—-The four of us came back to the company housing late one night after playing tennis to find that the front door, which was never locked, was locked. While three of us discussed our best course of action, Duke punched out one of the small panes of glass beside the door. He didn’t sever an artery or cut a tendon, though it took Sebastian half an hour to tweeze the shards of glass out of his hand and get it wrapped. “Saint Sebastian, Saint Sebastian, Saint Sebastian,” Duke repeated as he watched his brother work. He refused to go to the hospital. “That’s the way they do it in the movies,” he said, pleased with his own decisiveness.
“In movies the glass panes are made out of sugar, you fucking moron,” Pallace said, waiting up with us even though we’d come home because she was tired and wanted to go to bed. We had to act in the morning. She had to dance.
“And the guy punching the window out always takes the time to wrap his hand in a towel first,” Sebastian said.
“And the door wasn’t locked anyway,” I said, because it wasn’t. I tried it and found it was only stuck.
Duke thought this last bit was hilarious.
—-He put out a cigarette on his arm one night, looking right at me as he did it. I jumped up and batted it out of his hand. “What in the hell is wrong with you?” I shouted, and then ran downstairs for ice. When I came back to the room I could smell it.
“Tell me,” I said, holding the dish towel to the burn. But he wouldn’t tell me.
Benny is here, even though it isn’t Wednesday night. His arm is around Emily’s waist. He and Joe must have had the daughter’s--hand--in--marriage conversation because here comes Joe right behind them, beaming.
Emily looks at her boyfriend in horror. “You asked him for me?”
“I begged him,” Benny says.
“They haven’t agreed on the specifics of your dowry yet,” Maisie says.
Nell nods. “Dad’s insisting that Benny take the goats.”
“I’m not taking the goats,” Benny says.
“That’s between me and your father,” Joe says to him.
I get another placemat, another plate. Benny’s been in this house for as long as I can remember, trying on Halloween costumes, watching movies from the movie basket, talking us into another strip of raffle tickets for 4-H. Benny all but vanished from our lives in the years of his early adolescence, but those years were followed by his later adolescence, when Maisie referred to him as The Fixture. He and Emily started living in the little house when they came home from college, though they swore it was a platonic arrangement between two young farmers desperate to escape their parents. We pretended to believe them, though we knew that Emily and Benny had been making use of the little house for a long time.
Nell goes to the sideboard and takes out the pale--blue linen napkins we use at Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter lunch. Joe reaches into the high shelf to bring down the good glasses, filling them with wine so that we can toast the marriage. “Benny and Emily eternal,” we say, raising our glasses to love. They don’t know when they’re getting married, but they know that they are, and now we know it, too. Anyone looking in the window would think the wedding is tonight, here in this very kitchen.
“Maid of honor.” Emily points to Maisie. “In fact, you will be the only maid at all.”
“What about me?” Nell asks.
“Officiant,” Emily says.
Nell clutches a dish towel to her heart. “Seriously? I get to marry you?” She throws herself into Emily, wraps her arms around her sister.
“You’ll have to get ordained on the internet,” Benny says.
Maisie smiles, glad to see Nell cast in a speaking role.
“What about the two of us?” Joe comes to stand beside me.
Emily shakes her head. “You’ve done your work already. Now I think you should just sit back on a blanket and enjoy yourselves.”
Joe and I will enjoy ourselves. For reasons of love and stability and property, we’ve hoped for this day. We believe that marriage will be good for both of them, all of us. Benny is laughing, kissing Emily’s cheek. When is the last time I looked at Benny Holzapfel? When he was twelve? Sixteen? His college graduation? I see him tonight. Benny, so bright and full of ideas, Benny attentive to everyone, Benny who smiles at Emily even when she’s turned away, Benny who I just now realize has grown to look like someone I used to date.
Maybe I’ve missed it all this time because the resemblance is vague, or maybe I missed it because you’d be hard--pressed to find a man less like Duke. Benny opened his retirement account at twenty--three. He’s drawn up plans for his family’s orchard and for this orchard that go out twenty years. But damn me if there isn’t something about his neck. It’s not the kind of likeness that would make a girl in a mall run up for an autograph, or make an old woman at the grocery checkout ask if people tell him he looks like Peter Duke. It wouldn’t have occurred to me had we not been spending our days immersed in this story, but now that I’ve seen it I can’t unsee it. Even his hair, which he wears in a bun, is hair that is familiar to me. And I wonder if this was how Emily finally gave up her obsession with Duke when she was in high school: She learned to see just a bit of her beloved in the boy next door.
“I wish we could have a proper party,” Joe says to Benny. “At least get your parents over here.”
“Well, we can’t,” Emily says. “As much as I enjoy a good party with the Holzapfels, everybody’s got too much work to do.”
It is less about work than it is Gretel Holzapfel’s asthma. Kurt and Gretel are careful to only see people outside and at a distance. In the morning I’ll get up early and make Gretel an apple cake to leave on her back porch. That will make her laugh. Emily, the eldest of three, is marrying Benny, the youngest of four. The Holzapfels already had three children when we moved to the farm. I remember Gretel coming to the house the day after we moved in, an apple cake in her hands, three young Holzapfels marching behind her. Two years later when she found out she was pregnant with Benny, she sat at my kitchen table and cried great tears. “We were done!” she said. They had given away the baby clothes years before. They had given away the crib. All of their children were finally in school and Gretel had part of her days to herself again. Now she would be straight back to diaper pails and booster shots, leaky breasts and the pervasive smell of spit--up. When, four months later, I found out I was pregnant with Emily, Gretel said I did it just to keep her company. That’s how far back our children go.
The eldest three Holzapfels are scattered now, one daughter teaching English in Milwaukee, one daughter a nurse practioner in Petoskey, a son at the Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton. None of those grown--up children had any interest in the farm. The Holzapfels’ midlife mistake alone will save them. Maybe Benny thinks he owes them that much.
“This must be how England felt when Henry II married Eleanor of Aquitaine,” Maisie says.
Nell looks at Emily in horror. “You’re giving him France?”
“I’ll take the goats if I get France,” Benny says.
“Aren’t any of you afraid I’m going to run out the door screaming?” Emily digs through the refrigerator for the pizza kits I’d ordered for the occasion.