The photo album of her youth and scrapbook of her twilight years. Had we trespassed on those memories?
To start with, she’d listened as Ren explained what we’d done and nodded as we showed her room after room. Toward the end, though, her nods turned to trembles and the curt replies from a gruff woman became silent tears from a grateful widow.
We feared she hated what we’d done. That somehow, we’d overstepped.
But of course, we worried for nothing.
It took two hours and forty-three minutes to show her around, bypassing the gardens and tennis courts that we hadn’t had time to tackle, and as we all stood on the repaired front veranda with peach roses perfuming the muggy breeze, she pulled out her cheque book and wrote us a figure that, even if we could’ve cashed the cheque, we wouldn’t have felt comfortable taking.
Ten thousand dollars.
Probably her entire retirement kitty, judging by the patched-up blazer she wore.
Obviously, we insisted we couldn’t take it.
Not just because it was too much, but because we had no way to cash it. No bank would touch us, no loan office would trust us—not without identification.
But even though it was a gift we couldn’t accept, there was something special about being offered that cash.
Ren and I stared at the cheque all evening after Mrs Collins had gone, and somehow, in that moment of feeling worthy and valued, we turned to each other and said, “It’s time to go.”
The next day, we called to let her know the annex was free, and it wouldn’t take a gardener much to tidy up the outside in order to sell the old girl for a tidy sum.
We left with freshly packed backpacks and aired out sleeping bags, leaving the cheque on her kitchen bench with a simple note saying thank you.
We were penniless and homeless, but our happiness made us richer than we’d ever been.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
DELLA
2020
“ARE YOU SURE, Della?”
I leapt into Ren’s arms right there in the tiny office of Lo and Ro’s Fruit Picking. “I’m sure. But only if you’re sure.”
He chuckled into my hair, holding me close, making my legs dangle off the ground. “Well, we just spent our last dollar, so unless you want to be in love with a thief, I suppose we don’t have a choice.” Letting me go, he smiled at Lo—a middle-aged woman with a baby boy tugging at her skirt and a sun-burned button nose. “We’ll take the job. How long was it for again?”
Lo—short for Loraine—pushed a clipboard toward us with a pen. She, along with her husband, Ro—short for Ronald—owned a farm that grew apples, pears, and berries.
“Five to six weeks, depending on how quickly we strip the orchards before working on the greenhouse berries. We like to pick later in the season because we can charge more as fruit gets scarce with colder weather.”
“Makes sense,” Ren said as I grabbed the clipboard and began hastily filling in the boxes. Names? They were easy. Phone number? We had one of those. Date of births? Fine, we could fudge that. Most details were easy apart from three things.
“Eh, Lo?” I looked up, tapping the pen against the form. “We don’t have a bank account or an address, and recently we were robbed, and they took our driver’s licenses, so we don’t have any I.D. Is that going to be a problem?”
I hated lying. I also hated how not having a piece of paper with our name on it had become a hazard in day-to-day living. But I wanted this job, and Ren needed some cash in his pocket in order to feel as if he was taking adequate care of me, so I fibbed and hoped for the best.
Lo looked us up and down, judging our tale.
I’d never been the best liar and hated to do it to a woman who’d caught us counting our last coins on the dusty highway where she had a small wooden stall selling freshly picked apples and pears. She’d taken pity on us when we’d settled on buying three instead of four, mentioning if things were tight, she had a few fruit-picking jobs open.
We’d only been on the road a couple of days since leaving the manor house, and we’d yet to embrace the thicker forest as we didn’t have the cash to fill up our backpacks with supermarket food. As comforting as it was to know Ren could hunt enough to keep us alive, I wanted more to my diet than just meat and the occasional wild vegetable.
When I’d seen the fruit stand, my mouth had watered, and I couldn’t stop myself tugging Ren across the road and drooling over a gorgeous pear.
“Ah, gotcha. You’re one of those.” Lo finally nodded.
“One of what?” Ren asked, his hackles rising, a slight cough falling from his lips.
My heart instantly froze, and I studied him.
Searching.
Seeking.
Desperate to know why he coughed, so I could stop it once and for all.
Perhaps it was just allergies.
Maybe it was from living in storms and traipsing through snow for so many years.
“Backpackers.” Lo pointed at our well-used bags. “I’ve had a fair few from overseas come through and want to be paid in cash as it violates their visa.”
Sighing, she picked up her baby son from the floor and plonked him on the small desk amongst the boxes of pears, blueberries, and apples. “Okay, I can do cash. And your hourly rate will be a dollar more, seeing as I don’t have to pay tax. I’ll pay you every Sunday, cash in hand. Got it?”
Ren cleared his throat, hiding any remnants of his tension. “Wow, thanks. We appreciate it.”
“Meh, don’t mention it. Government takes too much these days and doesn’t do anything worthwhile with it. Rather help out people who need it.” Taking my unfinished clipboard, she scanned it. “Married, huh? So you want a co-cabin with no one else?”
Ren stiffened. “You mean, you offer accommodation, too?”
Lo smiled. “’Course. We’re expecting dawn wake-ups and out in the orchard plucking by seven a.m., lot of transient folk don’t want to pay for motels seeing as fruit-picking isn’t exactly a long-term thing or pays the big bucks.” Bending down, she rustled below the desk before pulling up a key with a carved apple keychain. “Cabin six. It’s the only double free. Some people don’t like it as it’s the farthest from the communal showers and kind of on the forest edge. Heard it gives some tender-hearted folk the heebie-jeebies, but me? I love wildlife, and there’s nothing to be scared of.” Dangling the key, she raised a dark eyebrow. “So, you want it?”
Ren looked at me, and I looked at him.
This was entirely his choice.
I would happily live in the tent farther in the treeline if that was his preference, so he surprised me when he held out his hand and waited until Lo dropped the key. “We’ll take it. Happen to like wildlife too, so think it’s the perfect fit.”
And it was.
For the final weeks of summer, we tackled yet another kind of job, and Ren—who seemed to glow with the dawn—relaxed back into the wild, serious, incredible man I knew and loved.
Together, we’d pluck ripe, plump produce and sneak one or two on our way to the weighing and packing station. By day, we’d work with other staff—some young, some old—and by night, we’d walk the rows between the orchard trees, inhaling the scent of life, lying on our backs in the grass and watching the stars with the songs of cicadas serenading us.
Occasionally, if we stayed out late and crept back through a sleeping, silent farm, Ren would snag my hand and pull me into the massive greenhouse. There, surrounded by strawberries and raspberries and every other berry imaginable, he would push me into the shadows, press me against a wall, and hoist up my skirt to slip inside me.
For a man who loved waking with the sun, his nocturnal activities never failed to steal my heart and make me melt. His kisses were as hot as the greenhouse, his fingers coarse from picking fruit, his harsh breath as sweet as the sugary berries around us.
Together, we’d rock in the dark in perfect harmony, faster and harder as bodies demanded more, and fingers bruised, and teeth nipped, and hands clamped on mouths to silence our moans.
We were completely untamed and unashamed.