“Just a couple of puffs or it will make you dizzy,” he said. “You’ve got to build up your lungs.”
We were walking again. I had a cigarette in one hand and his hand in the other. I couldn’t imagine Emily smoking, and I wondered if the director would have an objection, though surely I wouldn’t be smoking by the time the audience arrived. The way the embers brightened when we inhaled made me think of fireflies. When Duke stopped again we were back at the house where I was living. He took the cigarette from my fingers and put them both out in a pot of geraniums on the porch. Maybe I was a little dizzy. I hadn’t noticed the flowers when I came in or when I went out. That we were walking up the stairs holding hands seemed like the most natural thing in the world. For all I knew he had gone upstairs with the other Emily as well, the one who’d lasted only a day. He may have been taking me back to a bed he’d already slept in, and I couldn’t have cared less because it was my bed now.
“This is odd,” Joe says when he comes in the back door. The dishes are done and I’m on the couch sewing bits of everyone’s castoff dresses and favorite sheets and the random cloth napkin into quilt squares while Hazel sleeps. Thirty years from now I’ll have enough squares to make a quilt for each of our daughters.
“What’s odd?”
“We’re the only two people in the house.”
“Where’s Nell?”
“She went to Emily’s. I guess Maisie’s still trying to plug the calf.”
It might not sound like an overture but I stick my needle in the tomato--shaped pincushion all the same. People with children are attuned to the inherent sexual possibility of an empty house. For years we tried to schedule activities for all three girls at the same time: the weekly dance class, the 4-H meeting, the algebra tutor. A scant hour of overlap was all we were hoping for, but even when those bright stars aligned, one daughter so often refused to leave. There always seemed to be one girl who wanted nothing but to crawl into my lap for an hour while the other two were away. And so I would hold her. You don’t forget that, even if your daughters have grown and been gone for years and then come home.
“I would have thought they’d all rush back for the story.”
“We’ll pick it up tomorrow.”
“How far have you gotten?”
What came after that first night? “Well, I’m at Tom Lake, we’ve had the first table read, so I guess we’re up to Pallace.”
Joe shakes his head. “Oh, Pallace. Don’t you wonder about her?” He cuts a piece of the strawberry cake I’ve left on the counter. I wish he’d eat the whole thing. As thin as he gets in the summer, he should eat a cake every day. “Pallace and then Sebastian.”
“I never should have started.”
He looks at me with that small, sad smile he has. “How? They’re relentless. They would have sat on your chest until you told them everything.”
“And it’s not like I’m telling them everything anyway. I’m not telling them the good parts.”
Joe brushes the crumbs into the sink, rinses the knife. “By which you mean sex.”
I am staring at my husband from across the room, a calm man who isn’t given to picking apart the past, which doesn’t mean he needs to hear it. “I’m speaking in the parlance of three girls in their twenties.”
“Really good sex?” He’s still smiling when he comes over and takes the pincushion from my hand.
I shrug. “Who can remember?”
“You, probably. I’m betting you remember.” My husband smells very faintly of hay and goats.
“I remember yesterday if I’m lucky.” I’m not fooling him but still, I want to be polite.
“How tired are you?” he asks.
“Less tired than you.”
For so many years I have kissed him. For so many years I have not kissed another soul, and there is a deep and abiding comfort in this. Joe is not Duke. Joe was never Duke and I would never have wanted him to be. From the couch Hazel gives a low growl.
“What about her?” Joe asks.
“She can’t climb stairs.”
He looks at the dog. “Really? I just thought Maisie liked to carry her.”
“She does.”
“Can you stay awake while I take a shower?”
“I can.” I follow him up the stairs. We leave the lights on because before we know it, one of the girls will be home.
8
It’s a different kind of sleep when the girls are home. Even after so many years I am asleep but also waiting to hear the back door open and close. Nell comes home first, then Maisie. When they were younger I could hear the difference in their footsteps, a job that is simplified by Hazel barking. It’s strange to me that Maisie and Nell have continued to sleep in the same room now that Emily’s room is available, but they’ve always liked being together. Even when they were children, neither of them seemed to pine for a room of her own. At thirteen, Emily nailed a NO TRESPASSING sign to her door (purchased from Ace Hardware and put up not with tape or thumbtacks but nails), and even that couldn’t rouse her sisters’ interest in getting in there. All these years after the end of Emily’s hormonal rage, Maisie and Nell are still opting for the familiar comfort of their twin beds.
When I go downstairs in the morning I find a cardboard box full of eggs waiting on the kitchen counter, some of them the color of milky coffee and some of them the blue of clouded sky. I’m glad we don’t keep chickens because I regret the goats, but it means that eggs are always welcome. Maisie and Nell drag downstairs while I’m making French toast, Maisie clutching her dog like a pillow to her chest. I ask her if she’d been paid in eggs last night and she nods, yawns. “They tried to give me money.”
“Money’s nice,” Nell says, rubbing at her eyes. None of our girls have money.
Maisie shakes her head. “I can’t take money until I have my license. And anyway, what’s a person supposed to charge for helping a poor little shitting calf in the middle of the night?”
“Three dozen eggs?” I say, guessing.
“More or less.”
Animals aren’t much of a thing around here. Like our goats, the occasional cow or horse or flock of chickens represents a fruit farmer’s temporary insanity, the fanciful quest to make a hard job harder. Wouldn’t it be fun to sell eggs at the fruit stand? Goat cheese? Butter? But it isn’t fun. We know how to tend to our trees but the animals are largely a mystery to us, which is why Maisie’s phone is always ringing. No one cares that she hasn’t finished school. She knows more than they do and they need her now.
“Is the calf okay?” her sister asks.
Maisie nods again, thanking me as I put breakfast on the table. “I got a stomach tube down her for fluids, and they had some Albon tablets. It turned out okay.” She cuts a corner off her French toast and slips it to the dog.
I brush my fingers through my middle daughter’s curling hair before sitting down. Chemistry was nothing for Maisie. Sick calves are nothing. She is never afraid.