We remember our hats. The day is clear and bright as we walk out to take our place between the trees. We see the six members of the Ramirez family in the distance and shout out our greetings, and they in return wave their arms above their heads. Their family is safe and together in this cherry orchard they have come back to year after year. Our family is safe and together in this cherry orchard. Our eldest daughter is going to marry our neighbors’ son, a boy she loves, a boy we love, and I am mad at Duke, who, through no fault of his own, or through only the fault of his essential Dukeness over which he had no control, tore the fabric that bound me to my daughter. And though it has been repaired, expertly, repeatedly, this lumpy seam remains between us that keeps her from telling me she’s getting married. The dog has run ahead and Maisie jogs after her while Nell drops back and takes my hand. “I want to see if the daisies are up,” she says.
We climb the little hill to the cemetery where to my surprise the tall grass is tangled with flowers—-white petals, bright--yellow hearts. She’d called the seed and feed store more than a month ago and asked them to put a couple of packets of daisy seeds in with our order.
“I was just here,” I say, amazed by the degree to which everything is changed by the presence of daisies. The girls like to bring the goats up to the cemetery in the summer—-they do a beautiful job trimming around the stones—-but no one’s had the time this year and now we’ll never do it. The place looks too pretty.
The shaggy and shaded wilderness of the cemetery was always Emily’s favorite place on the farm. Even when she was a tiny girl she liked to run her fingers along the tombstones, the letters worn nearly to nothing, the stones speckled with lichen. I would lie in the grass between the graves, so pregnant with Maisie I wondered if I’d be able to get up again, and Emily would weave back and forth between the granite slabs, hiding then leaping out to make me laugh. Like every other mother in the history of time, I wondered if I would ever be able to love another child as much as I loved her.
“Listen, she isn’t mad at you,” Nell says. “They were thinking out loud, that’s all. I just happened to be at the table while they were thinking out loud.”
I laugh. “I should have named you Veronica.”
“Veronica from high school?”
“She knew how to read my mind.”
Nell smiles. “Maybe I’ll start a mentalist act, even though I think yours is the only mind I can read. Well, yours and Emily’s and Maisie’s. I can’t read Daddy’s mind.”
“I wonder why not,” I say. Veronica. She will always be eighteen for me. I can see her so clearly.
“He’s too good an actor.” She leans over to brush her hand across the daisies. “I’d make a fortune if I knew when we were getting out of here.”
“Don’t you sort of love it, though?” I am projecting, of course. I know this.
“Love being trapped with my family on the farm while the world goes up in flames? Not so much. I mean, I know we’re lucky. I know that pretty much everyone else has it worse, but it’s hard. You and Dad and Emily live here anyway, and Maisie’s got the shitting calves to give her life meaning, but for me it’s pretty much just picking cherries.”
I can do nothing about the world and the flames beyond leaving free masks in the fruit stand, but the part in which we’re trapped is joy itself. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugs. “At least we have the past.”
Nell and I agree that we’ll come back at the end of the day and pick a bouquet for the table but for now we should get to work. Maisie has her bucket around her neck by the time we catch up and Emily’s bucket is nearly full with a good six inches of cherries already in the lug.
“You knew Benny and I were getting married,” Emily says before I even pick up my bucket. Just as well, since I didn’t know how to start the conversation. She tilts back her head so she can see me from beneath the bill of her cap, so I can see that she’s fierce again.
I glance over at Maisie but she keeps her back to me while deftly picking cherries. I understand now that the detour to see the daisies in the cemetery was meant to give Maisie and Emily a minute to talk. “Listen, I’m thrilled about this. You know we love Benny.”
You know we love you.
“It’s not like we were making plans behind your back,” Emily says. “We were only having a conversation. If this isn’t a good time for you—-”
“Don’t say that.”
She squeezes her eyes closed. “I don’t want to feel like I’m doing this wrong before I’ve even done anything.”
“Emily.” I put my arms around her from the side, the buckets dictating the shape of our embrace. She tries to pull away but I have her. I hold her, and then she starts to cry.
“Oh, Emmy.” Nell touches her sister’s shoulder. “Oh, god, I’m so sorry.”
Emily shakes her head, covers her face with her hands.
“Somebody didn’t get enough sleep,” Maisie says.
That’s what I used to say to the girls when they wailed over whatever it was they wanted and didn’t get—-another puff of cotton candy, a final spin on the Zipper. The perceived injustice of the phrase enraged them, but when they got older and started saying it to one another it was suddenly hilarious. Sure enough, Emily’s sobs are disrupted by her own hiccupping laughter. She pulls up her T--shirt to wipe her face, blow her nose.
“You’re so gross. You should be a vet,” Maisie says.
Emily shakes her head. “I don’t know how to do this.”
“Get married?”
“I don’t know how to do any of it.” She turns up her face to shout at the sky. “Are we going to get the cherries picked in time? Will anyone be working at the processing plant? Is everything going to rot in a warehouse? Then Benny says we should just go ahead and get married, at least get that knocked off the list, and I think, why not? If we do it now we don’t have to invite anyone—-no relatives, no neighbors, no friends from school. We’ve got the perfect excuse. It can just be us and the Holzapfels. We can bring blankets and sit in the grass by the pond. I can wear something I already own and nothing will cost anything and we won’t have to write thank--you notes.” The breeze shifts imperceptibly through the leaves and just like that she’s crying again. Maisie lifts the yoke of stone fruit from her sister’s neck and Emily rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Whenever I think about getting married I feel like I’m losing my mind, and maybe that’s because I’m losing my mind, and then I think of poor Benny getting stuck with a crazy wife and what a burden I’m going to be for him, then two minutes later I don’t feel that way at all. Getting married is bullshit, if anyone wants to know. The whole institution is designed to drive women crazy. We don’t have the time or the money to blow on some princess fantasy I never had in the first place. So why can’t we just get married on a Thursday after lunch and then go back to work? Done. I love Benny, you know I do, and I want to marry him. I just don’t want to be a bride.”
Maisie and Nell and I are staring at her, and while I’ve always said my daughters are capable of a perfect communion of thought, this time I’m in on it. Emily has solved the age--old problem.