Tom Lake(92)

It was years later that Joe told me how he’d thought his heart would stop when he saw Duke there in the middle of the road, holding Emily.





20


The way Emily is sitting in the grass, her head against her knees, I wonder if she’s going to be sick. Maisie is on one side of her, Nell on the other.

“Should I have told you this when you were fourteen?” I ask. “Should I have said, Duke isn’t your father but he came to the farm once and thought you were the most beautiful child in the world and swung you around and recited Chekhov to you? Would that have made it better or worse because I’m telling you, I don’t know. Maybe I did exactly the wrong thing.” It’s true that she met him once and was besotted with him, and it’s true that he, at least for those minutes, was besotted with her. Duke had looked straight into her eyes after all. Even if she was only four it left a mark.

Emily pulls up her T--shirt and wipes her face. “I wouldn’t have believed you,” she says finally. “I would have said he’d come to get me and you refused to let me go. I would have gone out of my mind.”

“Impossible,” Maisie says, rubbing circles on her back.

“I would have refused to let you go,” I say. “Even if you were his, which you weren’t.”

“Maybe you remember him,” Nell says to her.

Emily considers this, looking into her own memory for Duke. “It’s like watching a movie,” she says. “I can see the whole thing now that you’ve told us. So yes, I remember Duke, but I also remember you and Veronica sitting at that table registering people for auditions, and I remember Ripley standing by the swimming pool, and I remember your grandmother. I mean, it’s not the same thing.”

“Still,” Nell says encouragingly. “It’s something.”

“It’s not. It’s nothing.” Emily’s beautiful eyes fill up again. “I just wish he could go back to being a famous movie star who I wanted to be my father when I was a teenager. I wish he could have waited out the pandemic on a yacht in Capri.”

“Everybody wishes that,” I say.

Maisie takes Emily’s braid into her hands. “But then we’d have spent the rest of our lives thinking that Duke played George in Our Town and Mom dumped Duke for Dad. I never would have known that Mom used to spell her name with a ‘u,’ or that she wanted to be a vet for a week in high school, or that she ruptured her Achilles. I never would have known that Dad played the Stage Manager. I’m not saying Duke needed to drown so that we could get our facts straight, but I’m not sorry to know. The truth is I’ve never been one hundred percent positive who your father was and now I am. I mean, I knew it was probably Dad, but didn’t part of you think that paternity was going to be the big reveal?”

I look at Maisie, aghast. “Are you serious?”

She shrugs. “The only thing she ever said to me when I was a kid was that Duke was her father.”

“She told me the same thing and I never believed it,” Nell says. “Didn’t you ever watch her in the barn with Dad? It’s like they’re the same person.”

Joe started taking Emily with him to work after Nell was born, at least for a few hours in the morning, affording me the luxury of having only two children under the age of five instead of three. He showed her which green plants were weeds and taught her how to take those weeds out by the roots. He laminated a small picture of the dreaded plum curculio beetle for her to keep in her pocket so she could be on the lookout. Emily has always been Joe’s.

Emily stands, then reaches down to pull her sisters to their feet, one with each hand. “Is there anything else we need to know about the past?” Back to work, is what she’s telling us.

“I think that’s everything.”

“Then tell us what happened when Duke died,” Emily says.

Emily, Emily, stop. I shake my head. “You know that story already.” Talking about Duke as I knew him when he was alive has kept him alive this past week. I’d just as soon leave it at that.

For a good ten minutes we work without talking, which may be the new family record, but then Maisie breaks down just after emptying her bucket. “I was at the Minties’,” she says. “Lauren Mintie called me in the middle of the night because Ramona had gone into labor and she was barking and whining.”

“Doesn’t every living thing whine during labor?” Nell asks.

“Lauren said she was afraid something would go wrong and the kids would wake up in the morning and the dog would be dead and the puppies would be dead and then they’d be traumatized. Like dogs have never done this without human supervision before. But births are a good experience so I told her I’d come. Plus she said Ramona was in the bathtub downstairs and she’d leave the door open and the lights on but they’d all stay upstairs so I wouldn’t have to see anyone but the dog.”

“Contactless whelping,” Emily says.

“Ramona’s a nice dog,” Nell says.

Maisie nods. “She was very good. She had seven puppies so it took a long time. I got the window open and turned on the overhead fan. You can’t believe how awful puppies smell.”

“Everything you do smells,” Nell says.

Maisie ignores this. “The third one came out sideways so who knows, maybe it was a good thing I was there. That one died. I found a baggie for it in the kitchen and took it with me.”