Joe has come by on the Gator to pick up the lugs. Once he realizes we aren’t talking about Tom Lake anymore, he switches off the ignition and stays. “This time, yes,” he says. “Right away.”
I nod in agreement. In the city where people thought I might have been the girl in a movie, I’d been found by Joe Nelson, the one person who actually knew me, the one person I knew. When we left the theater together that afternoon we were laughing. He told me he’d been brought in the week before to try to save a lousy play. I told him it had never been my intention to work in theaters, to be with actors, but I needed a job and this was where Cat had sent me. We felt like we were picking up something that had started a long time ago. But we hadn’t started, had we? I told him I could just as easily have been taking measurements for some other show, or been pinning tulle on the underskirts of wedding dresses in a bridal salon. He said he should have been back in Chicago but then he never would have found me. And then what? It would have been a different life, one that I will never be able to imagine. A life without Joe and the farm, without Emily and Maisie and Nell.
“Did you come back to Michigan after that?” Emily asks. She is sitting in the grass, we all are, and no one minds that the ground is damp.
“Not right away,” Joe says. “I didn’t ask her. I was always afraid of scaring your mother off.”
“When we came back to Michigan the next summer to see Maisie and Ken they pretended I’d been your father’s girlfriend all along, like we’d been together for years. God, she was good to me. She put out those napkins I’d brought her.”
“Did you stay in the little house?” Emily asks.
I look at Joe. “We did, didn’t we?” We slept in the lumpy double bed that Benny and Emily got rid of. We kept the windows open. The noise of the frogs would wake us in the middle of the night and then sing us back to sleep.
“Did you ever get the books straightened out?” Maisie asks.
“I still haven’t gotten the books straightened out,” Joe says.
“Your father gave them the money to stay afloat. He gave them all the money he had, and when that wasn’t enough, he directed a couple of very lucrative peanut butter commercials.”
“Don’t tell them that,” he says.
“He directed iconic peanut butter commercials to make the money to pay off Ken and Maisie’s bills.” Money that, over time, resulted in his buying out their interest in the farm, though that had never been his intention. Ken kept a record of every cent, then one day called Joe up to say he owned the farm.
“Which peanut butter?” Nell asks.
“Skippy,” I say. “He made one for crunchy and one for smooth.” They nod in silent appreciation for his gifts. Looking at so many trees decked out in cherries, it’s easy to understand how it might have all gone another way.
“What if we didn’t do this anymore?” Joe asked me one morning when we were sitting in a diner on West Thirty--Eighth Street, eating pancakes.
“I stopped doing this a long time ago,” I said.
“They were my bills, too,” Joe tells the girls. “My father owned half the farm even if he didn’t work on it, so if you inherit the land you’re going to inherit the bills. By 1995 we already owned the place. Ninety--five was the year that wiped people out. All summer long it was perfect—-the perfect temperatures, the perfect amount of rain, not a single blight on any tree on any farm. The crop was huge, like nothing anyone had seen in decades, and the price went through the floor. I was just glad Ken and Maisie were in Arizona already.”
“If your father hadn’t paid off all the bills and put the rest of the money away we would have lost the farm,” I say, but Joe gives me a look and I stop. I know better. We do not talk of losing the farm.
And there will be no talk of our meeting again at that theater, about the years spent dating, living together, deciding to marry, moving to Michigan. Joe has thrown the switch that takes the train from love to the precipitous decline in crop prices. He has seen to it that when he leaves we will be contemplating cherries and not our courtship, which is fair, because the courtship is ours alone, and there is work to do, and we’ve already lost half the day to lightning.
“I should get back to work.” Joe gets up stiffly, the backside of his jeans muddied and wet. Then we all get up and start hefting the lugs into the Gator. The neighbors never thought that a couple of New York theater people had come to take over the farm. Joe Nelson and his wife had come. Joe Nelson who’d been there since he was a boy.
And for his efforts, the farm we took over was in better shape than we expected, by which I mean better shape financially. The main house, the little house, the barn, the trailers where the summer crews stayed, the fences and the trees themselves all existed in varying degrees of disrepair and decay. Ken and Maisie took what was theirs and left for Arizona to live near their daughter. After Ken died, Maisie spent the summers with us, providing a stupendous amount of help. “All that sunshine,” she’d say to me as we stood side by side in the kitchen, the girls crawling and toddling and walking around us. “A person can only take so much.”
“So Dad saved you,” Emily says.
I keep picking. I will not stop for the rest of the day. “I guess he did. Unless I saved him. I might have saved him, too.”
“It’s a good story either way,” Maisie says. “And to think if it wasn’t for Duke we might never have asked.”
“I wouldn’t have asked because I thought I knew it already,” Nell said. “And I had every part wrong.”
“To tell you the truth, I just never thought about it,” Emily says. “I mean, I thought about the Duke part but I don’t think I ever wondered about you and Dad.”
“We weren’t particularly interesting,” I say. Good marriages are never as interesting as bad affairs.
“Did you ever go back to Tom Lake?” Nell asks.
“You mean, did we ever drive down to see a show?”
“A show,” she says, “or, I don’t know, did you ever just walk around for old times’ sake?”
I do not explain that “old times’ sake” is a condition of fond nostalgia. “We never did. You know how it is in the summer.”
“I guess Duke never went back either,” Maisie says. Maisie has never been as interested in Duke as her sisters. She has no trouble letting him go.
“Duke was too famous to go back to Tom Lake after that summer,” Emily says.
She’s right about that. “On your way up or on your way out.”
“So you never saw him again.” Emily has made her peace with this, and I give serious consideration to leaving that in place, peace being a hard commodity to come by in this world. But one thing is left, the part of the story I wouldn’t have told her when she was young because there would have been no context for it, the part of the story I couldn’t have told her when she was a teenager because she would have submitted it into evidence against me. And so I’ve held it all these years, the random thing she would most want to add to her collection of ephemera.
“Once,” I say.