“He’s too good an actor.” She leans over to brush her hand across the daisies. “I’d make a fortune if I knew when we were getting out of here.”
“Don’t you sort of love it, though?” I am projecting, of course. I know this.
“Love being trapped with my family on the farm while the world goes up in flames? Not so much. I mean, I know we’re lucky. I know that pretty much everyone else has it worse, but it’s hard. You and Dad and Emily live here anyway, and Maisie’s got the shitting calves to give her life meaning, but for me it’s pretty much just picking cherries.”
I can do nothing about the world and the flames beyond leaving free masks in the fruit stand, but the part in which we’re trapped is joy itself. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugs. “At least we have the past.”
Nell and I agree that we’ll come back at the end of the day and pick a bouquet for the table but for now we should get to work. Maisie has her bucket around her neck by the time we catch up and Emily’s bucket is nearly full with a good six inches of cherries already in the lug.
“You knew Benny and I were getting married,” Emily says before I even pick up my bucket. Just as well, since I didn’t know how to start the conversation. She tilts back her head so she can see me from beneath the bill of her cap, so I can see that she’s fierce again.
I glance over at Maisie but she keeps her back to me while deftly picking cherries. I understand now that the detour to see the daisies in the cemetery was meant to give Maisie and Emily a minute to talk. “Listen, I’m thrilled about this. You know we love Benny.”
You know we love you.
“It’s not like we were making plans behind your back,” Emily says. “We were only having a conversation. If this isn’t a good time for you—”
“Don’t say that.”
She squeezes her eyes closed. “I don’t want to feel like I’m doing this wrong before I’ve even done anything.”
“Emily.” I put my arms around her from the side, the buckets dictating the shape of our embrace. She tries to pull away but I have her. I hold her, and then she starts to cry.
“Oh, Emmy.” Nell touches her sister’s shoulder. “Oh, god, I’m so sorry.”
Emily shakes her head, covers her face with her hands.
“Somebody didn’t get enough sleep,” Maisie says.
That’s what I used to say to the girls when they wailed over whatever it was they wanted and didn’t get—another puff of cotton candy, a final spin on the Zipper. The perceived injustice of the phrase enraged them, but when they got older and started saying it to one another it was suddenly hilarious. Sure enough,Emily’s sobs are disrupted by her own hiccupping laughter. She pulls up her T-shirt to wipe her face, blow her nose.
“You’re so gross. You should be a vet,” Maisie says.
Emily shakes her head. “I don’t know how to do this.”
“Get married?”
“I don’t know how to doanyof it.” She turns up her face to shout at the sky. “Are we going to get the cherries picked in time? Will anyone be working at the processing plant? Is everything going to rot in a warehouse? Then Benny says we should just go ahead and get married, at least getthatknocked off the list, and I think, why not? If we do it now we don’t have to invite anyone—no relatives, no neighbors, no friends from school. We’ve got the perfect excuse. It can just be us and the Holzapfels. We can bring blankets and sit in the grass by the pond. I can wear something I already own and nothing will cost anything and we won’t have to write thank-you notes.” The breeze shifts imperceptibly through the leaves and just like that she’s crying again. Maisie lifts the yoke of stone fruit from her sister’s neck and Emily rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Whenever I think about getting married I feel like I’m losing my mind, and maybe that’s because I’m losing my mind, and then I think of poor Benny getting stuck with a crazy wife and what a burden I’m going to be for him, then two minutes later I don’t feel that way at all. Getting married is bullshit, if anyone wants to know. The whole institution is designed to drive women crazy. We don’t have the time or the money to blow on some princess fantasy I never had in the first place. So why can’t we just get married on a Thursday after lunch and then go back to work? Done. I love Benny, you know I do, and I want to marry him. I just don’t want to be a bride.”
Maisie and Nell and I are staring at her, and while I’ve always said my daughters are capable of a perfect communion of thought, this time I’m in on it. Emily has solved the age-old problem.
“You slipped the harness,” Nell says.
“You’re a fucking genius,” Maisie says, her voice gone soft with wonder.
Emily stands radiant before our adoration. “Dad doesn’t know this, does he?”
We shake our heads.
“Hold off for a minute, will you? Let me tell him. Benny’s going to want to talk to him. I want to talk to him. He’d be hurt, you know, if he thought we’d worked the whole thing out without him. We’re together all the time.”
Emily! I want to say. This sorrow at the thought of exclusion you wish to protect your dear father from, that’s what I’ve been feeling all morning. But I have been here long enough to understand the difference between daughters and mothers and daughters and fathers. We promise to wait. Secrets are at times a necessary tool for peace. “Take as long as you need.”
“I’ll tell him,” she says, then opens up her arms to take the three of us in.
When all of this is done we feel that we have lived enough for an entire day. We’ve done enough. Now we should be able to go home, sit on the porch or in the bathtub, go back to bed with our books and our dog and our sewing, but the truth is the sun is ticking up and we’ve barely started to work. Sweet cherries must be picked today and every day until they’re gone. We’ll start shaking the tarts before the sweets are finished. They overlap at the end. When all the cherries are harvested there will be just enough time to get the trees pruned and finish up the farm maintenance and take care of equipment repair before we start in on the apples. And the pears. Only a few acres but still, we have pears and they will have to come off the trees. Everything does.
