Earlier this afternoon, Luca had received his hundredth rejection. A bleak milestone on his spreadsheet he had been both steadily chugging toward and dreading for years. One hundred literary agents had rejected the manuscript he’d been working on since he was fourteen.
And if that wasn’t a sign he needed to finally change his fucking life, he didn’t know what was.
“No,” he eventually said, getting down to the bare bones of it all. “The problem with fishing is that it’s never been what I’ve chosen at all.”
Emerson looked at him then. A slanted, curious but kind look, one brow furrowed down, the other lifting in the corner.
“And farming would be?”
A fair question, if still one that had Luca shifting his eyes away. Maybe Luca had never contemplated farming until two hours ago, but maybe it didn’t matter. This was a good option. Writing sure as hell wasn’t going to get him out of fishing. It was time to give up the ghost.
“Could be,” he eventually answered, and hoped Emerson knew how much he meant it. How much he wanted it to be true.
I feel like I still don’t know anything about you, Emerson had said.
But they’d had a beer together. Had just spent a decent amount of time walking this land, while largely being silent.
These days, a beer and some silence was a lot for Luca toshare with a person. He rather thought Emerson probably knew him as well as anyone else did.
Emerson only regarded him a minute more before he shrugged, looking once more toward the golden fields of his land.
“Sounds good enough for me. When could you start?”
four
Emerson’s shouldersrelaxed as he pulled in front of Jayden’s house, a modernized bungalow on a garden-lined Portland street.
He’d been up early, as usual for a Saturday, prepping all the boxes for the CSA pickup and the market. And even if he had only had the one beer the night before, he could tell it did affect him. His movements a little slow, head a little sluggish. The drive here felt particularly long.
Worth it, though. The drive here was always worth it. He used to only come to the city for market days and CSA pickups, but now he could schedule those things around what really mattered: Daisy pickups.
Well, dropoffs, too. But they weren’t as fun as the pickups.
“Da-dee!”
Daisy’s blonde pigtails bounced in the sun as she ran out to meet him. Her hair was thin, wispy, barely long enough to fit in said ponytails—Emerson had always been sorry she’d inherited his hair genes instead of Jayden’s, whose dark brown hair was thick and full—but Jayden had parted the blondelocks clean down the middle and brushed them to a shine, as he always did.
“Daisy daze.” Emerson scooped her up, propped her on his hip. It was harder and harder to do these days, picking up his girl without it twinging his back, but he’d take it as long as he could. “Poppy inside?”
He and Jay had each chosen the paternal nickname that felt right to them—Papa for Jay, just Dad for Emerson—but Daisy had put her own spin on things. Papa turned into Poppy, Dad to Daddy, but with one of Daisy’s signature pronounced pauses in the middle: Da-dee.
Emerson knew one day that pause would disappear, that her enunciation would smooth itself out. But part of him hoped it never would. That she’d whisper,thanks, Da-dee, when he hugged her at her high school graduation.
Daisy nodded, tugged on his ear.
“Making snack.”
“Ah.” Emerson continued past Jayden’s roses and shrubs, reached for the handle of the front door. “The most important part of the day. Was your nap okay?”
Daisy turned suddenly shy, hiding her face away as Emerson entered the foyer. The bright turquoise frames of her glasses knocked into the side of his chin.
“I don’t know.”
“I think she knows,” Jayden intoned from the kitchen down the hall, “that she didn’t sleep at all.”
Emerson gasped, dramatic. “Not atall?”
Daisy giggled into his neck. “I wasn’t sleepy!”
