“Traverse City,” he said when I asked. “Have you been?”
“I flew into the airport there,” I said.
“Airports don’t count. Traverse City is very pretty, not that that’s saying much. It’s very pretty everywhere around here.” He was sitting alone in the front row of the theater with his notebook and a bag lunch. He offered me half his tuna sandwich, which was incredibly generous. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten lunch.
The blossoms were off the trees and the fruit hadn’t fully come in and the boxes of bees had been taken away to their next job and still, everything was beautiful. “What are you directing in Traverse City?”
“Nothing.” He opened a large bottle of seltzer then looked around as if hoping to see a glass. “There isn’t a glass,” he said.
“I’m fine.”
“Do you mind sharing?” he asked. When I shook my head he took a drink from the bottle and handed it to me. “I have an aunt and uncle who live there and I promised to come up and be helpful. I’ve been saying I’d do it for a couple of years now but I keep getting diverted.”
“By plays?”
“Things too good to pass on kept coming along, and then I’d be on the wrong side of the country. So when Tom Lake asked me to do this, I thought, that solves the problem. I’ll finally be in exactly the right place. That’s a long answer to a short question:
Once we open I’m going to spend the rest of summer in Traverse City.”
“What kind of help do they need?”
“They need all kinds of help but my first priority is to sort out their finances.”
“You’re good at that?” I wished that I was good at something as useful as bookkeeping. I very nearly told him I could sew.
He shrugged. “I wouldn’t say good. I’d only say I’m better at it than they are.”
I asked him what his aunt and uncle did for a living while eating his sandwich and drinking his seltzer.
“They’re cherry farmers. Have you ever been to a Michigan cherry farm?”
I shook my head.
A little light broke over Nelson’s face, the same quiet light the actors saw whenever we did something right. “You should come and see it.”
“The cherry farm?” I was thinking about that first drive down from the airport and how I’d wanted to stand in the middle of the road and do one slow rotation. It felt like years ago.
“Do you have a car?” Nelson asked.
“Pallace does.” Sebastian was up for a couple of days and if Pallace wanted to get somewhere, Sebastian would take her. Pallace would lend me her car.
Nelson opened up his notebook and started drawing a map: the roads, the mileage counts, the names of the farms I would pass and the name of the road where I should turn. “Come tomorrow,” he said. “Come for lunch and I’ll show you around. You can swim in the lake if you want.”
Tomorrow was Monday, our day off. Opening night was Thursday. I was going to see the director’s family’s cherry farm.
Uncle Wallace was muttering when he came back from break and everyone else was laughing. Who could keep their mind on another rehearsal? Not even Nelson’s persistent calm could snap us into focus. Uncle Wallace wove around the stage in the pointless configurations of a squirrel. George dropped his lines and then stared at me as if it were my job to pick them up. The whole thing was a disaster, which meant good luck. Sebastian was around more often now that Cabaret had opened. He claimed he was in danger of losing his job, though I think he said it to impress Pallace. No one would fire Sebastian. As soon as rehearsals were finished, Duke and I hustled out of our costumes so we could find him.
“You weren’t at the lake,” Duke said to me, sliding the pins from his hair as we walked. He put them in his pocket. “I even went down and felt around on the bottom. You weren’t anywhere.”
“I talked to Nelson. I asked him where he was going next.” I must have looked happy because Duke stopped short, folding his arms across his chest.
“Did he offer you a part?”
Oh, Duke of the wide dark eyes and thick black lashes. Duke who had gotten too much sun even though we’d been told not to because it made more work for the makeup people. I shook my head. “Nothing so glamorous.”
“Then what’s with the smile?”
“His family has a cherry farm in Traverse City. He invited me up to see the farm tomorrow.”
“I bet he did.”
I laughed. “I’m excited! Haven’t you ever wanted to see a cherry farm?”
“I’m from Michigan.”
Somehow I hadn’t thought of there being cherries in East Detroit. “Well, I’m from New Hampshire and I’m going.”
“How are you going to get there?”
I knew what he was thinking. He didn’t want me in the car with Nelson. Men were not impossible to decipher. “Pallace will lend me her car.” I wasn’t certain of this but the more times I said it, the more it seemed true.
He looked at me another minute and then finally smiled. Maybe he was happy for my happiness. Maybe he still hoped Nelson would give him a part in another play later. Maybe he really just wanted to keep an eye on me. “If it’s going to be that much fun we should all go together, the four of us. That would be all right with you and Nelson, wouldn’t it? If it’s not a date?”
I rolled my eyes at the stupidity of it all. “It’s not a date.” And it wasn’t. But that didn’t mean I was supposed to show up with three extra people.
“Good!” Duke cried. “Then it’s settled. We’ll all drive up in the morning to see the director’s cherry farm.”
“The cherry farm!” Emily cries, and Maisie and Nell raise their fists in the air.
Parts of this story they already know, and this is one of them. The stories that are familiar will always be our favorites.
12
It had rained all morning but by the time we’d finished breakfast the sun was out. Sebastian said that he should drive to Traverse City, his Plymouth had a big back seat, and so we piled into the car, boys in front, girls in back. We rolled down the windows, waving goodbye to everyone we passed. Goodbye, Tom Lake! None of us had been farther away than the coffee shop in town since we arrived, none of us except Sebastian, who had an entire life about which we had no curiosity. Ubiquitous fruit stands lined the road and I wanted him to pull over so that I would have a gift to bring to Nelson’s aunt and uncle, a pie or some flowers, something more than three uninvited guests.
“These people own an orchard,” Duke shouted, the wind reaching inside the car to carry his voice away. “All that stuff at a fruit stand is the stuff they’re trying to get rid of.”
“What good. Is sitting. Alone in your room,” Pallace sang absently. I could see Sebastian’s eyes go to her in the rearview mirror. The sound of her voice called him like a bell.
“You should have been Sally Bowles,” I said, because even though that German--looking girl who played Sally was pretty extraordinary, I had no doubt Pallace would have been better.
Half of Pallace’s face was hidden behind her enormous black Jackie Onassis sunglasses. Who knew what she was looking at. “I should have been a lot of things,” she said.