Tom Lake(89)

“What if we didn’t do this anymore?” Joe asked me one morning when we were sitting in a diner on West Thirty--Eighth Street, eating pancakes.

“I stopped doing this a long time ago,” I said.



“They were my bills, too,” Joe tells the girls. “My father owned half the farm even if he didn’t work on it, so if you inherit the land you’re going to inherit the bills. By 1995 we already owned the place. Ninety--five was the year that wiped people out. All summer long it was perfect—-the perfect temperatures, the perfect amount of rain, not a single blight on any tree on any farm. The crop was huge, like nothing anyone had seen in decades, and the price went through the floor. I was just glad Ken and Maisie were in Arizona already.”

“If your father hadn’t paid off all the bills and put the rest of the money away we would have lost the farm,” I say, but Joe gives me a look and I stop. I know better. We do not talk of losing the farm.

And there will be no talk of our meeting again at that theater, about the years spent dating, living together, deciding to marry, moving to Michigan. Joe has thrown the switch that takes the train from love to the precipitous decline in crop prices. He has seen to it that when he leaves we will be contemplating cherries and not our courtship, which is fair, because the courtship is ours alone, and there is work to do, and we’ve already lost half the day to lightning.

“I should get back to work.” Joe gets up stiffly, the backside of his jeans muddied and wet. Then we all get up and start hefting the lugs into the Gator. The neighbors never thought that a couple of New York theater people had come to take over the farm. Joe Nelson and his wife had come. Joe Nelson who’d been there since he was a boy.

And for his efforts, the farm we took over was in better shape than we expected, by which I mean better shape financially. The main house, the little house, the barn, the trailers where the summer crews stayed, the fences and the trees themselves all existed in varying degrees of disrepair and decay. Ken and Maisie took what was theirs and left for Arizona to live near their daughter. After Ken died, Maisie spent the summers with us, providing a stupendous amount of help. “All that sunshine,” she’d say to me as we stood side by side in the kitchen, the girls crawling and toddling and walking around us. “A person can only take so much.”

“So Dad saved you,” Emily says.

I keep picking. I will not stop for the rest of the day. “I guess he did. Unless I saved him. I might have saved him, too.”

“It’s a good story either way,” Maisie says. “And to think if it wasn’t for Duke we might never have asked.”

“I wouldn’t have asked because I thought I knew it already,” Nell said. “And I had every part wrong.”

“To tell you the truth, I just never thought about it,” Emily says. “I mean, I thought about the Duke part but I don’t think I ever wondered about you and Dad.”

“We weren’t particularly interesting,” I say. Good marriages are never as interesting as bad affairs.

“Did you ever go back to Tom Lake?” Nell asks.

“You mean, did we ever drive down to see a show?”

“A show,” she says, “or, I don’t know, did you ever just walk around for old times’ sake?”

I do not explain that “old times’ sake” is a condition of fond nostalgia. “We never did. You know how it is in the summer.”

“I guess Duke never went back either,” Maisie says. Maisie has never been as interested in Duke as her sisters. She has no trouble letting him go.

“Duke was too famous to go back to Tom Lake after that summer,” Emily says.

She’s right about that. “On your way up or on your way out.”

“So you never saw him again.” Emily has made her peace with this, and I give serious consideration to leaving that in place, peace being a hard commodity to come by in this world. But one thing is left, the part of the story I wouldn’t have told her when she was young because there would have been no context for it, the part of the story I couldn’t have told her when she was a teenager because she would have submitted it into evidence against me. And so I’ve held it all these years, the random thing she would most want to add to her collection of ephemera.

“Once,” I say.



He came to the house in October of 1997. Dates near the end of the last century are easy for me to remember based on the season and who I was pregnant with, in this case Nell, who was due in a matter of weeks. That meant Maisie was two and Emily four. I liked being pregnant. I was good at it. Joe and I had decided that two was the right number of children, but once we’d had them for a while, we wanted more. One more baby, we whispered to each other when the snow was starting to melt, one more under the wire, a terrible extravagance we could in no way afford, but we did it anyway. We went back to bed.

There was no best time in northern Michigan, only the time that best suited you. I was partial to fall because I liked the sharpness of the air and the brightness of the light on the leaves. The kitchen was still small in those days and I kept the girls in there with me while I peeled potatoes for dinner. They were making jam tarts, which meant they were smearing jam into their hair. I picked Maisie up when I heard the knock on the door, giving her my stomach for a perch. Emily, my big girl, followed on her own. Someone was always knocking, a neighbor needing me to watch a baby for an hour or a neighbor bringing a pie because I had watched the baby the day before, someone from the picking crew needing Band--Aids or eggs or butter or salt, or it was a stranger driving by who wanted to know our price on apples because the fruit stand was closed.