“No, but I think the pear trees might. Didn’t you tell me once that pear trees are agitated by lightning somehow? Don’t they come through the window?” All year long we stare out this window—-the tissue--thin blossoms, the birds, the cherries and the apples, the bright--red autumn, the sweep of snow, the resulting mud, and then the blossoms again. French Impressionism has nothing on our view. We put the window in when we expanded the kitchen and built the family room. Michigan farmers like houses they can keep warm, and so for months we debated the question of warmth versus beauty and in the end beauty won. Neighbors come into this room and shake their heads at such decadence.
“You’re awful,” Nell says, stepping away. She says to me, “Does your ankle tell you when it’s going to rain?”
“You mean my Achilles? No. It has no weather predicting abilities.”
“Does it ever hurt?”
I shake my head. “Never. I would say an entire decade can go by without my thinking of it.”
Maisie is lying on her stomach in front of the sofa, one side of her face pressed to the floor. “Hazel,” she pleads. “Sweetheart.” She reaches out her arm to no avail. She reports that the dog is now the size of a cantaloupe, obstinate and trembling in the farthest corner where no one can reach her without moving furniture. “Will one of you bring me a piece of cheese?” Maisie asks, not looking up.
I put down my sewing and go to the refrigerator. Joe and Emily are no doubt in the barn, sorting, stacking, repairing. They will sit in the barn office, which is full of spiders and hay, placing orders and writing checks. They know how to make good use of an hour of lightning, and so do we, but our use is different. I will get the mending done. Nell will make a spinach pie for dinner. Maisie will continue to try to coax the dog from under the sofa.
“So when did Duke start sleeping with Pallace?” Nell asks, pulling out the mixing bowls.
I laugh. Maisie sits straight up, banging her head on the edge of the coffee table.
“Ow!” I say on her behalf. “Are you okay?”
She rubs her head with her fingers then checks them for blood. “Have the two of you been talking without us?”
“No.” Nell comes over to look at her sister’s head in another flash of lightning. “But you know where this is going.”
“I swear to you, I have no idea where this is going.”
“That’s where this is going,” I say.
“I didn’t think Pallace liked Duke.”
“Sometimes that makes it all the more compelling.”
Nell nods in sad agreement and I start to think that when this is over, and it is very nearly over, each of my daughters should be asked to serve up their own brief pasts.
“Well, we can’t talk about it when Emily’s not here,” Maisie says. “We promised.”
“We sure can’t talk about it when she is here,” Nell says. “She’s not going to want to hear anything bad about Duke.”
“How did you know if Mom didn’t tell you?” Maisie asks. “Did Dad tell you?”
Nell groans.
“That’s a horrifying thought,” I say.
“I know that Duke’s sleeping with Pallace because that’s the way it works.” Nell has put on red lipstick this morning though I cannot for the life of me imagine why. “The guy likes the star of the show. Then later on he doesn’t like her because she’s the star of the show. Then there’s a new show with a new star and he realizes the new one’s better.”
“For the record, I didn’t know any of this at the time.” I raise the shirt I’m mending to my lips, bite the thread.
“And you want to be an actress?” Maisie asks Nell.
“Because it’s so different in vet school?” Nell replies.
Now Maisie’s quiet. Her long--distance boyfriend has recently told her he needed space, as if there had been some shortage of space. Nell has told me this in strictest confidence. From Maisie I’ve heard nothing. She lies back out on her stomach. “Hazel?” she says.
“Emily doesn’t understand anything about the way the world works,” Nell says. “Benny’s been in love with her since she was three.”
“Faithfully in love,” Maisie adds.
“She says, ‘You’re so lucky. You get to date lots of people. You get to go out and have experiences and all I’ll ever have is Benny.’？”
Maisie stretches her arm further, the cheese in her upturned palm. “Which is like calling a marine in Afghanistan to tell him that you wish you got to go to war, too.”
Nell shakes her head. “She’s only been in love with Benny and Duke.”
“So maybe it would help her to know that Duke was unfaithful,” Maisie says.
“Maybe we don’t need to talk about it at all,” I say. “That works for me. Duke ended up with Pallace for a while. What else is there to say?”
“I feel so bad for Sebastian,” Maisie says.
“I feel bad for Pallace,” Nell says.
I smile to think that neither of them feels bad for me because here we are, together in this tight house with the rain lashing at the trees.
“Did it happen right away?” Maisie asks.
“I don’t know. What constitutes right away?” We are still on summer stock time, after all, four performances of Our Town left when I came back from the hospital, Fool for Love opened four nights after Our Town closed. I would say within the first five minutes of Fool for Love I knew they’d already had sex and were planning on having sex again as soon as the curtain came down. I knew it, Sebastian knew it, the audience knew it. When she tipped the bottle of tequila back, I could see it going down her throat. When he threw her to the floor and covered her with his body, I could hear people gasp. Sebastian and I gasped. “I think by the time Fool for Love opened things had changed,” I say diplomatically. “I’m not sure. They never told me.”
“What do you mean, they never told you?” Nell asks.
“I mean one night Duke was there and the next night he wasn’t. I couldn’t exactly go out and find him. Having a giant cast on your ankle really does impede your ability to hunt your boyfriend down. They don’t do casts for Achilles ruptures anymore, did you know that? They put you in a walking boot that you can take off in the bath.”
Did it happen before Fool for Love? Did it happen while I was in the hospital? Would it have happened if my ankle hadn’t swollen and I had stayed only one night instead of two? Two nights was one night more than Duke could sleep alone. They don’t even keep you one night now. It’s outpatient surgery. These were the things I used to think about, how with a slight shift in circumstances the outcome might have gone another way. Then I realized it would have gone that way eventually. Then I stopped thinking about it.
“So what did you do?” Nell asks. She abandons the spinach pie before she starts it, coming out of the kitchen to sit across from me in the big green chair. Her red lipstick makes her look French. Maisie gets off the floor and lies down on the sofa. When the next round of thunder shakes the floorboards, Hazel darts out and cries to be picked up.