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He jerks his head to his right, scowling.
“Hank, maybe you should just give her a chance. Would that be so hard? I mean, it’s all up to her anyway, right?”
“Shut up.”
“Hey, there’s no need to be such a dick about it. We’re just having a conversation here!”
He holds up a hand. “No, I mean it, shut up! Do you hear that?”
I shake my head, then stop to listen. I hear voices, I guess. Low voices… Stan? There’s something weird about it, something tense.
“This way,” Hank says, gesturing with his chin.
We walk through the rows, heading toward the woods that border the orchard. The voices get louder, coming in wisps and gradually gaining strength. As we head into the shadow of the trees, I see flash of violet off to our left. Stan and Vanessa are standing there, talking with Vanessa's dad.
“Oh, excuse us,” Hank mutters. “We thought we heard voices.”
The scene is tense, with Vanessa glancing urgently between her dad and Stan, shifting from foot to foot over and over.
“I was just explaining to Earl that we have a cabin in orchard. That Vanessa could live there.”
“Live there?” Hank repeats.
“What's going on?” I ask.
Vanessa looks at me, her mouth open slightly, her eyes wide and startled. I want to put my arms around her, to calm her down. She seems so lost right now.
“We need to be leaving much sooner than we expected,” her dad says. He purses his lips, working his jaw back and forth. “It's a shock to us all, but that's what we need to do.”
“I'd like to stay,” she says quietly.
“Vanessa, let's talk about this in the house.”
“No!” she insists. “I'd like to talk about it right now. Stan offered the cabin to me, and a job as well. That was your concern, right? So now you're fine, right?”
“Vanessa…” he says in a warning voice. “We can talk about this. In. The. House.”
“So if they’re giving me a job,” she continues, “and I’ve got a safe place to live, then what? How could you possibly say no? I'm a grown woman. I’ll decide this for myself
.”
Her dad twists his walking stick in his hand, gripping it tightly. I can tell he's extremely frustrated, but he’s also struggling to acknowledge her status as an adult who could make her own decisions.
“She’ll be safe here with us,” Hank says softly. I glance at him in surprise. “There's five of us to look after her. Anything she needs… it will be fine.”
I watch Stan try to suppress a sly smile. “Yeah… it's really no trouble. Nobody's using the cabin right now. It'll be nice to have somebody looking after it. A woman’s touch, like they say.”
I try to catch Hank's eyes, to see how he softened so quickly, but he's deliberately not looking at me. Vanessa's dad shakes his head slowly, pressing his lips together.
“I hope you change your mind,” he says softly, then turns and walks back down the path.
Once he is out of earshot, Stan reaches out to steady Vanessa by holding her elbow. She breathes out slowly through her puffed cheeks.
“That was… amazing,” she finally says. “I can't believe that happened!”
“So you're okay?” I ask.
She fans herself lightly with her fingertips. “Yeah! I mean… I've been wanting to tell them for so long, and now it's just… I mean, what a relief!”
