Their father is sound asleep. Because he cannot wait for me, he’s left the lamp on the nightstand burning and folded back the covers on my side of the bed. One hand is on his heart, as if the last thing he did was check to see if it was still beating, the other is out of the bed, his fingers nearly brushing the floor. Nothing can wake him in the summer. After dinner, he goes back out to the barn, saying he has just a few more things to finish, then winds up putting in a second day. I picture the farm as a giant parquet dance floor he balances on his head, the trees growing up from the little squares. The fruit that must be picked, the branches that must be pruned, the fertilizer and insecticide (just try growing cherries without it), the barn full of broken machinery along with the new tractor we can’t afford and the goats that seemed like such a good idea five years ago when Benny first suggested them for weed management and cheese, the workers whose children are sick and the workers who need money to go home to see theirchildren and the little house whose roof leaks and the stacks of twenty-pound plastic lugs withThree Sisters Orchardprinted on the side, and me and Emily and Maisie and Nell, all of it is on him. We try to be helpful but it is his head this place rests on. He carries it with him to our bed at night.
I put on my nightgown and crawl in beside him, covering the hand that covers his heart. Live forever, I say to myself.
Veronica didn’t get to go to the University of New Hampshire. She had to stay home because no one else was there to watch the boys. Her plan was to do two years of community college and then transfer her credits. Everyone has plans, and by the time we graduated from high school she wasn’t telling me hers anymore. She was the one who started out with Jimmy-George, by which I don’t mean sitting on the steps at the end of the hall, talking. He was older than us, twenty-two, though no one believed it. Veronica asked to see his driver’s license when he told her and she still thought he was lying, just like the guys in the outlet stores thought his ID was fake and then sold him the beer anyway. He lived two towns over and was doing his student teaching. He said the kids in his class had laughed that first day of school when he wrote his name on the blackboard. Jimmy-George was going to be a high school math teacher, and that in itself made him a valuable asset because he did our math homework for us. He did other things. Six years older would be nothing later on, but at the time it was an unimaginable distance. We couldn’t believe how lucky we were when he reached for us, an adult who played a kid onstage.
Veronica told me how she felt about him, and later she told me what they did. Two nights a week he came to her house after he’d finished rehearsal and she’d put the boys to bed. He would curl around her in her single bed so they could go to sleep likemarried people, then he would get up in the early dark and drive back to the room he rented and get ready for school, all before her mother finished her shift at the hospital. Veronica said that his eyes never left hers the entire time. She said she was pretty sure no one had ever really looked at her before, not in her entire life, and maybe that was true, but it was also true that that was just the way Jimmy-George looked at people. Onstage he looked at me like someone had dropped a giant Mason jar over us and we were alone in the world. He was the one who taught me how not to look away.
“We should be spending time together,” he said one night after rehearsal. “You know, be George and Emily, have a strawberry phosphate or something.”
But we were George and Emily and Veronica. “I don’t think so,” I said.
“I thought you liked acting,” he said. “I’m just talking about us being more convincing.”
I told him that I thought we were pretty good already, when what I should have said was, Back up. He stood much closer when we weren’t on the stage, when no one else was around.
He touched one finger to the side of my neck. “Chemistry,” he said. “That’s what George and Emily have.”
I couldn’t say he was wrong about that. I hedged for a couple of days before climbing into his car, telling myself this thing between us was all in the name of theater. We passed Mr. Martin in the parking lot one night while he was standing beneath a street light in a wool hunting jacket, smoking a cigarette. I could tell he was trying to calculate the potential for damage.
“Fifteen will get you twenty, Mr. Haywood,” he said finally, his voice neither leering nor scolding, just a helpful piece of information passed along. Jimmy’s last name was Haywood.
Jimmy-George removed his hand from my waist and laughed, so I laughed too, even though I had no idea what Mr.
Martin was talking about. Years later, I heard the expression again on aset and it made perfect sense. Mr. Martin had been concerned for Jimmy Haywood’s safety.
