“Do you get on with Casey?”
I haven’t even met Bailey’s new husband yet. Scott and I were invited to the wedding, but with only a week’s notice, we didn’t feel it was expected of us to go. Bailey has always been impulsive.
“Everyone gets along with Casey,” Dad replies. “He’s a good guy.”
“That’s cool.”
I don’t mean for my voice to sound thin, but Dad shoots me a pained look.
“I was sorry to hear about Scott,” he says. “I thought he was a good guy too.”
“He was,” I reply quietly. “I guess he still is.” I swallow down the lump in my throat and add with forced flippancy, “Can’t help who you fall in love with, right?”
Dad clears his throat. “Right.”
We let that sit between us for a while.
My parents met when they were in their early twenties and traveling around Europe. They fell hopelessly in love, and when Dad’s visa ran out, Mum moved to Phoenix, Arizona, to be with him. They were married and expecting me within a year.
It was a straightforward case of too young, too soon. At least, that’s how Dad described it to me when, as a resentful teenager, I tried to get to the bottom of why his head was so easily turned by another woman, a professor at the University of Arizona where Dad was working as a groundskeeper.
It’s always been a mystery to me how someone like Sheryl could fall for a man like Dad—she’s nine years older and a whole lot wiser. I get the attraction part—objectively speaking, my dad was kind of hot: Sheryl used to take her coffee breaks outside in the gardens so she could chat with him.
Harder to understand is how an affair between an academic and a groundskeeper turned into something serious enough that they were willing to devastate his wife and child.
Because when Sheryl fell pregnant with Bailey, Dad chose them over us. Sheryl convinced Dad to move to Indiana to be closer to her family and found a position at the university in Bloomington. My heartbroken mother took me home to the UK, and Bailey got to grow up with my dad as her own.
This trip is not without its emotional complications.
I must nodoff because it doesn’t feel like we’ve been traveling for two hours when Dad rouses me.
“We’re coming into town,” he says. “I thought you might like to see it.”
I force my stinging, tired eyes to focus on the view outside my window. We’re on a long, straight road, whizzing past fast food restaurant chains: Taco Bell, KFC, Hardee’s, Wendy’s. We pass a car wash and a garage and then the road morphs into a residential street with regular intersections. Some of the homes are two-story with gabled dormers, red-tiled roofs, and basement windows peeking out above neatly mowed lawns. Others are bungalows of white weatherboard with brightly painted shutters in lime green or cornflower blue. We crest a small hill and continue over the other side, where there’s more of the same before we reach what Dad says is the “historical downtown.”
Ahead is a large square around a central courthouse with a tall clock tower. The building gleams white in the fading sunshine, and as Dad drives around it, multiple Doric columns come into view.
“That’s the Hoosier National Forest off in the distance,” Dad says as we leave the town center and head through another residential sector where many of the homes have red, white, and blue banners hanging from their front porches. I’ve missed the Fourth of July celebrations by only a week.
“And Bailey and Casey live along there,” Dad adds, nodding out the window.
There’s a sign at the edge of the road that reads:Wetherill Farm—Pick Your Own, with an arrow pointing in the direction we’re heading.
“Yours?” I ask.
“Yep.” He nods proudly.
Beneath the cursive black-with-white-infill lettering are painted illustrations of fruit and vegetables. I make out peach, pear, apple, pumpkin, and watermelon before we drive past.
“You do watermelons too?”
“Not this year,” Dad replies as we cross over a tumbling river on an old iron bridge that’s painted rust red. “Only pumpkins for Halloween. The previous owners grew melons, but we figured we’d better give ourselves time to get to grips with the orchards first. Hopefully we won’t get into trouble for false advertising,” he jokes.
Mum bristled when I told her that Dad and Sheryl had bought a pick-your-own produce farm. She was a fruit picker at a citrus farm when we lived in Phoenix and she works at a garden center now. She’s always loved being out in the open andtending to nature, even if the work itself isn’t particularly challenging.
She once confided that she felt Dad had rubbed salt into her wounds when he left her not just for another woman, but for a professor. Now Sheryl has swapped academia for what is basically Mum’s dream job. It’s no surprise she feels sore.
Laid out before us on the other side of the bridge is farmland, vast and sprawling for miles. We drive alongside a field of something green and leafy for a short while before Dad takes a left onto a dirt track.
