Tom Lake(53)

“Maisie, this is Peter Duke,” Joe said. “He’s Editor Webb in the play. And Pallace Clarke, she understudies Lara’s part. Pallace is in Cabaret too, so she’s the busy one. And this is Sebastian Duke. He’s Peter’s brother.”

“What part do you play?” she asked Sebastian, holding his hand.

“I play the brother,” Sebastian said.

“You wouldn’t believe how good he is at it,” Duke said.

Maisie laughed. “You’re going to tell me everything,” she said to Sebastian. “We’ll sit down and you can tell me what it’s like to be the brother of a famous man.”

And Duke, who knew he was destined to be a famous man, smiled.

Joe was dispatched to the orchard to find his uncle but as soon as he turned to leave his uncle walked in the kitchen door. Maisie’s husband was Ken. Ken and Maisie Nelson. Their nephew, Joe. A bouquet of pink and yellow dahlias sat in a green drinking glass on the table. I didn’t know how there would be enough food for everyone but Maisie brought out plenty. Maybe we ate their dinner, too: fried chicken and biscuits and butter beans and corn cut from the cob and baked apples. We ate like children, greedy and unconcerned, and Maisie acted like nothing in the world had ever made her so happy.

“When I was growing up I used to lie in bed at night imagining what other people’s families must be like,” Duke said once the pie was served, cherry pie, which he told her was his favorite. “I would picture their houses, their furniture, what they ate and how they spoke to one another, and what I always pictured was this.” He turned to Joe. “Turns out I spent my entire childhood picturing your family.”

Joe smiled. “You were picturing this particular branch of my family.”

“I was, too,” Pallace said, setting down her fork. “Ever since I walked in the door I’ve been trying to remember what this place reminded me of and that’s it. This is where I wanted to live when I was a kid.”

“We would have been happy to have you,” Ken said.

“Except in my fantasy the family was Black,” Pallace said. “But other than that it’s a very similar vibe.”

Pallace and I tried to help with the dishes after lunch but Maisie shooed us away. “Let Joe show you around. Come back later and help us pick cherries. That’s when we’ll put you to work.”

The kitchen was small so off we went, because of course the work was not really for us. Maisie kept a cutting garden in the backyard, zinnias and dahlias and foxgloves and coneflowers.

The bees made such a racket we thought at first the noise must be coming from someplace other than bees.

“In my vision of the perfect childhood there were no bees,” Pallace said, and Sebastian moved her to his other side so that he would stand between her and the menacing insects.

Joe walked in front of us, pointing out trees. “Those are the Montmorencys.”

“Tart or sweet?” Pallace asked.

“Tart,” he said. “Pie cherries. They’re mostly sold frozen. The pie today was from last year’s frozen cherries. You can take some back with you if you want.”

But we didn’t have a freezer to keep the cherries frozen or an oven to bake a pie.

“And those?” She pointed to a very different group of trees on the other side of the road.

“Plums,” he said, shaking his head. “The plums are a disaster. We’re going to have to take them out.”

“How can plums be a disaster?” I asked.

“Gerber told the farmers they wanted more plums for baby food, but by the time the farmers put in the trees and grew the trees and picked the plums, Gerber said they didn’t want plums anymore.”

“Can’t people just eat them?” Pallace asked.

“I eat them. You probably wouldn’t. No one buys a bag of Stanleys at a fruit stand.”

I had no idea that a Stanley was a plum, or that one plum was made into baby food while another was eaten over the sink. I didn’t know that a Napoleon was a cherry. What I knew was that the four of us were strolling through an orchard with our director, who, after Thursday, would come up here for the rest of the summer to do the work of sorting out his family’s finances. The show would go on. He would go on.

“How long has your family owned the place?” Sebastian asked.

“One Nelson or another has been here for five generations.

Either they hate it—-my father hated it—-or they were like Ken and couldn’t imagine doing anything else. All Ken ever wanted out of life was Maisie and the farm.”

“So who’s up next? Do they have kids?”

Joe walked over and pulled an errant weed near the base of a tree then dropped it in the road. “That’s the question. Their daughter Alice lives in Phoenix. Alice is out. She’s got a husband and kids. They’re settled there, they like the heat. I don’t think she even eats cherries. My cousin Kenny is a forester in the U.P. Everybody’s looking to Kenny to save the day but nobody knows for sure if he’s going to do it, including Kenny. There might not be anything to save anyway.”

Pallace was walking ahead of us in her little yellow shorts. She turned around to face us and started walking backwards. “Are they broke?”

“Pretty much,” Joe said. “This business runs on a very small margin. The crop is bad one year and you’re broke, or the crop is good, which means that everybody’s crop is good, and so the prices drop and you’re broke. Gerber tells you to put in twenty acres of plum trees so you sink all your capital into plum trees—-”