“Which is why he became a cherry farmer.”
Maisie is still sitting there, the dog in her lap asleep. “I want to kill him.”
“Well, you can’t, he’s dead, and anyway, it happened a long time ago.” The rage dissipates along with the love, and all we’re left with is a story. Peter Duke is dead and I’m telling them my small corner of what happened.
“So how did you get out of there?” Nell asks.
I turn to the window. Even the rain has reached its conclusion. The sun is everywhere. “Come on. Back to work.”
“You’ll tell us, won’t you?” Nell says to me. “You promise?”
I tell her yes, I promise, but she isn’t going to like it.
Maisie and Nell get their hats, their bug spray, and go out into the great dripping world wearing muck boots. I stay behind to make the lunch, which I should have been working on while I was talking all this time. The past need not be so all-encompassing that it renders us incapable of making egg salad. The past, were I to type it up, would look like a disaster, but regardless of how it ended we all had many good days. In that sense the past is much like the present because the present—this unparalleled disaster—is the happiest time of my life: Joe and I here on this farm, our three girls grown and gone and then returned, all of us working together to take the cherries off the trees. Ask that girl who left Tom Lake what she wanted out of life and she would never in a million years have said the Nelson farm in Traverse City, Michigan, but as it turned out, it was all she wanted.
Once I finish with the sandwiches and put the bags of cookies and chips in a backpack, I walk out past the kitchen garden. The lettuce and tomato plants and zinnias are already straightening up from the beating they’ve taken. Those tiny periwinkle butterflies are working their rounds. Where do the periwinkles go in rain like that? It’s not that I’m unaware of the suffering and the soon-to-be-more suffering in the world, it’s that I know the suffering exists beside wet grass and a bright blue sky recently scrubbed by rain. The beauty and the suffering are equally true.Our Towntaught me that. I had memorized the lessons before I understood what they meant. No matter how many years ago I’dstopped playing Emily, she is still here. All of Grover’s Corners is in me.
By the time I drop off the food in the barn and kiss my husband, the girls have put their buckets around their necks like horses ready to plow a field. They are fully at work.
“He left you!” Emily cries when she sees me coming.
“All caught up,” Maisie says from the ladder.
Hazel has found a filthy tennis ball, god knows where, and brings it to me. I throw it as far as I’ve ever thrown a tennis ball and she tears out down the row of trees, Hazel, who cannot climb the stairs.
“We opted for the abridged version,” Nell says.
“You should have told me this years ago,” Emily says. I don’t know exactly what her sisters have told her but she is miraculously indignant on my behalf, her entire being trembling with sympathy and rage.
“You would have taken Duke’s side,” Maisie says, but she says it lightly.
Emily comes over and hugs me. “What did you do? Did you stay?”
Hazel is back with the tennis ball and after a brief tussle and growl for show I throw it again. She is not a young dog. This will not be our entire day. “I didn’t stay.”
“Are you going to make us guess?” Maisie asks from her high perch.
I start to say no, there’s no guessing this one, when Nell raises her hand like a schoolgirl. “Ripley came and got you.”
“No!” Emily shouts.
I look at my youngest child in disbelief. Nell in her lipstick has figured it out. “How else could you leave? You can’t walk. You don’t have a car and even if you did it’s your right foot so you can’t drive. You haven’t told your family. You just said you didn’t see Sebastian again.”
“Wait, you don’t see Sebastian?” Emily looks up at Maisie. “You didn’t tell me that.”
Sebastian. This is an uncomfortable point on which I have meant to be evasive, but since I have lied I decide to let the lie stand. I have staked out a single day of privacy in the light of this merciless interrogation.
“I would have thought Sebastian would get you out of there but he didn’t. Cat can’t leave Tom Lake in the middle of the season. Elyse Adler isn’t coming back. I don’t think Chan gets you out even though I bet he was in love with you.”
“Give up acting,” Maisie says to her sister. “The FBI needs you.”
“And Ripley wants you back to do publicity. I mean, he really needs you to come to Los Angeles so he’s leaning on you anyway. You’re the star of the movie.”
“I’m not the star of the movie.”
“We’ve seen it a hundred times. You are. So Ripley’s been calling and Duke’s been collecting the messages at the office.” She stops herself to think things through and we wait with her in silence. “Oh my god, Duke called him, didn’t he? Duke called Ripley and told him to come and get you. That’s why Ripley came to Michigan. Otherwise he would have sent the girl, the-what’s-her-name, Ashby, to fly out and bring you back.”
“Why couldn’t it have been Ashby?” Emily asks her. “It doesn’t make any sense that Ripley would be the one to get on a plane.” Emily, who we used to be so afraid of, is trying to put it together.
