Tom Lake(47)

11


Joe didn’t want to talk about it last night when we went to bed, and when I wake up in the morning he’s already out there. He’s wondering if Maisie or Nell will have children, and if those children who won’t grow up here will want to take over the farm someday. He’s thinking about what will happen to the farm without another generation of family to protect it after we’re gone, after Emily and Benny are gone. He is thinking about Emily and Benny being gone. He is thinking about the developers who relentlessly sniff the perimeter of our land, the strangers who knock on our door in February to ask if we wouldn’t rather spend the winter in Florida. They are the enemies of stone fruit. They would leave just enough trees in the ground to justify calling the place Cherry Hills or Cherry Lane, then pull the rest up and build pretty white summer houses with picture windows and wraparound porches, places we could never afford. And that’s the good scenario. The bad scenario, the one where the trees eventually die? Joe isn’t thinking about that one and I know this because I’m not thinking about it either.

When Maisie and Nell come downstairs for breakfast I can tell they’ve been staring at their own bedroom ceiling for most of the night, running through the same worst cases. Maybe we should start a family mentalist act, see if we can make a living reading one another’s minds. Maisie’s phone dings at the table and she takes it out of her pocket and stares at it for so long that Nell and I stop and wait for her to tell us.

“What?” Nell says finally.

“Someone’s trapped a litter of feral kittens in their barn and wants to know if I can come by and kill them this afternoon.” Maisie puts her head down on the table.

“Who?” I reach for her phone but she grabs it away.

“We’ll have to see them again,” she says. “You’re better off not knowing.”

“Let them kill their own kittens,” Nell says tiredly. It’s true: Ignore the kittens and you’ll wake up one morning to find the cats outnumber the mice. But still, people need to kill their own kittens. You don’t ask your neighbors to do that for you.

Maisie sighs. “I can’t think about this right now.”

The back door opens and Joe is there looking so worn out I wonder if he got any sleep at all. Joe pretty much never comes back to the house in the morning once he’s gone out. Hazel raises her head and issues a single bark of acknowledgment.

“We’re taking the day off,” he says, jingling the keys in his pocket. “We’re going to the beach.”

We stare at him like he’s someone we’ve never met. “We can’t go to the beach,” Maisie says. “There’s too much work.”

“There’s always too much work and I’ve decided we aren’t doing it today. I’ve already sent Emily home to get her suit.”

We continue to sit. Nell pours milk in her coffee to cool it.

“Go on.” He stands there like a teacher who’s just announced Class dismissed. This is the part where we’re supposed to fly out the door.

“Let’s pick for a while,” I say, looking for the middle path. “Then we’ll knock off early and go to the beach.”

Joe shakes his head. “We never knock off early, in case you haven’t noticed. That’s why we have to do this in the morning, first thing. Go.”

“It’s Tuesday,” I say. “Since when are we off on Tuesday?”

“It’s Thursday,” he says.

Thursday? I wonder if this could be true.

“Are you going to the beach?” Nell asks her father. She tests the coffee. Still too hot.

“I’m going to go check on a couple of things and then I’ll come down.”

“So we’ll work until you’re finished then we’ll all go together.” I meant it to be helpful, Joe can’t do everything by himself, but my suggestion flies all over him.

“Could someone in this family listen to me for a change? I just went through this with Emily. She’s crying. She’s useless. All of you are tired and useless and I want you to go and have some goddamn fun.”

“?‘Some goddamn fun’?” Maisie says. “Oh, well, when you put it like that. I’ll go kill the kittens and then meet you at the beach.”

“Kittens?” Joe asks.

“We’ll go,” I say to him.

He turns around to look out the window above the sink. “Do it now. I don’t want Emily down there by herself.”

This is the fire that ignites us because none of us wants Emily to be at the beach by herself. We clump together in our sorrow. In joy we may wander off in our separate directions, but in sorrow we prefer to hold hands. I head upstairs for my swimsuit, towel, and hat. When I come back down Joe’s gone and the girls tell me to go.

“We’ll clean up and make the sandwiches,” Nell calls as I am out the door. “We’re right behind you.”

I take the two--track away from the orchard and towards the woods until I find the smallest break in the trees, a path I know to look for only because I’ve come this way a thousand times. It’s like stepping into a book, one turn and everything changes: cool instead of hot, dark instead of light. Instead of cherry trees, eighty--foot hemlocks and red oaks and white pines, and between those hemlocks and oaks and pines are giant rocks dressed up in mossy sweaters. The girls loved nothing more than to lie on those rocks when they were little, press their faces into the cool, shaggy green and pretend they were mermaids flung from the sea by a towering wave. They squeezed their legs together and flopped them like sad tails. A century ago these very rocks must have been in the orchard, and those ancestors who are buried up the hill beneath the daisies must have dug them up and dragged them here. They had already cut down all the oaks and pines, planed them into boards and sent them out into the world to be reassembled into houses and ships. Tired as they were, the ancestors took the time to pull the stumps and burn them. Then they planted the fields with cherry trees. Maybe they had left the half mile of woods that stands between the orchard and the beach because they’d lost the strength to cut it down. Maybe the men lived to be fifty before a rock or a tree or a horse tipped over and crushed them. Maybe the women died at forty--five giving birth to their eighth or ninth or tenth child. Maybe they never went to the beach in the summer, not even once. Maybe picking cherries really is the least of it.