“This town.”
Something passes over her expression, there and gone before I can decipher it. “It is. Is your hometown not like that? I know you said it’s small, too.”
“No, it is in some ways. Everything in Montana is just so much more…spread out, I guess. It’s harder to be as tight knit when your closest neighbor is a mile down the road.”
“Ah,” she says. “Is that how you grew up?”
“No, we lived in an apartment in town.” It was old and run down, the only complex in all of Larkspur. Most of the other residents were elderly people who either couldn’t or didn’t want to take care of their land anymore. “We were actually pretty close with our neighbors. They were like grandparents to us. Babysat Evan and I a lot when we were small.”
“Did you have grandparents around?”
“No, my dad wasn’t in the picture for very long, and my mom’s parents both died pretty young. So it was just us.”
“Do you miss it?” she asks. “Your hometown?”
I watch the trees passing by outside, see the first of the autumn leaves starting to fall, and ponder her question. It’s been so long since I’ve been back. I haven’t wanted to go, to see all the places my mom used to be, where she should be now. It feels like her ghost is lingering there, knowing she left it much too soon.
But sometimes, when I look out at the wrong mountains or drive through miles and miles of farmland on my way to my next assignment and see corn or soybeans or cotton instead of cattle, I feel a little twinge in my chest, like there’s a hollow spot where Larkspur should be.
“Maybe sometimes,” I finally say. “But I love traveling too. You ever travel?”
That look passes over her face again, lingering longer this time before disappearing. “No, I’ve never been anywhere.”
My brows lift without my permission, but I shouldn’t be surprised. Before I went to college and then decided to do travelnursing, I’d never been anywhere either. But Stevie seems too big for this town with her exotic palette and her mobile home and her wandering job.
“You didn’t want to?”
She flicks on the turn signal, and I look back out the windshield again to see a wooden sign engraved with the wordsMisty Grove Orchardand a painted bushel of apples. Her tires crunch over gravel and dirt, kicking up a cloud of dust behind us. Up ahead, I see a white farmhouse with a wraparound porch and a dark red roof. It looks like something out of a movie or a picturebook. The kind of place I dreamed about living when our upstairs neighbors would be vacuuming or arguing in the middle of the night.
“No,” she says, breaking me out of my perusal. “I did. I just never got the chance.”
Stevieleadsusthrougha latched gate that opens to the garden. It’s not big, but not small either. It probably feeds more than just the people in this household, but I can tell it’s not a part of the farm. The orchard spreads out for acres and acres beyond with a red barn in the distance. When we pulled down the long drive, Stevie took a turn that led us to the house, but there was another that led to what I imagine is other parts of the expansive orchard.
“Should we go in and see your family first?” I ask as Stevie picks a bed and squats down beside it. We stopped by a shed for gloves and tools, and she wastes no time before slipping the gloves on and digging in.
“Oh, no,” she answers, autumn sunlight pouring onto her skin. “If we go inside now, this will never get done. As it is, we probably only have fifteen minutes before they realize we’re here.”
I glance back at the house. Music drifts through one of the open windows. “Okay, let’s do this.”
We work mostly in silence for the next fifteen minutes, Stevie showing me where to go next and the bucket to throw the weeds in. I assume the garden was probably full during the summer, but now there’s only a few raised beds with produce—pumpkins and sweet potatoes, root vegetables, and leafy greens. The trees in the orchard are beginning to look bare, too, as apple season comes to a close. It’s like the whole farm is going into hibernation.
She was right, though, and after only twenty minutes, a door on the back porch opens and a woman who looks nothing like Stevie stands there in an outfit remarkably similar to the one Stevie is wearing—cropped army green pants and a thick oat-colored sweater.
“Stevie Jane, what are you doing?”
Stevie stands from where she was hunched over a bed, unbothered by the dirt covering her gloves as she lifts one hand to her forehead to block the sun and plants the other on her hip. “Baking a cake.”
“Don’t be a smartass, young lady. I am your mother.”
A laugh huffs out of Stevie. “Weeding your garden.”
“You could have at least come in first to say hello to your only parents.”
I catch Stevie’s eye roll, but I don’t think her mom does, because I have a feeling she wouldn’t be the type to let that go. “No, or it would have never gotten done.”
Stevie’s mom waves her hand like what her daughter said is irrelevant. “Come inside for some tea.”
“We’re weeding the garden.”
