For a while we really did just run our lines in the back of his car, and then those lines were lightly punctuated with kissing. One night he asked if I knew a place we could stretch out, something I hadn’t done before, something my body felt keenly attuned to wanting, something Veronica said was amazing. I had the keys to Stitch--It, and so I unlocked the door and took him up the stairs without turning on the lights, past the sewing machines and thread racks, past a thousand buttons and god only knew how many zippers hanging from oversized safety pins, right to a couch where my grandmother sometimes napped. Nobody caught us, and since Veronica was the only person in the world I would have told, I told no one. But god, it ruined everything: the rehearsals, the play, my grandmother’s shop where I’d been the very happiest, and my best friendship. While the math teacher was pulling my sweater over my head, I failed to take into account that Veronica would still be able to read my mind.
I wish I’d thought to ask him why he picked us. I know he wasn’t much more than a kid himself, but if high school girls were his thing, why did he feel the need to drive two towns over to see what was available? He had four classes of math students to choose from. But then of course I realized he must have been sleeping with the math girls, too. He was a good--looking kid, and he knew everything about eye contact, and he could act. Truly, he was the best George I ever saw. This could just as easily have been a story about my having slept with Jimmy--George Haywood who then went on to be a stupendously famous actor, though I’m pretty sure he went on to be a math teacher somewhere in New Hampshire.
I blame myself for what happened. I was hideously disloyal to the person I loved in order to be with a person I didn’t love at all. But I was also sixteen, and as sure as fifteen will get you twenty, sixteen doesn’t stand a chance against twenty--two.
Maybe I should have told my girls this part of the story, but they would have needed to hear it before they turned sixteen for the information to do them any good.
Joe lets us sleep in after all, or Maisie and Nell and I slept. On the far side of the orchard, Emily had set her alarm so that she could start the coffee and make egg sandwiches before she and her father meet for work. Emily, twenty--six, had been a senior in high school when she started saying she would come back after college and help us with the farm. She said that when we were ready to retire she would run the place herself.
“You can do anything in the world,” I said, channeling my grandmother. “And you might want to do something else.”
“You might want to do something else,” my husband echoed, but what he meant was Yes and Please and Thank you. The farm is either the very paradise of Eden or a crushing burden of disappointment and despair manifested in fruit, depending on the day. I would love to leave my child Eden. The other stuff, less so.
“This isn’t a monarchy,” Maisie said. “It’s not like you get the land because you’re the oldest. What if I want to run the farm?”
“Then we run it together,” Emily said. “That’s easier anyway. Do you want the apples or cherries?”
Maisie’s future was never going to be in fruit, but that didn’t mean she wanted her sister to win. Even though no one would believe it now, Emily had once been the harbinger of misery for all of us. Nell certainly didn’t want the farm. She’d been pricing tickets to New York since seventh grade. Of our three girls, only Emily found fascination in the profits of sweet cherries versus tarts. She paid attention to trees the way Maisie paid attention to animals and Nell paid attention to people. Even as a child, she was the one to notice the first traces of brown rot. Emily liked to work outside while her sisters slapped at mosquitos. She was good with her hands while they cut themselves on leaves. She liked to sit in the fruit stand and talk to the people who stopped to buy peaches and jam. Maisie and Nell did not go near the fruit stand.
But in her day, Emily had been a beast, a teenage girl so riven with hormones and rage that her two younger sisters decided it would be easier to just be good. Emily had raised sufficient hell for all of them put together. We worried that her devotion to the orchard might be some latent penance for bad behavior. She was trying to make it up to us long after we had ceased to be hurt.
“Take your time,” we’d say when she talked about the farm. “You don’t have to decide now.”
But she had decided. She signed up for a horticulture major at Michigan State. She signed up for an agribusiness management minor. Her father shook his head when she told him about the minor. “Someone’s been paying attention,” he said.
When I go down the hall and find Maisie and Nell asleep in their twin beds, I see them both as they are and as they were: grown women and little girls. The forced--air heat blew weakly from floor vents on the second story before we updated the HVAC system, and every winter morning they begged to spend a single day warm in bed, and every morning I dragged them out, telling them to wear their bedspreads over their nightgowns and get dressed in front of the stove. Parts of the house date back to the 1800s. It was warm only in pockets. The girls referred to the Little House on the Prairie books as the stories of their lives.
But we are in the full glory of summer now—-the windows open, the room bright, and still these daughters, twenty--four and twenty--two, sleep on.
“You promised your father,” I say, because that’s what gets them.
“Take Hazel out, please,” Maisie says into her pillow.
When I go to lift the little dog from under her arm, Hazel shows me her teeth, even though she doesn’t mean it. She, too, yearns for a day in bed. I carry her because her front leg doesn’t work on stairs. I put her out the kitchen door and she squats beside my pot of geraniums then trots away.
Emily had been fourteen when she first informed me Peter Duke was her father. She’d been slamming around the house for weeks, her head bent beneath the weight of her interior darkness. When I asked what was wrong she said nothing in the same voice one would say go fuck yourself.
Where was everyone? It was early March and the snow was blowing sideways while I sat next to the fireplace with a pile of mending. Sometimes I wondered if the girls bit the buttons off their shirts just to give me something to do. I put my hands in my lap. “Where did you get that idea?”
Her eyes opened up as if she were finally fully awake. “You don’t even deny it.”
“Of course I deny it. I just wonder what could have made you think it.”
“Because it’s true.”
“Emily, it’s not true.”
“How would you even know?”
I don’t remember ever looking at my mother this way, like I could eat her down to the bone then wipe my bloody mouth on her hair. Emily was genuinely frightening, and at the same time I wanted to laugh for the sheer lunacy of it all. Fear and laughter: the two worst reactions in the absence of logic. “I would know because I would have been there.”
“But you’d lie about it. You lie about everything.”
A pause for reflection read as guilt, but the accusation was so strange I was having a hard time being nimble. “What did I lie about?”
“Knowing. Him.” Plunge--plunge, like an ice pick.