“We always know where to find you,” Maisie says ominously.
“By the time Richard the Lionheart is born, the two of you will rule all of northern Michigan.” The history of the British monarchy is Joe’s winter hobby, and it thrills him to see that his girls have been listening, in the same way I imagine it would thrill me if they could sew.
Emily and Benny turn their heads towards one another. They don’t raise their eyes. Maisie and Nell are busy with the salad but Joe sees it and he looks at me, thinking the same thing.
“Are you pregnant?” As soon as the words are out of my mouth I wish I’d waited until after dinner, wish I’d pulled Emily into the pantry and whispered the question in her ear, but I have asked her and so we all stop, hold our breath, those wineglasses still within reach.
The blush rises straight from Emily’s heart, and even though I would have sworn that Benny had been standing on the other side of the table, he is there beside her, his arm around her shoulder. “Nope,” he says, pressing his hip lightly against hers.
Emily looks at Benny. She is saying nothing but is also asking him a question and without answering he is saying yes.
“We’re getting married and we’re not having a baby,” Benny says. He picks up Emily’s wineglass. “Proof.”
“We’re not having a baby,” Emily says, and I understand that she’s telling us there will be no babies.
“Plenty of time for all of that,” Joe says.
The happiness in his eyes makes my eyes fill up, and I hope for his sake we can leave this alone, talk about whatever it means on some other, less celebratory day, but forestalling conversation is not a skill in our family’s wheelhouse.
“Or not,” Emily says.
“Or not what?” Joe asks, teasing her. “Not enough time? Is this going to be a very long engagement?”
Everyone is waiting now. Hazel is waiting. Emily opens her mouth but nothing comes out.
“We’re not having children,” Benny says.
Joe shakes his head. “You don’t know that.”
“I know that,” Emily says.
We should have one night that is not about the future or the past, one night to celebrate these two people and nothing else but we’ve blown it. “You don’t want children?” I ask her.
Emily tips back her wineglass. She drains it. “I don’t know if I want them but I’m sure I’m not going to have them.”
I am making our three daughters quilts from my grandmother’s dresses, from their grandmother’s dresses and my dresses and the dresses they wore when they were children. I started collecting the fabric when I was a child because even then I knew I would have daughters one day and I would make them quilts. My daughters will give these quilts to their daughters and those daughters will sleep beneath them. One day they will wrap their own children in these quilts, and all of this will happen on the farm.
“I know this isn’t the way you planned things,” Emily says. “I know it’s not what you want.”
“It isn’t about what we want,” I say, but that’s a lie. These children we’ve never spoken of? We want them very much. We long for them.
“Crops used to fail once every fifty years,” Benny says, his voice quiet because all of us are silent. “The crops have failed twice since I was born. The winters are milder, the lake is warmer, the trees aren’t staying dormant long enough. They bloom too early, the freeze kills the buds.”
Joe holds up his hand. “Why are you saying this? What do you think we don’t already know?”
But Benny doesn’t stop. His voice comes without drama or demand and still, he keeps talking. “Sooner or later we’re going to have to stop putting in cherry trees.”
“No,” Joe says.
“I really cannot stand this,” Maisie says.
“It’s not going to be cold enough for them anymore. We’re going to have to start thinking about wine grapes, strawberries, asparagus.”
“So plant the grapes,” Joe says. “It doesn’t mean you don’t have children.”
“It sort of does,” Nell says. “Once you think about it.”
“You, too?” Joe asks. “Have the three of you signed a pact?”
“I have no idea what I’m going to do,” Nell says. “But I’ll tell you, I think about it.”
Maisie tightens her arms across her chest. “Who doesn’t think about it?”
Emily sits down on a kitchen chair and Benny stands behind her, his hands on her shoulders. We are all so tired.
Emily picks up a fork and balances it on one finger. She looks at nothing but the fork. “I can eat vegetables and ride my bike and stop using plastic bags but I know I’m just doing it to keep myself from going crazy. The planet is fucked. There’s nothing I can do about that. But I’ll tell you what, I’m going to spend my life trying to save this farm. If anybody ever wonders what I’m here for, that’s it.”
Nell reaches across the table and takes her sister’s hand, and Joe, Joe who never walks away from us, goes out the kitchen door. He is standing at the edge of the garden, his back is to the house. He is looking at the trees.
11
Joe didn’t want to talk about it last night when we went to bed, and when I wake up in the morning he’s already out there. He’s wondering if Maisie or Nell will have children, and if those children who won’t grow up here will want to take over the farm someday. He’s thinking about what will happen to the farm without another generation of family to protect it after we’re gone, after Emily and Benny are gone. He is thinking about Emily and Benny being gone. He is thinking about the developers who relentlessly sniff the perimeter of our land, the strangers who knock on our door in February to ask if we wouldn’t rather spend the winter in Florida. They are the enemies of stone fruit. They would leave just enough trees in the ground to justify calling the place Cherry Hills or Cherry Lane, then pull the rest up and build pretty white summer houses with picture windows and wraparound porches, places we could never afford. And that’s the good scenario. The bad scenario, the one where the trees eventually die? Joe isn’t thinking about that one and I know this because I’m not thinking about it either.
When Maisie and Nell come downstairs for breakfast I can tell they’ve been staring at their own bedroom ceiling for most of the night, running through the same worst cases. Maybe we should start a family mentalist act, see if we can make a living reading one another’s minds. Maisie’s phone dings at the table and she takes it out of her pocket and stares at it for so long that Nell and I stop and wait for her to tell us.
“What?” Nell says finally.
“Someone’s trapped a litter of feral kittens in their barn and wants to know if I can come by and kill them this afternoon.” Maisie puts her head down on the table.
“Who?” I reach for her phone but she grabs it away.
“We’ll have to see them again,” she says. “You’re better off not knowing.”
“Let them kill their own kittens,” Nell says tiredly. It’s true: Ignore the kittens and you’ll wake up one morning to find the cats outnumber the mice. But still, people need to kill their own kittens. You don’t ask your neighbors to do that for you.