah before he’d even hung up: LEAD. a collective, grows fish peppers, “meadow-something.” running it down.

Noah, instantly: On it.

For the first time since Brooklyn, Jasper felt the thing he was actually best at — the scattered connections in his head lining up into a single thread — and it didn’t feel like trouble. It felt like use.