Bittersweet Fruit

As a teen, he joined the John Birch Society and slept with a pistol in his closet to ward off the commies if they invaded. When his sister brought home Joan Baez albums, he smashed them, calling the singer "a subversive." Later, he held Brenner personally responsible for overhyped health concerns about Alar that damaged apple growers -- despite the fact that she'd never reported on the chemical -- and defined her as the kind of "card-carrying, flag-burning evangelist from the American Civil Liberties Union" he hated.

None of this stopped her, a couple of years into Carl's fight with cancer, from getting up one morning and telling her husband, "I am flying to Washington state, and I will not be back for weeks. I hope you do not have a problem with this."

She didn't warn her brother, for fear he would tell her not to come.

On the plane, she read up on apples, preparing reporter-style questions she hoped would help her enter Carl's world. When she got to Seattle, she called him. She planned to rent a car and drive east through the mountains.

"Drive? To Wenatchee?" he told the globe-trotting journalist. "You would get lost on your way to the Wal-Mart."

Over the next weeks, she worked beside him in orchards and packinghouses, asking her questions, trying to know her brother through the fruit he loved. Sometimes she found it joyous to be with him, "two only children in the same family, trying to connect."

Sometimes she didn't.

"What the hell are you doing here, anyway?" Carl raged at one point. "You don't have any idea how complicated it is to run an orchard. You're a city person. City people think that apples are something you buy at the grocery store."

"You have been a [expletive] your whole life," she shot back. "And whatever you do, I am not leaving. You will not send me away. You can be as angry as you want."

A pause. "Okay, I appreciate that," he said.

She is asked, now, why she thinks her brother was so angry.

"He was needy. He was lonely." Anger and need were "tangled together" inside him.