Into the dark woods we followed.
“Look at this!” Pallace cried, her head craned back to see the place where the leaves cut the sunlight to thread.
“Keep going,” Joe said. He went past the hemlocks and white pines and the red oaks that were never felled or burned, past the giant rocks in mossy sweaters. We could smell the cherry trees and then the moss and then the water, and then the woods opened unexpectedly and let us out on a beach of the Grand Traverse Bay of Lake Michigan. He had brought us to the edge of the world.
“How much have I missed?” Joe asks, taking his place on the towel beside me. He is wearing his plaid cotton work shirt and jeans, his steel--toed boots. His hair is much the same, as is his smile. His back is straight, his blue eyes still bright behind his glasses. Of all the things in life that have changed, Joe has changed the least.
Nell gets up to sit beside her father, wraps him in her skinny arms. “You’ve just been freed from your cloak of invisibility and are now revealed to be the hero.”
Joe shakes his head. “Believe me, I wear the cloak of invisibility for a long time in this story.”
I admit that I was slow.
“Did she tell you the part about bringing a date on our first date?” he asks Nell. “She brought her date and her date’s brother and her date’s brother’s girlfriend.”
“You in no way posed the invitation as a date.”
“That’s because you were dating Duke. I was just putting out a feeler to see if I stood a chance.”
“Too subtle,” I say.
“I was playing the long game,” he says.
Nell, tucked beneath his arm, looks up at him. “You were in love with her then, weren’t you?”
There’s a question I’d never asked.
Joe is not a man to lie, even when the lie could be categorized as harmless and polite. I can see him digging around in his memory. Did he love me then? It was such a long time ago. “I like the thought,” he says finally, “but probably not. I don’t think I could have been in love with a person who was so clearly in love with someone else. That would be self--defeating and I wasn’t the self--defeating type.”
“I wasn’t in love with Duke,” I say.
Joe makes a ridiculous sound, an eruption of laughter and incredulity.
Nell keeps her attention on her father while making an effort to soften the blow. “So you weren’t exactly in love with her but you liked her very much and thought she was a wonderful actress.”
“Your mother was the best actress I ever directed,” Joe says. “If she had decided that that was what she wanted to do with her life, she would have been brilliant at it.”
“Shoulda, woulda, coulda,” I say, lying back on the sand, though it is true that his estimation touches me.
“No one was better,” he says.
“Well, actually, someone was better,” I say.
“That was your opinion,” Joe says.
I open one eye and stare at him. I use my amazing powers of mentalism to tell him to shut up, which he does.
Nell rests her chin on her knees. “What I don’t understand,” she begins.
“Here it comes,” Joe says.
“What I don’t understand,” she says again, looking at her father, “is how a person can grow up in Michigan, love the theater, become a famous director, and then ditch it all to come back and grow cherries.”
“I’ve wondered about that myself,” Maisie says. She is scratching her dog’s stomach with both hands and Hazel stretches out her four legs as far as she is able.
“It’s nice to see them turn their attention on you for a change,” I say.
“First off, you grew up on a cherry farm in Michigan and you want to be an actress,” he says to Nell.
“What choice did I have? You read us Chekhov at bedtime,” she said. “No Hippos Go Berserk for the Nelson girls.”
“Secondly,” Joe says, ignoring her, “cherry trees come equipped with invisible leashes. Just when you think you’re free they start to pull you back.”
“Emily inherited the cherry leash, not me,” Nell says.
Emily nods. “Thanks for that.”
“Are there more sandwiches?”
Maisie rifles through her bag and hands him one. We are partial to cheese and mustard, all of us.
“I had two lives,” Joe says, unwrapping his lunch. “Maybe more than two. I got to do everything I wanted. Who can say that?”
I raise my hand.
“So what happened to Duke?” Emily asks.
We look at her. The four of us are forever turning as one to look at her. “You know what happened to Duke,” I say.
“I don’t mean what happened to Duke. I mean what happened to him that day, that summer?”
“Duke liked the farm better than anybody,” Joe says, glad to be back on topic, glad to be thinking about anyone other than himself, glad to have a sandwich. “By which I mean he liked this place more than pretty much anybody who ever visited. Duke would have quit acting to pick cherries, at least on that day he would have. If Ken had offered him a job he would have taken it. I remember him running up and down the beach like a kid. He was crazy. That was the first time I ever saw him do a handstand.”
“Was it?” I ask. He used to do them on the chair in our room.
“But when did things change? Did it happen the day you brought him to the orchard?” Emily asks me. “The happiest day of your life?”
“Let’s strike the whole happiest--day--of--my--life motif,” I say. “You three refuse to understand what I’m saying.”
I can see that Emily is both irritated and making an effort not to be. We’ve had a good day so far, some real sweetness, and we both want to keep it that way. “You come up to the farm with Duke and Sebastian and Pallace and you leave with Daddy. Something must have happened.”
Joe looks over at me as if he might have missed some pivotal piece of information himself.
“I came up with Duke and left with Duke. I didn’t leave with your father.”
“Okay, so maybe not on that day but eventually you did. You were with Duke and then you were with Dad.”
I shake my head. A child’s ability to misunderstand is limitless, even when she is no longer a child. “I didn’t leave Duke for your father. Your father and I were never together at Tom Lake.”
Now Maisie is squinting at us as well. “But you and Dad met at Tom Lake. You fell in love at Tom Lake.”
“We met at Tom Lake and didn’t fall in love, and then we met again a long time later and we did fall in love,” Joe says to them. He looks at me. “I feel like I need a lawyer.”
Because now we feel the shift from Lara and Joe and Maisie and Nell on one side and Emily on the other, to Lara and Joe on one side and Emily and Maisie and Nell on the other. The jury does not believe us.
“You fell in love at Tom Lake,” Nell says, of this she is certain. “That was always the story.”
“It was never the story!” I say. “It may have been the story you told yourselves but it wasn’t the story we told you.” Over the years I told them I had dated Duke at Tom Lake. Over the years I told them their father and I met at Tom Lake. What I realize in this moment, and Joe realizes it too, is that maybe we’ve never told them more than that. Or maybe they are children looking at their parents and so our lives began when they began and everything else they colored in with fat crayons any way they wanted.