Tom Lake(90)

The enormous black SUV with black--tinted windows idling in front of the house called to mind drug lords, federal agents, movie stars. Duke had knocked on the door and then stepped back to admire the pumpkin patch Joe had planted for the girls. His sunglasses were tortoise shell, round. If time had marched for the rest of us, it had left Duke alone. He was exactly the same, or he was lovelier, his complexion all snow and roses, his hair curling gently at the collar of his navy peacoat. I guess the cop show was a long time ago. Circumstance would dictate that I should have been the one who was surprised, but Duke took the honor for himself. He didn’t have the slightest idea what I was doing there. When I opened the screen door and said his name he looked back down the drive like maybe he’d taken a wrong turn into the past, then looked at me again, me and my girls, I wouldn’t say in horror because it wasn’t horror, exactly, more like acute discomfort. “What are you doing here?” he asked finally.

“I live here.” Whatever he’d come for, it wasn’t me.

“This is the Nelson farm?” Was he even thinner now? Somehow taller? Was it possible that every part of him had been polished?

“Duke,” I said, “this is weird. Why are you here?”

He took off his sunglasses and I saw the tiny scar at the corner of his right eye where his brother had hit him. He pressed his eyes closed, then covered them with his hand as if maybe he expected that when he took his hand away again I’d be gone. He was wearing a wedding ring.

I was still there.

And so he tried to restart the moment, begin again. “These are yours?” he asked. Maisie pressed her sticky face into the side of my neck. I hoisted her up to resettle her bones on top of the baby inside me. Emily looped one arm around my thigh and with the other hand gave Duke a charming wave. I made the introductions and he said their names aloud, bent from the waist. He was still making children’s movies in those days, or he was just at the end of that era, I couldn’t remember, but he had a very nice smile for children, a completely different smile from the one that was familiar to me, or maybe it was just that his teeth had been fixed. Those beautiful, wonky teeth had been ground off and replaced.

He straightened up. “A couple used to live here, the Nelsons.”

I nodded. “Ken and Maisie. They moved to Arizona to live with their daughter. Well, Ken died a few years ago, but Maisie comes back every summer.”

“I met them a long time ago, and I was just—-” He stopped to scan the fields again, as if the word that eluded him was out there. “I was nearby.”

“You met them with me.” Maisie was getting heavy and I set her on her feet. The girls went straight down the steps and started kicking leaves. “Remember? You and me and Sebastian and Pallace? We drove up here for lunch.”

He thought about that for a while and then I saw the light click on. It was as if he had just come into his body. “You wanted to stop and get them something,” he said. “We swam in a lake.”

“Right.”

“And you live here now?”

I nodded. I was wondering if he would put it together but I doubted it. He had no incentive.

“Can I look inside?”

“Sure.” I held the door open, turning my stomach at an angle. When he walked past me I expected something, a kiss on the cheek? He went right to the kitchen. “It’s messy,” I called out.

“I’m making dinner.” Then I was irritated with myself for anything that sounded like an apology. What the hell, Duke? That’s what I should have said. I stayed on the threshold, keeping an eye on the girls. I could see him, his hand on a chair, taking it in.

“It’s just the same,” I heard him say, though he may have been talking to himself. “I remember this table.”

“We want to make the kitchen bigger.”

In a minute he came back. “Don’t. It’s perfect. Did you buy the place?”

“I married in.” The girls were rolling now, then stopping to flutter their arms and legs. They were putting on a leaf show, which required an audience. “I married Ken and Maisie’s nephew.”

“Oh,” he said. I could read nothing into that. Not disappointment or relief or surprise.

“Did you come to see Maisie?” My daughter, who we called little Maisie in the summers when big Maisie was here, lifted her golden head.

“It was such a good day,” he said. “The day I was here. Someone told me years ago that I should always have a place in my mind where I could imagine myself happy, so that when I wasn’t so happy I could go there. Anyway, this is the place I go.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“It’s funny, I’d forgotten you were with us.”

“Understandable,” I said.

He shook his head. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m tired, that’s the thing. I’ve been tired a lot lately, and so I’m here a lot, you know, in my mind. I just wondered if I could find the farm again. To tell you the truth, I’ve thought about buying the place, just to make sure that nothing changes.”

“Nothing changes,” I said. “Unless you count the conveyor we put in the barn to sort the cherries.”

He shook his head. “I don’t count that.”

“I don’t think my husband would sell,” I told him. I don’t think my husband would sell you the orchard if you offered him the entire state of California.