“I bet he is.”
“Man, was he ever in love with you.”
“Duke?”
Sebastian glanced over, taking his eyes off I-95 for just a second. “Sorry, no, Ripley.”
I laughed.
“I mean it. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. He told me once he was waiting for you to grow up, you know, so it wouldn’t seem so weird.”
But everything was weird, everything but me and Sebastian in the car, the lights of Connecticut shooting past us. We had chosen not to make a hard thing harder, which made it slightly easier when I counted up the days six weeks later and realized that my luck had run out. I still had enough money in my savings account left over from when I made actual money. I didn’t have to call anyone. I didn’t have to ask anyone for permission or help. A nurse stood beside me and held my hand and I’m here to tell you, I felt nothing but grateful. There was always going to be a part of the story I didn’t tell Joe or the girls. What I did was mine alone to do. I tore the page from the calendar and threw it away.
21
There are always four or five days when picking the last of the sweet cherries overlaps with the start of shaking the tart cherries, when things get so busy you can’t find your own hand. The crew we have kept our distance from this summer, the crew who has kept their distance from us, comes closer as we bring out the giant mechanical shaker. Together we unspool the tarps beneath the tree and then attach the shaker. Ten violent seconds later all the cherries are on the ground. The tarps are then rolled back, dumping the cherries into a long, mobile conveyor belt so the whole operation can move forward—-unroll, shake, roll up—-tree after tree, acre after acre. When the conveyor belt fills, the cherries progress into a giant tank full of water. We climb to the top and use our old tennis racquets to skim off the branches and leaves that have fallen in. There is no talking over all the noise, no extra moment in which to remember the past or examine how we feel about anything. There is work and only work, and with a lot of help, we get it done.
At the end of the first week of August, after all varieties of cherries have been harvested and sent off to the processing plant, we spend the day at the lake—-me and Joe and Emily and Benny and Maisie and Nell and Hazel—-swimming a little but mostly sleeping on our towels because we are that tired and the next day the pruning will begin. We’ve got six weeks to get things ready before apple season and there’s a year’s worth of maintenance around the farm to attend to. There’s a wedding to think about.
It is during this season of maintenance that Maisie leaves work in the late afternoon to go back to the house for a phone meeting with her advisor. Ten minutes later she returns, a tall, gray--haired man at her side. “Mom!” she calls out in a loud voice, and I turn in her direction. Six weeks have passed since Duke drowned in the Tyrrhenian Sea, four weeks since I finished telling the girls the story of when I had known him. There are no visitors in the orchard, no one but the people who work with us, but as I get closer I can see that it’s him.
“Sebastian!” Maisie says, and in her excitement she waves. She might as well be hopping up and down. I can tell that he means to be sheepish but he’s not, he’s glad, and I walk straight into his arms.
He puts one hand on either side of my head and looks at my face. We are both so much older now, and we are alive. “I didn’t think you’d be here,” he says.
“I’m always here,” I say.
He smiles. “I met Maisie.”
“He was on the porch swing,” Maisie tells me. “Just sitting there. I knew exactly who he was.”
“She opened the door and said, ‘Sebastian Duke?’？”
I look behind me. Emily and Nell are hanging back like shy children. I introduce my girls.
“Emily!” he says. “My brother used to say, ‘Someday I’ll live on an orchard in Michigan and have a daughter named Emily.’？”
“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” she said, her cheeks red.
“Did you know that your mother was the greatest Emily of all time? Your father was a very good Stage Manager but this one was in a class by herself.”
“He’s basing that on two Emilys,” I tell the girls, but I will admit it, I am grateful.
Sebastian shakes his head. “I went on to have an entire life after I knew you,” he says. “You have no idea how many actresses I’ve seen.”
“She should have stuck with it,” Nell says. “We tell her that all the time.”
“It looks like your mother did just fine,” Sebastian says.
“One of you go get your father,” I say to them. “Tell him who’s here.”
But miraculously, they all go, because in some ways they are grown--up women who understand.
Duke was sixty when he died, which makes Sebastian sixty--one, which makes me fifty--seven. “I look at you,” he says, “and I can see the whole thing, you and Duke up there onstage, Uncle Wallace. You’re still that girl.”
I shake my head. “I’m so sorry,” I say. “I’ve thought of you every day since we heard but I didn’t have any idea how to find you.” Which is true, but it also never occurred to me to try. We knew each other such a long time ago.
“Duke loved it here,” Sebastian says, looking out over the trees. “He was always talking about the day we all came out and had lunch with Joe’s aunt and uncle. The place hasn’t changed.”
“I could tell you all the ways it’s changed but you’re right, essentially it’s the same farm.”
“Did you know he tried to buy it? I found him a lot of other orchards over the years but he always said no. This was the place he wanted.”
Even now it’s such a strange thought, Duke picking cherries on the Nelson farm. “He showed up one day in a big black car. The girls were so little then, in fact Nell wasn’t even born.”
Sebastian nods, and I understand that he knows every story about his brother. He sees Joe and the girls coming out of the barn and he waves, then we start up the road towards my family.
Generations of Nelsons had cleared the trees and planed the boards and pulled out the roots and the enormous rocks and planted the orchard. They looked after the cherries and the apples, the peaches and pears. They weren’t about to sell this place to anyone. He called them for several years making offers, and after so many polite refusals he suggested a compromise: Would they sell him a place in the cemetery? Just a little place under the oak tree, he said. Duke would be cremated, after all. How much room would he need? Maybe just a small stone with his name but maybe not even that. The privacy appealed to him, along with the memory and the view. Duke told Maisie and Ken if he couldn’t live here he would at least like the right to be dead here. “Why are you even thinking about that?” big Maisie had asked him. He was so young! But she liked his television show, and even though she knew it wasn’t real, Duke had so many people shooting at him and pushing him out of speeding cars. That had to wear a man down after a while, put him in mind of his own death. The price he offered them for a corner of their cemetery came to more than what Ken and Maisie had cleared in profit for the last five years combined. The money bailed them out. Duke bailed them out, and we never knew it. The lawyer came to the house with a check and a nondisclosure agreement. They were told that Duke would like to come and sit from time to time if they didn’t mind, and of course they didn’t mind. They would be thrilled to have him visit, stay for dinner, sleep in the guest room. He was welcome. That’s what Duke told Sebastian. The Nelsons liked him. But after he bought a piece of the cemetery they didn’t hear from him again, and he never came to visit, except for the one time he did.