Duke had a look on his face as if he were working a particularly complicated math problem in his head. Then he found the answer. “Jesus. Joe Nelson?”
“Joe Nelson,” I said.
“You married Joe Nelson?”
“Who on the Nelson farm did you think I married?” Maisie put the end of my braid in her mouth and started chewing.
“That’s right. His family owned the farm. I forgot that part. Joe Nelson.” He shook his head. “It makes more sense now. Is he still directing? I haven’t heard his name in years.”
I shook my head. We owed him no explanation, Joe and I.
“Do you live out here all the time?”
“We do,” I said, a decision that was feeling better by the minute.
“Are you coming to live with us?” Emily asked.
Duke started walking again. “I haven’t been invited.”
“I invite you!” she said gleefully. “You can sleep in my room. I have my own room.”
“You have tremendously friendly children.” He bounced my girl up and down on his hip, his walk becoming exactly the kind of exaggerated canter the girls were always begging me to do.
I could see Joe in the distance. He was out in front of the barn, wiping his hands on an enormous dirty rag. I waved. I had never loved anyone more than I loved Joe Nelson at that moment. “Look who’s come to visit,” I called to him.
“As you know,” Duke said to Emily, his eyes two inches from her eyes, “your cherry orchard is to be sold for your debts; the auction is set for August twenty-second, but don’t you worry, my dear, you just sleep in peace. There’s a way out of it. Here’s my plan. Please listen to me.”
The Chekhov wasn’t funny now that we were the ones who owned the cherry orchard, but Duke wouldn’t have known that. Joe was coming towards us quickly now, stuffing the rag in his pocket. “Nelson!” Duke called to him, his voice brimming with joy. “Hail fellow well met.” He was shaking Joe’s hand as Joe was taking Emily from his arms.
It was years later that Joe told me how he’d thought his heart would stop when he saw Duke there in the middle of the road, holding Emily.
20
The way Emily is sitting in the grass, her head against her knees, I wonder if she’s going to be sick. Maisie is on one side of her, Nell on the other.
“Should I have told you this when you were fourteen?” I ask. “Should I have said, Duke isn’t your father but he came to the farm once and thought you were the most beautiful child in the world and swung you around and recited Chekhov to you? Would that have made it better or worse because I’m telling you, I don’t know. Maybe I did exactly the wrong thing.” It’s true that she met him once and was besotted with him, and it’s true that he, at least for those minutes, was besotted with her. Duke had looked straight into her eyes after all. Even if she was only four it left a mark.
Emily pulls up her T-shirt and wipes her face. “I wouldn’t have believed you,” she says finally. “I would have said he’d come to get me and you refused to let me go. I would have gone out of my mind.”
“Impossible,” Maisie says, rubbing circles on her back.
“I would have refused to let you go,” I say. “Even if you were his, which you weren’t.”
“Maybe you remember him,” Nell says to her.
Emily considers this, looking into her own memory for Duke. “It’s like watching a movie,” she says. “I can see the whole thing now that you’ve told us. So yes, I remember Duke, but I alsoremember you and Veronica sitting at that table registering people for auditions, and I remember Ripley standing by the swimming pool, and I remember your grandmother. I mean, it’s not the same thing.”
“Still,” Nell says encouragingly. “It’s something.”
“It’s not. It’s nothing.” Emily’s beautiful eyes fill up again. “I just wish he could go back to being a famous movie star who I wanted to be my father when I was a teenager. I wish he could have waited out the pandemic on a yacht in Capri.”
“Everybody wishes that,” I say.
Maisie takes Emily’s braid into her hands. “But then we’d have spent the rest of our lives thinking that Duke played George inOur Townand Mom dumped Duke for Dad. I never would have known that Mom used to spell her name with a ‘u,’ or that she wanted to be a vet for a week in high school, or that she ruptured her Achilles. I never would have known that Dad played the Stage Manager. I’m not saying Duke needed to drown so that we could get our facts straight, but I’m not sorry to know. The truth is I’ve never been one hundred percent positive who your father was and now I am. I mean, I knew it was probably Dad, but didn’t part of you think that paternity was going to be the big reveal?”
I look at Maisie, aghast. “Are you serious?”
She shrugs. “The only thing she ever said to me when I was a kid was that Duke was her father.”