For a while we really did just run our lines in the back of his car, and then those lines were lightly punctuated with kissing. One night he asked if I knew a place we could stretch out, something I hadn’t done before, something my body felt keenly attuned to wanting, something Veronica said was amazing. I had the keys to Stitch-It, and so I unlocked the door and took him up the stairs without turning on the lights, past the sewing machines and thread racks, past a thousand buttons and god only knew how many zippers hanging from oversized safety pins, right to a couch where my grandmother sometimes napped. Nobody caught us, and since Veronica was the only person in the world I would have told, I told no one. But god, it ruined everything: the rehearsals, the play, my grandmother’s shop where I’d been the very happiest, and my best friendship. While the math teacher was pulling my sweater over my head, I failed to take into account that Veronica would still be able to read my mind.
I wish I’d thought to ask him why he picked us. I know he wasn’t much more than a kid himself, but if high school girls were his thing, why did he feel the need to drive two towns over to see what was available? He had four classes of math students to choose from. But then of course I realized he must have been sleeping with the math girls, too. He was a good-looking kid, and he knew everything about eye contact, and he could act. Truly, he was the best George I ever saw. This could just as easily have been a story about my having slept with Jimmy-George Haywood who then went on to be a stupendously famous actor, though I’m pretty sure he went on to be a math teacher somewhere in New Hampshire.
I blame myself for what happened. I was hideously disloyal to the person I loved in order to be with a person I didn’t love at all. But I was also sixteen, and as sure as fifteen will get you twenty, sixteen doesn’t stand a chance against twenty-two.
Maybe I should have told my girls this part of the story, but they would have needed to hear it before they turned sixteen for the information to do them any good.
Joe lets us sleep in after all, or Maisie and Nell and I slept. On the far side of the orchard, Emily had set her alarm so that she could start the coffee and make egg sandwiches before she and her father meet for work. Emily, twenty-six, had been a senior in high school when she started saying she would come back after college and help us with the farm. She said that when we were ready to retire she would run the place herself.
“You can do anything in the world,” I said, channeling my grandmother. “And you might want to do something else.”
“You might want to do something else,” my husband echoed, but what he meant was Yes and Please and Thank you. The farm is either the very paradise of Eden or a crushing burden of disappointment and despair manifested in fruit, depending on the day. I would love to leave my child Eden. The other stuff, less so.
“This isn’t a monarchy,” Maisie said. “It’s not like you get the land because you’re the oldest. What if I want to run the farm?”
“Then we run it together,” Emily said. “That’s easier anyway. Do you want the apples or cherries?”
Maisie’s future was never going to be in fruit, but that didn’t mean she wanted her sister to win. Even though no one would believe it now, Emily had once been the harbinger of misery for all of us. Nell certainly didn’t want the farm. She’d been pricing tickets to New York since seventh grade. Of our three girls, only Emily found fascination in the profits of sweet cherries versus tarts. She paid attention to trees the way Maisie paid attention to animals and Nell paid attention to people. Even as a child, she was the one to notice the first traces of brown rot. Emily liked to work outside while her sisters slapped at mosquitos. She was goodwith her hands while they cut themselves on leaves. She liked to sit in the fruit stand and talk to the people who stopped to buy peaches and jam. Maisie and Nell did not go near the fruit stand.
But in her day, Emily had been a beast, a teenage girl so riven with hormones and rage that her two younger sisters decided it would be easier to just be good. Emily had raised sufficient hell for all of them put together. We worried that her devotion to the orchard might be some latent penance for bad behavior. She was trying to make it up to us long after we had ceased to be hurt.
“Take your time,” we’d say when she talked about the farm. “You don’t have to decide now.”
But she had decided. She signed up for a horticulture major at Michigan State. She signed up for an agribusiness management minor. Her father shook his head when she told him about the minor. “Someone’s been paying attention,” he said.
When I go down the hall and find Maisie and Nell asleep in their twin beds, I see them both as they are and as they were: grown women and little girls. The forced-air heat blew weakly from floor vents on the second story before we updated the HVAC system, and every winter morning they begged to spend a single day warm in bed, and every morning I dragged them out, telling them to wear their bedspreads over their nightgowns and get dressed in front of the stove. Parts of the house date back to the 1800s. It was warm only in pockets. The girls referred to theLittle House on the Prairiebooks as the stories of their lives.
But we are in the full glory of summer now—the windows open, the room bright, and still these daughters, twenty-four and twenty-two, sleep on.
“You promised your father,” I say, because that’s what gets them.
“Take Hazel out, please,” Maisie says into her pillow.
