“Not even a vegetarian. But,” she admitted, “I eat mainly vegan by default. I’m not allowed to have meat in the house, so I used to eat it in the school cafeteria.”
“School-lunch meat. That’s desperation.”
Marigold smiled. “You have no idea.”
“So … you aren’t a student anymore?”
“Not since I graduated high school. You?”
“Same,” North said. “How old are you?”
“Nineteen. You?”
“Same.”
They smiled at each other, shyly. Pleased. The moment grew bigger and bigger, until it was too big. North shifted in his seat. “I was a vegetarian for a few months. I had to go back to eating meat, because I needed that level of protein and energy for the farm work. But the moment I’m out of here, I’m gonna try it again.”
“You aren’t interested in the family business?”
“No way. You?”
Marigold shook her head. “The restaurant gene did not pass on to me. My grandparents also own a restaurant,” she explained. “Down in Atlanta.”
“That’s cool. My grandparents started our tree farm.”
“Family owned and operated since 1964,” she said, quoting their sign.
Something flashed inside North’s eyes. As if he were feeling the same thing she’d felt when he’d spoken highly of her mother. Pride, maybe relief. “That’s right,” he said.
“So why don’t you want to be a farmer, North Drummond?”
“Just not in me.” He sipped his coffee. “Like you and restaurant-ing, I suppose.”
But there was something in his tone that he couldn’t quite hide. Something that was more distressed than indifferent.
“So,” she asked again. “Why don’t you want to be a farmer, North Drummond?”
He smiled grimly. “It’s true that I’m not interested in it. But Nick—my older brother who was supposed to inherit the farm—it turned out that he didn’t want it, either. About two years ago, he left in the middle of the night. Packed up everything he owned and moved to Virginia to live with his girlfriend. Now they breed designer dogs. Puggles and Labradoodles.”
Marigold was struck by the excessive bitterness in his pronunciation of these words. “But … wasn’t he getting out, like you want to do?”
“My dad had just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s.”
“Shit. Oh, shit. I’m sorry.”
North stared at his coffee mug. “It’s getting harder for him to work, and my parents have been relying on me more and more. They want me to take over the farm, but my sister is the one who actually wants it. My parents are good people, but … they’re kind of old-fashioned. There was a big fight last summer. Now Noelle’s gone, too.”
Marigold wished she could reach through the table to hug him. She understood everything—the love, the shame, the needing to stay until things were okay again.
“I’ve been trying to convince her to come back—and trying to convince my parents to give her the farm—so that I can leave.”
“Why can’t you just leave anyway? Like your brother and sister did?”
“The farm barely turns a profit as it is. My parents would go broke without me.”
Marigold swallowed. She’d made the same decision. She had also put her future on hold. “I—I’m staying home to help out, too.”
North looked up. His hardness, his edge, dissolved. “Does this have something to do with your father?”
“It has everything to do with my father.”
“And the reason why you’ve been living like this?”
Now Marigold was the one staring at her coffee. “You know those stories about women who didn’t know that their husbands had secret, second families?”
“Yeah.”
Marigold shrugged.
There was a beat. “Are you serious? You can’t be serious.”
“In Charlotte. A wife and two daughters.”
North looked appropriately shocked.
“They weren’t happy to hear about our existence either,” Marigold said. “And now he’s living there. With them. Making amends. To them. Maybe starting a third and fourth secret family, I don’t know. We found out just before Christmas, last year.”
North shook his head. “I didn’t know things like that happened in real life.”
Marigold hadn’t known either.
“So why didn’t you get to keep your house?” he asked.
“Because my mom and I … we were the second family.”
North’s eyes widened with understanding.
“He married the other woman before he ever met my mom. We were his exotic, wild-child, hippie side project.” Marigold spat this like poison. “So now his wife, his legal wife, is taking all the money in lawsuits. He had to sell our house, and we had to move.”