She eyed me warily, with an expression I would have called cynical in anyone but a four-year-old. Her eyes were a watery green in a cat-shaped face, and she had eyelashes so thick they looked fake, and a lush mouth just like her father’s.
I was smitten, but never in my life—before or since—did anyone make me work so hard for approval. The one thing she liked was my hair. It was almost to my waist, thick and wavy, and Maya loved to brush it. Once I found that secret, I tucked away pins and barrettes and soft fastenings in my pockets so she could play with my hair whenever we were together.
No one ever believes me, but I honestly didn’t know Augustus was married to Shanti. He wore no ring. He was up-front about the problems with her addiction. We never went to his place, only to mine, but he told me it was because he lived too far out for it to be realistic, the opposite direction from the farm.
I was nineteen and madly in love. Of course I believed him.
I drive back to my farm outside Ojai, just over forty minutes from Belle l’été. Bright, hot sunshine breaks through the morning gloom by the time I pull into the driveway, marked with a hand-carved sign, a rising sun over a meadow, and the words MEADOW SWEET ORGANIC FARMS.
My pride and joy, though it has begun to feel hollow the past decade or so. I still take pride in growing organic produce and supplying restaurants for a hundred miles around. I love the experimental crops, the annual tests of new heirloom varieties of squashes, tomatoes, beets, potatoes. Sometimes they’re successful, sometimes they’re not. Two years ago, a purple Incan potato proved so popular, I moved out a half acre of reds, but then the Incas succumbed to a fungus and I lost the whole crop before it ripened.
That is the farming life. Unpredictable. Plants are living things, vulnerable to all kinds of threats—storms, insects, fungi, and more and more often, fire. Today, a crew works along the perimeter, chopping out scrub and grasses for fire mitigation to give us a chance if an ordinary sort of blaze sweeps down the mountains. Nothing can stop a firestorm of the sort that has become more common in recent years, but we do our best. The hills are tinder after a dry winter, and the Santa Anas will start blowing in a couple of months. All it takes is a spark—lightning, a bad muffler, an arsonist with a match—to gulp down vast swaths of land. The past five years have been a horror up and down the state, through the whole West, really. We are learning to live with the threat of catastrophe, like lobsters in a pot on the stove.
A small crew is packing up strawberries that were harvested early this morning and loading crates into trucks for delivery to various restaurants. I wave and the crew leader waves back. A man is bent over a central irrigation unit with wrenches and screwdrivers to fix a problem that showed up last week.
I herd Cosmo and Elvis into the house, and stop to give the other animals some love, kissing the cats and rubbing Joe the ancient border collie’s soft belly. My assistant, Tanesha, works in the office attached to the house, so they have plenty of attention, but they miss me anyway.
I poke my head into the office. “How’s everything?”
“Good. We’re supposed to be at the grade school in two hours. Will you be ready?”
“Sure. I’ll just pop in the shower.”
“I had a phone call from the Carpinteria police,” Tanesha says, turning to offer me a slip of paper. “They want to talk to you again about Augustus. I told them we’d be that direction this afternoon, and they said that would be fine. Just stop in. Ask for the guy on the paper.”
I frown, feeling a ripple of unease. “Did they say why?”
“No.”
“Did they say if they’ve released the body?” I hold the paper lightly between my thumb and index finger. “Rory is not coping very well.”
“He didn’t say.” She clicks a program closed on the computer and swings around to face me. Her feet are bare beneath a pair of well-worn khakis, and her ankles are dusty from working in the fields earlier. A pale line shows where her socks stopped. “How’s Maya?”
“Okay, I think.” A rippling sting reminds me of her request that I leave her alone. “I worry that she’s not very stable yet, and she doesn’t want me living there, but . . . it’s early days.”
“People do get sober, Meadow.”
“Do they?” I ask, mostly rhetorically. I think of Maya the night she called me to come pick her up from the winery. I couldn’t go by myself because I couldn’t drive that far along the coast at night with my bad eyes. I called the only person I could, her father. He drove us there in the dark night. He was the one who helped her up from the ground, where she’d more or less passed out, covered in wine, her hair stiff with it. I could only weep, shattered by her crash.