He looks at me with that small, sad smile he has. “How? They’re relentless. They would have sat on your chest until you told them everything.”
“And it’s not like I’m telling them everything anyway. I’m not telling them the good parts.”
Joe brushes the crumbs into the sink, rinses the knife. “By which you mean sex.”
I am staring at my husband from across the room, a calm man who isn’t given to picking apart the past, which doesn’t mean he needs to hear it. “I’m speaking in the parlance of three girls in their twenties.”
“Really good sex?” He’s still smiling when he comes over and takes the pincushion from my hand.
I shrug. “Who can remember?”
“You, probably. I’m betting you remember.” My husband smells very faintly of hay and goats.
“I remember yesterday if I’m lucky.” I’m not fooling him but still, I want to be polite.
“How tired are you?” he asks.
“Less tired than you.”
For so many years I have kissed him. For so many years I have not kissed another soul, and there is a deep and abiding comfort in this. Joe is not Duke. Joe was never Duke and I would never have wanted him to be. From the couch Hazel gives a low growl.
“What about her?” Joe asks.
“She can’t climb stairs.”
He looks at the dog. “Really? I just thought Maisie liked to carry her.”
“She does.”
“Can you stay awake while I take a shower?”
“I can.” I follow him up the stairs. We leave the lights on because before we know it, one of the girls will be home.
8
It’s a different kind of sleep when the girls are home. Even after so many years I am asleep but also waiting to hear the back door open and close. Nell comes home first, then Maisie. When they were younger I could hear the difference in their footsteps, a job that is simplified by Hazel barking. It’s strange to me that Maisie and Nell have continued to sleep in the same room now that Emily’s room is available, but they’ve always liked being together. Even when they were children, neither of them seemed to pine for a room of her own. At thirteen, Emily nailed a NO TRESPASSING sign to her door （purchased from Ace Hardware and put up not with tape or thumbtacks but nails）， and even that couldn’t rouse her sisters’ interest in getting in there. All these years after the end of Emily’s hormonal rage, Maisie and Nell are still opting for the familiar comfort of their twin beds.
When I go downstairs in the morning I find a cardboard box full of eggs waiting on the kitchen counter, some of them the color of milky coffee and some of them the blue of clouded sky. I’m glad we don’t keep chickens because I regret the goats, but it means that eggs are always welcome. Maisie and Nell drag downstairs while I’m making French toast, Maisie clutching her dog like a pillow to her chest. I ask her if she’d been paid in eggs last night and she nods, yawns. “They tried to give me money.”
“Money’s nice,” Nell says, rubbing at her eyes. None of our girls have money.
Maisie shakes her head. “I can’t take money until I have my license. And anyway, what’s a person supposed to charge for helping a poor little shitting calf in the middle of the night?”
“Three dozen eggs?” I say, guessing.
“More or less.”
Animals aren’t much of a thing around here. Like our goats, the occasional cow or horse or flock of chickens represents a fruit farmer’s temporary insanity, the fanciful quest to make a hard job harder. Wouldn’t it be fun to sell eggs at the fruit stand? Goat cheese? Butter? But it isn’t fun. We know how to tend to our trees but the animals are largely a mystery to us, which is why Maisie’s phone is always ringing. No one cares that she hasn’t finished school. She knows more than they do and they need her now.
“Is the calf okay?” her sister asks.
Maisie nods again, thanking me as I put breakfast on the table. “I got a stomach tube down her for fluids, and they had some Albon tablets. It turned out okay.” She cuts a corner off her French toast and slips it to the dog.
I brush my fingers through my middle daughter’s curling hair before sitting down. Chemistry was nothing for Maisie. Sick calves are nothing. She is never afraid.
Maisie looks at her sister as if she is just now awake enough to see her. “What did you wind up doing last night?”
Nell swirls a piece of French toast in a puddle of syrup. “I went to the little house. Benny told me I could borrow his copy of Moby--Dick. He said by the time I finished reading it the pandemic would be over.”
“You went to the little house to read Moby--Dick?” Maisie reads journal articles about small--animal vaccinations, and Emily reads journal articles about weed control and pesticides, and Nell reads novels and plays, each of them marveling at the other two.
“No,” Nell says. “We wound up playing Pictionary.” She stops because there’s something else she wants to tell but she’s conflicted about it. Nell is a girl without secrets. Watching her face is like going to a movie.
“And—-” I prompt.
“Maybe I’m not supposed to talk about it. They didn’t say I couldn’t so I wonder if maybe you already know and haven’t told me.”
Maisie and I put down our forks.
“Let’s assume we don’t know,” I say.
“Let’s assume we do,” Maisie says.
Nell takes another bite, weighing the options. “Do you know they’re getting married?” she asks.
Maisie slaps the table with her open hand, sloshing her coffee, startling the dog. “They got engaged?”
Nell folds her lower lip into her mouth. “You didn’t know.”
“We didn’t know,” I say, and what I feel—-and I am ashamed of this—-is a very old prick of exclusion. Emily didn’t come to me. Emily, who didn’t tell me when she started her period and didn’t tell me when she decided to go to Michigan State, didn’t think to tell me that she was marrying Benny, though Emily, had she been at the table, would have said it was because I already knew those things.
“I don’t think it’s an engagement per se. I mean, it wasn’t like she was holding out her hand to show me a ring. They were just talking about whether or not they should try to fit in some kind of wedding between cherry season and the apples. The only reason it even came up was because one of the pictures I was supposed to draw was ‘marriage vows.’？”
“Outed by Pictionary,” Maisie says.
Nell looks from her sister back to me. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Of course you should have. How else would we have known?” I can hear the petulance in my voice.
“They were always going to get married,” Maisie says.
Nell nods. “When I was a kid I thought Benny must have hated his parents because he was here all the time.”
The French toast has grown cold but we make ourselves eat it. We know how the morning will go if we’re hungry. “Come on,” I say, picking up plates. “Let’s get to work. I bet your father thinks we’re still in bed.”