“Here’s home,” he says, turning right almost immediately into a long, tree-lined driveway.
There’s an identicalWetherill Farm—Pick Your Ownsign on the grassy verge and the drive splits, leading to a black wooden barn on the left, beyond which are fields of fruit trees. At the end of the right-hand fork is a two-story farmhouse fashioned out of light gray weatherboard. The left-hand third of it has a gabled front with three big windows. On the right, three smaller, matching gabled dormers protrude from the gray slate roof, beneath which runs a long veranda. The rose beds at the front of the house are bursting with pinky-orange blooms and there are three stone steps leading up to a door painted midnight blue.
This door opens as Dad cuts the engine. I reach for my handle and climb out of the car to greet Sheryl.
“Wren! Welcome!” she calls, coming down the steps.
I once saw Sheryl wide-eyed with horror at finding a rogue gray strand among her lustrous dark-chocolate locks, and she never used to leave the house without a full face of makeup. But in the last few years, Sheryl has gone au naturel. In place oflong, shiny hair is a short gray bob, and her face is cosmetic-free—even her trademark plum-pink lipstick is missing.
Her personality, I’m sure, remains unchanged. She’ll still be as bold and opinionated as ever and I could see from the way she came down the steps that she still carries herself with an air of importance. But despite this less-than-favorable-sounding description, I don’t dislike her. In many ways, I respect her, and I even refer to her as “dynamic” to friends, a label that always makes me feel disloyal to Mum. We get on okay, but it’s taken us years to reach this point, and our relationship is far from perfect.
“Hello, Sheryl.” I give her a hug, making it quick because she doesn’t like people invading her personal space.
At five foot nine, she’s taller than me by four inches, and she’s always been enviably curvier and bustier, even more so now. Dad told me she’s been baking a lot since retiring from her university position, which made me smile because he always did the lion’s share of the cooking. I could never have pictured Sheryl as a country girl, but the image is less blurred now that she’s in front of me.
“What a beautiful house,” I say.
Sheryl beams and places her hands on her hips, looking up at the first floor. “We love it. Come and have a look inside. Or shall I give you a tour of the orchards first? No, come inside,” she decides before Dad or I can get a word in edgeways. “You must be exhausted.”
The interior of the house is very traditional, with walls painted in muted shades of green, gray, and blue and white-accented details on the window frames, cornices, and banister. The furniture I recognize mostly from their previous home: antiques that Sheryl inherited from her parents when theypassed away. The floor is polished dark wood, broken up by worn rugs, except in the kitchen where it’s tiled terra-cotta. It smells of cinnamon in here.
“Cinnamon peach cake,” Sheryl says proudly when I spy the baked goods on the counter. “I made it especially for you.”
“Aw, thanks,” I reply, touched.
The farm opens to peach-picking customers next weekend. Apples and pears will follow later in the season.
“Do you want some now or would you like to have a look upstairs?” she asks. “Let’s put your bag upstairs first. See your bedroom.”
She’s off down the corridor before I can answer. Dad and I smile at each other and follow in her footsteps.
I can just about cope with Sheryl’s bossiness these days, but there was a time when I wasn’t as relaxed. When I was younger, I’d tug against Sheryl’s ropes and try to mark territory that had long been marked by her. That wasn’t much fun for anyone.
I’ve since learned that it’s better not to go into battle with her, and I’ll certainly be trying to abide by her rules over the next two weeks.
God knows, I don’t need any more stress in my life right now.
2
I wake up early the next morning, after a miraculous full night’s sleep. I managed to hang on until about 10 p.m. before crashing out in the same marshmallowy double bed that Sheryl and Dad had in the guest room of their former home.
They used to live in Bloomington, a pretty, vibrant university city, where they moved just before Bailey was born. It’s an hour north, the midway point between here and Indianapolis, and they had a cream brick house on a tidy corner plot in a leafy green suburb.
I once visited in autumn and the colors of the trees lining practically every street were breathtaking.
That’s the thing about Indiana: it gets very cold and very hot and the extreme temperatures mean that autumn is the star of the seasonal show. I’d like to return again at that time of year, but right now it’s the height of summer.
Pale yellow light oozes beneath the white blinds of the two dormer windows and, when I check the clock on the bedside table, I see that it’s not quite 7 a.m.
It smells of cinnamon in here too, albeit a synthetic version, courtesy of the potpourri on one of the windowsills. I likethe scent—it reminds me of America’s shopping malls and home stores: warm and welcoming.
Mum always said that Phoenix smelled of orange blossom. She claimed the desert air was infused with it.
I was only six when we left, so my memories of Phoenix are vague. I remember the three tall, fat cacti in our backyard, the man-made city beach that had sprinklers on the sand because it was too hot to walk on, and the local swimming pool that was so highly chlorinated it turned my hair green. I remember the desert sands sweeping down the roads and Camelback Mountain fading into the skyline beyond distant bungalows. I remember the vast, multicolored layers of the Grand Canyon and the clear green water and smooth rock edges of Lake Powell. I remember tiny hummingbirds that fluttered like butterflies and prairie dogs that I tried but never managed to feed by hand. And I remember my dad tucking me in at night, calling me his “Little Bird,” the nickname he came up with when I was small and has long since stopped using.
I also remember the arguments. The screaming. The tears that were shed. I remember the tracks on my dad’s cheeks as he kissed me goodbye and left through our front door for the last time.
I shut off my mind to these images because there are some things I’d rather forget.
