Duke shook his head, fishing his lighter out of his pocket. “I like it here.”
“Peedee,” Sebastian said. His voice wasn’t stern but we all understood his seriousness. Duke got to his feet and put the cigarette behind his ear. Pallace brushed some pine needles off his back.
“There’s one more thing to show you,” Joe said. “You can stay all afternoon if you want but after this I need to get back to work.”
We followed him down the hill, Duke coming last and closing the gate. “Wasn’t that something?” he whispered, leaning close.
“Beautiful.” It was the word I used for the entire day.
We walked back a different way, past a long stretch of apple trees and a smaller stand of pears, Joe telling us the names of every variety and which ones were for eating and which were for processing and which trees were past their usefulness and needed to be pushed out. That was another thing he was planning to do if he found time. We were back on the main road that ran alongside the woods, and when he reached a break in the trees that he alone had seen, he stepped inside.
Into the dark woods we followed.
“Look at this!” Pallace cried, her head craned back to see the place where the leaves cut the sunlight to thread.
“Keep going,” Joe said. He went past the hemlocks and white pines and the red oaks that were never felled or burned, past the giant rocks in mossy sweaters. We could smell the cherry trees and then the moss and then the water, and then the woods opened unexpectedly and let us out on a beach of the Grand Traverse Bay of Lake Michigan. He had brought us to the edge of the world.
“How much have I missed?” Joe asks, taking his place on the towel beside me. He is wearing his plaid cotton work shirt and jeans, his steel-toed boots. His hair is much the same, as is his smile. His back is straight, his blue eyes still bright behind his glasses. Of all the things in life that have changed, Joe has changed the least.
Nell gets up to sit beside her father, wraps him in her skinny arms. “You’ve just been freed from your cloak of invisibility and are now revealed to be the hero.”
Joe shakes his head. “Believe me, I wear the cloak of invisibility for a long time in this story.”
I admit that I was slow.
“Did she tell you the part about bringing a date on our first date?” he asks Nell. “She brought her date and her date’s brother and her date’s brother’s girlfriend.”
“You in no way posed the invitation as a date.”
“That’s because you were dating Duke. I was just putting out a feeler to see if I stood a chance.”
“Too subtle,” I say.
“I was playing the long game,” he says.
Nell, tucked beneath his arm, looks up at him. “You were in love with her then, weren’t you?”
There’s a question I’d never asked.
Joe is not a man to lie, even when the lie could be categorized as harmless and polite. I can see him digging around in his memory. Did he love me then? It was such a long time ago. “I like the thought,” he says finally, “but probably not. I don’t think I could have been in love with a person who was so clearly in love with someone else. That would be self-defeating and I wasn’t the self-defeating type.”
“I wasn’t in love with Duke,” I say.
Joe makes a ridiculous sound, an eruption of laughter and incredulity.
Nell keeps her attention on her father while making an effort to soften the blow. “So you weren’t exactly in love with her but you liked her very much and thought she was a wonderful actress.”
“Your mother was the best actress I ever directed,” Joe says. “If she had decided that that was what she wanted to do with her life, she would have been brilliant at it.”
“Shoulda, woulda, coulda,” I say, lying back on the sand, though it is true that his estimation touches me.
“No one was better,” he says.
“Well, actually, someone was better,” I say.
“That was your opinion,” Joe says.
I open one eye and stare at him. I use my amazing powers of mentalism to tell him to shut up, which he does.
