When she gets back to the house in the late afternoon, her friends are wrapping up work, too; they’ve thrown open all the windows—“It got too stuffy,” Amina explains, “and Jackie was yelling too much”—and are painting the sides of the house, brightening up its chipped clapboard with a fresh coat of paint. Lili heads to the overgrown garden, stifling her smile as she refrains from informing her friends that they’ve used two drastically different shades of white paint.
Late sunlight filters through the gnarled apple trees, as she kneels in the dirt. Even after a full day in the fields, she loves the substantial sense of accomplishment as she digs up the aged garden crops, ripping out aggressive weeds.
“You should get chickens,” she tells Jackie when she helps her uproot the worst of the long-seeded kale that’s almost taller than her.
“Chickens?” Her roommate frowns.
“Yes, chickens. They eat weeds, and you’re going to have years of weeds with this garden, even after we’re done. You’ll have to keep on eye on them, but it’ll be worth it.”
“Alright,” Jackie concedes, looking amused. She pushes back her damp, sweaty hair with her forearm, hands clad in dirty garden gloves. She’s already got a bikini top on, denim cutoffs, ready to go swimming. “You’re the expert. I can get into being a chicken mom, I guess.”
Long hours, hot days. She’s up early, roaming the farm before workshop programming starts, talking to the field crew and helping with maintenance tasks: harvesting kale, twisting off carrot tops, packaging up produce for CSAs. Back at the house, her friends steadily make the space fit for a new life, bagging up the former owners’ residual belongingsfor donation, dropping off old furniture at the Salvation Army in town, replenishing the kitchen with fresh spices, oils, and tea. The storage pile of firewood grows as they get competitive about who can add more to the shed; Amina sketches a piece of Jamie and Jackie snoozing in the hammock together after a particularly long day, their long limbs ungainly like children’s in sleep. It’s a comforting blur of anticipatory summer nostalgia: the taste of campfire, burning wood, mismatched coffee mugs, tree trunks warm under her palm, lake water on her skin.
Once the garden is clear, she seeds a few fall crops: new kale, radishes, kohlrabi, carrots, oregano, things she’s seen Jackie’s parents cook with. Earth accumulates under her fingernails, her hair still damp from morning swims. Around her, the scent of soil and sunshine grows.
With it, memories of seasons in Marin. In Jane’s vegetable garden, she’d helped Robert harvest the last of the winter vegetables each spring, and sadness wells in the recollection, her rejected request to visit, but also—memories of her childhood, the feeling of loss. Expected, familiar, an old injury that she usually knows how to accommodate and ignore. Now, however, it’s no longer a numbness of enforced distance; she feels soft in her ability to brush against memories—unbidden, at the sight of thyme seedlings in the greenhouse, her mother’s favorite herb; remembering how her mother would braid her long black hair before they’d cook dinner, the sizzle of oil, her father chopping the fragrant stems as he let Lili rip apart kale for salad, his distraught laugh when she’d poured a whole packet of sesame seeds into the bowl:Alright then, some kale with our sesame salad, I suppose—ah, no, Lili! Don’t put more—okay, fine, yes, more—Aisha, I hope you’re in the mood for sesame—
That there is an end to pain—it’s an idea, rather than a belief, but it’s tied to that night with Aleksandr, the sense of falling headfirst into herself. It’s not in the foundation of her, and it’s not something she can trust yet, but she can begin to test her weight against it. The ability to let sadness and pain wash over her, as she kneels in the dirt, as she rides shotgun while James drives them all to the lake and the rush of air, trees, sunlight, and late summer heat makes her think of other places, other times: redwoods, froth of Pacific waves, bridges over bays. It’s so new, but she feels like she can breathe through it, a little.
When they fall into bed each night, she feels tired in a good, earned way.
“You like him,” she teases Jackie. They’re curled up in bed, facing each other across their pillows as they dissect Simon’s latest texts. He’s working late and hasn’t replied in a few hours. Out in the hall, they can hear Jamie and Amina brushing their teeth, in the shared bathroom.
Jackie groans, covering her face with her hand. “I do,” she mumbles. “I do, and it’s stupid—”
“It’s not stupid,” Lili counters. “He seemed really wonderful, and smart, and kind, and he’s the one who keeps reaching out to make plans—”
“I just don’t think he likes me very much.” It’s a whisper, quiet: uncertain, where she so rarely sees Jackie anything but radiant.
Lili frowns. “Hey,” she says, grasping for Jackie’s hand and pulling it away from her face. “I saw how he was looking at you, at Amina’s show. Like he was stunned you were with him. Got this adorable little smile whenever you’d quickly glance at him, then look away. He likes you, honest.”
“Fine,” Jackie concedes, looking unenthused.
Lili raises an eyebrow. “Wow, what excitement.”
“Ah, yes—he looked at me! A betrothal is coming, posthaste! The man—can you believe it—gazedupon me—had the audacity—” Jackie breaks off, laughing. “Sorry, I can’t breathe—the audacity to smile at me! Do you think I’ll recover from the scandal? My reputation? Fuck, my ribs hurt—”
“Walsh, I will kick you out of this bed,” Lili warns, but Jackie is laughing so hard she’s wheezing. Lili can’t keep from laughing, too, and her laugh feels easier, lighter, brighter than it has in years.
Every morning, when she wakes up early to head to Blue Acres, she puts the rusty moka pot on the stove and looks through the house’s packed bookshelves—remnants of the old owners, who had been professors at NYU, literature and history. Paging through the old books, she keeps coming across old favorites or abhorred titles from school lists, and she thinks:Of course, Aleksandr would like Clausewitz, andDoes he like Wiesel?andI don’t actually know what he’d think about Arendt.
Waking up on Tuesday, Kerr’s next round of edits, formalized feedback from their meeting last week, awaits in her inbox. The email contains strong praise and constructive feedback, but it is Aleksandr’s text—(8:36 a.m.) How are you?—that makes her chest swell with near-uncomfortable warmth.
That danger of hope, the fragility of yearning: what she might want to be possible.
He’s away in London: earnings call, headlines, interviews on the pre-market morning shows. After breakfast, Lili gnaws on a hangnail as she watches on her phone, listening to the calm, assured way he speaks to the latest results, fielding off-the-cuff questions with ease and a hint of humor: assets under management climbing ever closer to ten trillion, active international and domestic flows in every asset category, organic growth far outstripping commitments to the street. Capitalism running unchecked—metrics of success that don’t speak to any lives saved, or communities supported, or species preserved—and she should hate it, but all she can think about is that someone, probably Michael, made him button his shirt all the way up.
“Jesus Christ,” Amina mutters, spying the video feed over Lili’s shoulder while finishing brewing a fresh batch of coffee. “Stop mooning over him and just invite his ass up here.”
“He’s in London,” Lili snaps, gesturing at her phone, not looking away from its small screen propped against the salt and pepper shakers. “I can go a few days without getting laid.”
Amina snorts. “Yeah, because that’s what’s stopping you.”
“Lili has a crush,” Jackie quips, pouring coffee.
Lili feels her cheeks flame. “Don’t be stupid, it’s not like that—I just...”
“Yes?” Amina prompts, shaking the oat milk container. “You just?”
