Nell rests her chin on her knees. “What I don’t understand,” she begins.
“Here it comes,” Joe says.
“What I don’t understand,” she says again, looking at her father, “is how a person can grow up in Michigan, love the theater, become a famous director, and then ditch it all to come back and grow cherries.”
“I’ve wondered about that myself,” Maisie says. She is scratching her dog’s stomach with both hands and Hazel stretches out her four legs as far as she is able.
“It’s nice to see them turn their attention on you for a change,” I say.
“First off, you grew up on a cherry farm in Michigan and you want to be an actress,” he says to Nell.
“What choice did I have? You read us Chekhov at bedtime,” she said. “NoHippos Go Berserkfor the Nelson girls.”
“Secondly,” Joe says, ignoring her, “cherry trees come equipped with invisible leashes. Just when you think you’re free they start to pull you back.”
“Emily inherited the cherry leash, not me,” Nell says.
Emily nods. “Thanks for that.”
“Are there more sandwiches?”
Maisie rifles through her bag and hands him one. We are partial to cheese and mustard, all of us.
“I had two lives,” Joe says, unwrapping his lunch. “Maybe more than two. I got to do everything I wanted. Who can say that?”
I raise my hand.
“So what happened to Duke?” Emily asks.
We look at her. The four of us are forever turning as one to look at her. “You know what happened to Duke,” I say.
“I don’t mean whathappenedto Duke. I mean what happened to him that day, that summer?”
“Duke liked the farm better than anybody,” Joe says, glad to be back on topic, glad to be thinking about anyone other than himself, glad to have a sandwich. “By which I mean he liked this place more than pretty much anybody who ever visited. Duke would have quit acting to pick cherries, at least on that day he would have. If Ken had offered him a job he would have taken it. I remember him running up and down the beach like a kid. He was crazy. That was the first time I ever saw him do a handstand.”
“Was it?” I ask. He used to do them on the chair in our room.
“But when did things change? Did it happen the day you brought him to the orchard?” Emily asks me. “The happiest day of your life?”
“Let’s strike the whole happiest-day-of-my-life motif,” I say. “You three refuse to understand what I’m saying.”
I can see that Emily is both irritated and making an effort not to be. We’ve had a good day so far, some real sweetness, and we both want to keep it that way. “You come up to the farm with Duke and Sebastian and Pallace and you leave with Daddy. Something must have happened.”
Joe looks over at me as if he might have missed some pivotal piece of information himself.
“I came up with Duke and left with Duke. I didn’t leave with your father.”
“Okay, so maybe not on that day but eventually you did. You were with Duke and then you were with Dad.”
I shake my head. A child’s ability to misunderstand is limitless, even when she is no longer a child. “I didn’t leave Duke for your father. Your father and I were never together at Tom Lake.”
Now Maisie is squinting at us as well. “But you and Dad met at Tom Lake. You fell in love at Tom Lake.”
“We met at Tom Lake and didn’t fall in love, and then we met again a long time later and we did fall in love,” Joe says to them. He looks at me. “I feel like I need a lawyer.”
Because now we feel the shift from Lara and Joe and Maisie and Nell on one side and Emily on the other, to Lara and Joe on one side and Emily and Maisie and Nell on the other. The jury does not believe us.
“You fell in love at Tom Lake,” Nell says, of this she is certain. “That was always the story.”
