Maisie looks at her sister as if she is just now awake enough to see her. “What did you wind up doing last night?”
Nell swirls a piece of French toast in a puddle of syrup. “I went to the little house. Benny told me I could borrow his copy of Moby--Dick. He said by the time I finished reading it the pandemic would be over.”
“You went to the little house to read Moby--Dick?” Maisie reads journal articles about small--animal vaccinations, and Emily reads journal articles about weed control and pesticides, and Nell reads novels and plays, each of them marveling at the other two.
“No,” Nell says. “We wound up playing Pictionary.” She stops because there’s something else she wants to tell but she’s conflicted about it. Nell is a girl without secrets. Watching her face is like going to a movie.
“And—-” I prompt.
“Maybe I’m not supposed to talk about it. They didn’t say I couldn’t so I wonder if maybe you already know and haven’t told me.”
Maisie and I put down our forks.
“Let’s assume we don’t know,” I say.
“Let’s assume we do,” Maisie says.
Nell takes another bite, weighing the options. “Do you know they’re getting married?” she asks.
Maisie slaps the table with her open hand, sloshing her coffee, startling the dog. “They got engaged?”
Nell folds her lower lip into her mouth. “You didn’t know.”
“We didn’t know,” I say, and what I feel—-and I am ashamed of this—-is a very old prick of exclusion. Emily didn’t come to me. Emily, who didn’t tell me when she started her period and didn’t tell me when she decided to go to Michigan State, didn’t think to tell me that she was marrying Benny, though Emily, had she been at the table, would have said it was because I already knew those things.
“I don’t think it’s an engagement per se. I mean, it wasn’t like she was holding out her hand to show me a ring. They were just talking about whether or not they should try to fit in some kind of wedding between cherry season and the apples. The only reason it even came up was because one of the pictures I was supposed to draw was ‘marriage vows.’?”
“Outed by Pictionary,” Maisie says.
Nell looks from her sister back to me. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Of course you should have. How else would we have known?” I can hear the petulance in my voice.
“They were always going to get married,” Maisie says.
Nell nods. “When I was a kid I thought Benny must have hated his parents because he was here all the time.”
The French toast has grown cold but we make ourselves eat it. We know how the morning will go if we’re hungry. “Come on,” I say, picking up plates. “Let’s get to work. I bet your father thinks we’re still in bed.”
We remember our hats. The day is clear and bright as we walk out to take our place between the trees. We see the six members of the Ramirez family in the distance and shout out our greetings, and they in return wave their arms above their heads. Their family is safe and together in this cherry orchard they have come back to year after year. Our family is safe and together in this cherry orchard. Our eldest daughter is going to marry our neighbors’ son, a boy she loves, a boy we love, and I am mad at Duke, who, through no fault of his own, or through only the fault of his essential Dukeness over which he had no control, tore the fabric that bound me to my daughter. And though it has been repaired, expertly, repeatedly, this lumpy seam remains between us that keeps her from telling me she’s getting married. The dog has run ahead and Maisie jogs after her while Nell drops back and takes my hand. “I want to see if the daisies are up,” she says.
We climb the little hill to the cemetery where to my surprise the tall grass is tangled with flowers—-white petals, bright--yellow hearts. She’d called the seed and feed store more than a month ago and asked them to put a couple of packets of daisy seeds in with our order.
“I was just here,” I say, amazed by the degree to which everything is changed by the presence of daisies. The girls like to bring the goats up to the cemetery in the summer—-they do a beautiful job trimming around the stones—-but no one’s had the time this year and now we’ll never do it. The place looks too pretty.
The shaggy and shaded wilderness of the cemetery was always Emily’s favorite place on the farm. Even when she was a tiny girl she liked to run her fingers along the tombstones, the letters worn nearly to nothing, the stones speckled with lichen. I would lie in the grass between the graves, so pregnant with Maisie I wondered if I’d be able to get up again, and Emily would weave back and forth between the granite slabs, hiding then leaping out to make me laugh. Like every other mother in the history of time, I wondered if I would ever be able to love another child as much as I loved her.
“Listen, she isn’t mad at you,” Nell says. “They were thinking out loud, that’s all. I just happened to be at the table while they were thinking out loud.”
I laugh. “I should have named you Veronica.”
“Veronica from high school?”
“She knew how to read my mind.”
Nell smiles. “Maybe I’ll start a mentalist act, even though I think yours is the only mind I can read. Well, yours and Emily’s and Maisie’s. I can’t read Daddy’s mind.”
“I wonder why not,” I say. Veronica. She will always be eighteen for me. I can see her so clearly.
“He’s too good an actor.” She leans over to brush her hand across the daisies. “I’d make a fortune if I knew when we were getting out of here.”
“Don’t you sort of love it, though?” I am projecting, of course. I know this.
“Love being trapped with my family on the farm while the world goes up in flames? Not so much. I mean, I know we’re lucky. I know that pretty much everyone else has it worse, but it’s hard. You and Dad and Emily live here anyway, and Maisie’s got the shitting calves to give her life meaning, but for me it’s pretty much just picking cherries.”
I can do nothing about the world and the flames beyond leaving free masks in the fruit stand, but the part in which we’re trapped is joy itself. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugs. “At least we have the past.”
Nell and I agree that we’ll come back at the end of the day and pick a bouquet for the table but for now we should get to work. Maisie has her bucket around her neck by the time we catch up and Emily’s bucket is nearly full with a good six inches of cherries already in the lug.
“You knew Benny and I were getting married,” Emily says before I even pick up my bucket. Just as well, since I didn’t know how to start the conversation. She tilts back her head so she can see me from beneath the bill of her cap, so I can see that she’s fierce again.
I glance over at Maisie but she keeps her back to me while deftly picking cherries. I understand now that the detour to see the daisies in the cemetery was meant to give Maisie and Emily a minute to talk. “Listen, I’m thrilled about this. You know we love Benny.”