“Certain scenes require setups.” Nell covers her face with her hat.
Duchess emits a sigh of unspeakable boredom then gets up to leave.
“Really?” Maisie says to the dog.
Duchess goes and stands in the lake, gulping at the water before turning to cross the narrow beach. We call for her to come back, come back, but she doesn’t listen to us. She follows the path into the woods and is gone.
After opening night the director’s work was done, which had not been the case in the community theater, nor the case in college. But Tom Lake was professional theater, which meant that Nelson would take a bow after the first performance and be off to his next job in the morning. All of us wondered what that next job would be but as far as I knew, none of us had asked him. That was why I stuck around at lunch break one day shortly before we opened, when everyone else ran off to the lake to swim. I wanted to find out where Nelson was going. He was younger than many of the actors in the play but he had never been one of us. He never came to the lake. He was the adult and we were the children rushing off to swim.
“Traverse City,” he said when I asked. “Have you been?”
“I flew into the airport there,” I said.
“Airports don’t count. Traverse City is very pretty, not that that’s saying much. It’s very pretty everywhere around here.” He was sitting alone in the front row of the theater with his notebook and a bag lunch. He offered me half his tuna sandwich, which was incredibly generous. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten lunch.
The blossoms were off the trees and the fruit hadn’t fully come in and the boxes of bees had been taken away to their next job and still, everything was beautiful. “What are you directing in Traverse City?”
“Nothing.” He opened a large bottle of seltzer then looked around as if hoping to see a glass. “There isn’t a glass,” he said.
“I’m fine.”
“Do you mind sharing?” he asked. When I shook my head he took a drink from the bottle and handed it to me. “I have an aunt and uncle who live there and I promised to come up and be helpful. I’ve been saying I’d do it for a couple of years now but I keep getting diverted.”
“By plays?”
“Things too good to pass on kept coming along, and then I’d be on the wrong side of the country. So when Tom Lake asked me to do this, I thought, that solves the problem. I’ll finally be in exactly the right place. That’s a long answer to a short question:
Once we open I’m going to spend the rest of summer in Traverse City.”
“What kind of help do they need?”
“They need all kinds of help but my first priority is to sort out their finances.”
“You’re good at that?” I wished that I was good at something as useful as bookkeeping. I very nearly told him I could sew.
He shrugged. “I wouldn’t say good. I’d only say I’m better at it than they are.”
I asked him what his aunt and uncle did for a living while eating his sandwich and drinking his seltzer.
“They’re cherry farmers. Have you ever been to a Michigan cherry farm?”
I shook my head.
A little light broke over Nelson’s face, the same quiet light the actors saw whenever we did something right. “You should come and see it.”
“The cherry farm?” I was thinking about that first drive down from the airport and how I’d wanted to stand in the middle of the road and do one slow rotation. It felt like years ago.
“Do you have a car?” Nelson asked.
“Pallace does.” Sebastian was up for a couple of days and if Pallace wanted to get somewhere, Sebastian would take her. Pallace would lend me her car.
Nelson opened up his notebook and started drawing a map: the roads, the mileage counts, the names of the farms I would pass and the name of the road where I should turn. “Come tomorrow,” he said. “Come for lunch and I’ll show you around. You can swim in the lake if you want.”
Tomorrow was Monday, our day off. Opening night was Thursday. I was going to see the director’s family’s cherry farm.
Uncle Wallace was muttering when he came back from break and everyone else was laughing. Who could keep their mind on another rehearsal? Not even Nelson’s persistent calm could snap us into focus. Uncle Wallace wove around the stage in the pointless configurations of a squirrel. George dropped his lines and then stared at me as if it were my job to pick them up. The whole thing was a disaster, which meant good luck. Sebastian was around more often now that Cabaret had opened. He claimed he was in danger of losing his job, though I think he said it to impress Pallace. No one would fire Sebastian. As soon as rehearsals were finished, Duke and I hustled out of our costumes so we could find him.
“You weren’t at the lake,” Duke said to me, sliding the pins from his hair as we walked. He put them in his pocket. “I even went down and felt around on the bottom. You weren’t anywhere.”
“I talked to Nelson. I asked him where he was going next.” I must have looked happy because Duke stopped short, folding his arms across his chest.
“Did he offer you a part?”
Oh, Duke of the wide dark eyes and thick black lashes. Duke who had gotten too much sun even though we’d been told not to because it made more work for the makeup people. I shook my head. “Nothing so glamorous.”
“Then what’s with the smile?”
“His family has a cherry farm in Traverse City. He invited me up to see the farm tomorrow.”
“I bet he did.”
I laughed. “I’m excited! Haven’t you ever wanted to see a cherry farm?”
“I’m from Michigan.”
Somehow I hadn’t thought of there being cherries in East Detroit. “Well, I’m from New Hampshire and I’m going.”
“How are you going to get there?”
I knew what he was thinking. He didn’t want me in the car with Nelson. Men were not impossible to decipher. “Pallace will lend me her car.” I wasn’t certain of this but the more times I said it, the more it seemed true.
He looked at me another minute and then finally smiled. Maybe he was happy for my happiness. Maybe he still hoped Nelson would give him a part in another play later. Maybe he really just wanted to keep an eye on me. “If it’s going to be that much fun we should all go together, the four of us. That would be all right with you and Nelson, wouldn’t it? If it’s not a date?”
I rolled my eyes at the stupidity of it all. “It’s not a date.” And it wasn’t. But that didn’t mean I was supposed to show up with three extra people.
“Good!” Duke cried. “Then it’s settled. We’ll all drive up in the morning to see the director’s cherry farm.”
“The cherry farm!” Emily cries, and Maisie and Nell raise their fists in the air.
Parts of this story they already know, and this is one of them. The stories that are familiar will always be our favorites.
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