Emily says, looking at the three of us in disbelief.
“I’m starting to think I shouldn’t have told you this now.” I wonder if the red in Emily’s cheeks is sunburn or rage.
“I just can’t believe—-”
“Please,” Nell shouts. “Please! Mom is about to go into our house for the very first time and it’s the happiest day of her life. Can this not be a story about you for two minutes?”
“The happiest day of the summer of 1988,” I remind her. “Not the happiest day of my life. Not by a long shot.”
“All I’m saying is that I think it would have helped me to know,” Emily says.
Beneath the towel Maisie shakes her head. “It would so not have helped you.”
The long oak table in the kitchen was set for four but Nelson’s aunt Maisie was already pulling more placemats out of the drawer. She was a tall woman with short, curly hair, an oversized laugh and oversized feet she housed in blue Keds. “It’s the first time we’ve ever had a movie star come to lunch,” she said. “You’ll just have to forgive me if I say anything stupid.”
For all the world it appeared she was looking at me. “Me?”
“A huge star,” Nelson said. “Once your movie comes out.”
“Joe can’t stop talking about how good you are,” his aunt Maisie said. “Joe says you’re the best actress he’s ever worked with, and you know he’s worked with a lot of good ones. We’re going to drive down on Thursday to see you. Opening night! And Uncle Wallace, I can’t believe we’re going to see Uncle Wallace.”
“Uncle Wallace is really something,” Duke said.
I held out my package to her and she looked so surprised. “You didn’t need to bring me anything,” Maisie said.
She put it down on the table and folded back the tissue.
Such a genuine pleasure lit her face. I could imagine that it had been a while since someone had brought her something so impractical and pretty. She ran her fingers over the cutwork. “Oh, Lara, will you look at these,” Maisie said quietly.
Maisie, look, the white canisters are still on the sink, the whole row of them including coffee and rice. I broke the sugar the year we moved into the house. My hands were wet when I picked it up and it slipped right through and smashed on the floor. I stood there crying and crying, until Joe told me it was just a canister and it didn’t matter. But they were yours. Everything was yours. I’d forgotten how small the kitchen was before we pushed out the back wall. You would have loved it the way it is now. I can stand at the sink and keep an eye out for Joe and make dinner and talk to the girls. There’s so much space. The first day I came to the house the kitchen was so small and we were all crowded in together. Look how beautiful we all were, Maisie. Can you believe it? Look how young.
“Maisie, this is Peter Duke,” Joe said. “He’s Editor Webb in the play. And Pallace Clarke, she understudies Lara’s part. Pallace is in Cabaret too, so she’s the busy one. And this is Sebastian Duke. He’s Peter’s brother.”
“What part do you play?” she asked Sebastian, holding his hand.
“I play the brother,” Sebastian said.
“You wouldn’t believe how good he is at it,” Duke said.
Maisie laughed. “You’re going to tell me everything,” she said to Sebastian. “We’ll sit down and you can tell me what it’s like to be the brother of a famous man.”
And Duke, who knew he was destined to be a famous man, smiled.
Joe was dispatched to the orchard to find his uncle but as soon as he turned to leave his uncle walked in the kitchen door. Maisie’s husband was Ken. Ken and Maisie Nelson. Their nephew, Joe. A bouquet of pink and yellow dahlias sat in a green drinking glass on the table. I didn’t know how there would be enough food for everyone but Maisie brought out plenty. Maybe we ate their dinner, too: fried chicken and biscuits and butter beans and corn cut from the cob and baked apples. We ate like children, greedy and unconcerned, and Maisie acted like nothing in the world had ever made her so happy.
“When I was growing up I used to lie in bed at night imagining what other people’s families must be like,” Duke said once the pie was served, cherry pie, which he told her was his favorite. “I would picture their houses, their furniture, what they ate and how they spoke to one another, and what I always pictured was this.” He turned to Joe. “Turns out I spent my entire childhood picturing your family.”
Joe smiled. “You were picturing this particular branch of my family.”
“I was, too,” Pallace said, setting down her fork. “Ever since I walked in the door I’ve been trying to remember what this place reminded me of and that’s it. This is where I wanted to live when I was a kid.”
“We would have been happy to have you,” Ken said.
“Except in my fantasy the family was Black,” Pallace said. “But other than that it’s a very similar vibe.”
Pallace and I tried to help with the dishes after lunch but Maisie shooed us away. “Let Joe show you around. Come back later and help us pick cherries. That’s when we’ll put you to work.”
The kitchen was small so off we went, because of course the work was not really for us. Maisie kept a cutting garden in the backyard, zinnias and dahlias and foxgloves and coneflowers.
The bees made such a racket we thought at first the noise must be coming from someplace other than bees.
“In my vision of the perfect childhood there were no bees,” Pallace said, and Sebastian moved her to his other side so that he would stand between her and the menacing insects.
Joe walked in front of us, pointing out trees. “Those are the Montmorencys.”
“Tart or sweet?” Pallace asked.
“Tart,” he said. “Pie cherries. They’re mostly sold frozen. The pie today was from last year’s frozen cherries. You can take some back with you if you want.”
But we didn’t have a freezer to keep the cherries frozen or an oven to bake a pie.
“And those?” She pointed to a very different group of trees on the other side of the road.
“Plums,” he said, shaking his head. “The plums are a disaster. We’re going to have to take them out.”
“How can plums be a disaster?” I asked.
“Gerber told the farmers they wanted more plums for baby food, but by the time the farmers put in the trees and grew the trees and picked the plums, Gerber said they didn’t want plums anymore.”
“Can’t people just eat them?” Pallace asked.
“I eat them. You probably wouldn’t. No one buys a bag of Stanleys at a fruit stand.”
I had no idea that a Stanley was a plum, or that one plum was made into baby food while another was eaten over the sink. I didn’t know that a Napoleon was a cherry. What I knew was that the four of us were strolling through an orchard with our director, who, after Thursday, would come up here for the rest of the summer to do the work of sorting out his family’s finances. The show would go on. He would go on.
“How long has your family owned the place?” Sebastian asked.