“It’s not going to be cold enough for them anymore. We’re going to have to start thinking about wine grapes, strawberries, asparagus.”
“So plant the grapes,” Joe says. “It doesn’t mean you don’t have children.”
“It sort of does,” Nell says. “Once you think about it.”
“You, too?” Joe asks. “Have the three of you signed a pact?”
“I have no idea what I’m going to do,” Nell says. “But I’ll tell you, I think about it.”
Maisie tightens her arms across her chest. “Who doesn’t think about it?”
Emily sits down on a kitchen chair and Benny stands behind her, his hands on her shoulders. We are all so tired.
Emily picks up a fork and balances it on one finger. She looks at nothing but the fork. “I can eat vegetables and ride my bike and stop using plastic bags but I know I’m just doing it to keep myself from going crazy. The planet is fucked. There’s nothing I can do about that. But I’ll tell you what, I’m going to spend my life trying to save this farm. If anybody ever wonders what I’m here for, that’s it.”
Nell reaches across the table and takes her sister’s hand, and Joe, Joe who never walks away from us, goes out the kitchen door. He is standing at the edge of the garden, his back is to the house. He is looking at the trees.
11
Joe didn’t want to talk about it last night when we went to bed, and when I wake up in the morning he’s already out there. He’s wondering if Maisie or Nell will have children, and if those children who won’t grow up here will want to take over the farm someday. He’s thinking about what will happen to the farm without another generation of family to protect it after we’re gone, after Emily and Benny are gone. He is thinking about Emily and Benny being gone. He is thinking about the developers who relentlessly sniff the perimeter of our land, the strangers who knock on our door in February to ask if we wouldn’t rather spend the winter in Florida. They are the enemies of stone fruit. They would leave just enough trees in the ground to justify calling the place Cherry Hills or Cherry Lane, then pull the rest up and build pretty white summer houses with picture windows and wraparound porches, places we could never afford. And that’s the good scenario. The bad scenario, the one where the trees eventually die? Joe isn’t thinking about that one and I know this because I’m not thinking about it either.
When Maisie and Nell come downstairs for breakfast I can tell they’ve been staring at their own bedroom ceiling for most of the night, running through the same worst cases. Maybe we should start a family mentalist act, see if we can make a living reading one another’s minds. Maisie’s phone dings at the tableand she takes it out of her pocket and stares at it for so long that Nell and I stop and wait for her to tell us.
“What?” Nell says finally.
“Someone’s trapped a litter of feral kittens in their barn and wants to know if I can come by and kill them this afternoon.” Maisie puts her head down on the table.
“Who?” I reach for her phone but she grabs it away.
“We’ll have to see them again,” she says. “You’re better off not knowing.”
“Let them kill their own kittens,” Nell says tiredly. It’s true: Ignore the kittens and you’ll wake up one morning to find the cats outnumber the mice. But still, people need to kill their own kittens. You don’t ask your neighbors to do that for you.
Maisie sighs. “I can’t think about this right now.”
The back door opens and Joe is there looking so worn out I wonder if he got any sleep at all. Joe pretty much never comes back to the house in the morning once he’s gone out. Hazel raises her head and issues a single bark of acknowledgment.
“We’re taking the day off,” he says, jingling the keys in his pocket. “We’re going to the beach.”
We stare at him like he’s someone we’ve never met. “We can’t go to the beach,” Maisie says. “There’s too much work.”
“There’s always too much work and I’ve decided we aren’t doing it today. I’ve already sent Emily home to get her suit.”
We continue to sit. Nell pours milk in her coffee to cool it.
“Go on.” He stands there like a teacher who’s just announcedClass dismissed. This is the part where we’re supposed to fly out the door.
“Let’s pick for a while,” I say, looking for the middle path. “Then we’ll knock off early and go to the beach.”
Joe shakes his head. “We never knock off early, in case you haven’t noticed. That’s why we have to do this in the morning, first thing. Go.”
“It’s Tuesday,” I say. “Since when are we off on Tuesday?”
“It’s Thursday,” he says.
Thursday? I wonder if this could be true.
“Areyougoing to the beach?” Nell asks her father. She tests the coffee. Still too hot.
