Even now it’s such a strange thought, Duke picking cherries on the Nelson farm. “He showed up one day in a big black car. The girls were so little then, in fact Nell wasn’t even born.”
Sebastian nods, and I understand that he knows every story about his brother. He sees Joe and the girls coming out of the barn and he waves, then we start up the road towards my family.
Generations of Nelsons had cleared the trees and planed the boards and pulled out the roots and the enormous rocks and planted the orchard. They looked after the cherries and the apples, the peaches and pears. They weren’t about to sell this place to anyone. He called them for several years making offers, and after so many polite refusals he suggested a compromise: Would they sell him a place in the cemetery? Just a little place under the oak tree, he said. Duke would be cremated, after all. How much room would he need? Maybe just a small stone with his name but maybe not even that. The privacy appealed to him, along with the memory and the view. Duke told Maisie and Ken if he couldn’t live here he would at least like the right to be dead here. “Why are you even thinking about that?” big Maisie had asked him. He was so young! But she liked his television show, and even though she knew it wasn’t real, Duke had so many people shooting at him and pushing him out of speeding cars. That had to wear a man down after a while, put him in mind of his own death. The price he offered them for a corner of their cemetery came to more than what Ken and Maisie had cleared in profit for the last five years combined. The money bailed them out. Duke bailed them out, and we never knew it. The lawyer came to the house with a check and a nondisclosure agreement. They were told that Duke would like to come and sit from time to time if they didn’t mind, and of course they didn’t mind. They would be thrilled to have him visit, stay for dinner, sleep in the guest room. He was welcome. That’s what Duke told Sebastian. The Nelsons liked him. But after he bought a piece of the cemetery they didn’t hear from him again, and he never came to visit, except for the one time he did.
We are all sitting down to lunch as Sebastian explains it. I put out the good plates, the good napkins.
“I never knew how they did it,” Joe says. “How they came up with the money to get out of here.”
“So he’s going to be buried in our cemetery?” Emily is trying to find a place for this piece of information but there isn’t one.
Sebastian nods. “There weren’t many places he felt comfortable.”
Ken and Maisie are here now, their ashes together beneath a single stone. I miss them. I miss especially the summers when Maisie came when the girls were small, and how we would fill a bag with sandwiches and tramp up to the cemetery to sit and watch the clouds billow overhead. Sometimes we would go to sleep in sleeping bags and wake up in the middle of the night to see the stars. I try to imagine Duke up there with Maisie and Ken, and then I try to think if it matters at all. It doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t have anything to do with me. It was always about the farm, and how he thought he knew what it would be like to stay here based on just that single day. We all wanted to stay, me and Pallace and Sebastian and Duke and Joe. The difference being that Joe was a Nelson, and he did the work to make sure that there would always be Nelsons, some Nelson or another, on this land. The difference being I had the good sense to marry him.
“Duke didn’t have any children?” Nell asks Sebastian. “I feel like movie stars always have children, you know, all those wives.”
Sebastian shakes his head. “He saw himself as a liability.”
“What do you mean?” Joe asks.
“He just thought it would be better not to extend the line.”
Emily is sitting next to Sebastian at the table. “Everybody’s got their reasons,” she says to him.
Then Sebastian puts his arm around my daughter’s shoulder like he’s known her forever. “I always thought so.”
“Were you ever in love with him?” Joe asks me that night when we’re in bed. We’ve put Sebastian in Emily’s room, in the twin bed beneath the sloping ceiling stickered with planets and stars. He had planned to stay in a hotel in town, he had booked a room, but the girls wore him down with their insistence. He was ours for now. They told him so.
“Duke?”
Joe snorts, shakes his head. “I know you were in love with Duke.”
“I was and then I very much was not.”
“Which doesn’t answer my question.”
“Was I in love with Sebastian?”
“The better brother.”
The better brother, indeed, but I was young, and it was years before I could see the merits of kindness. “No,” I say. “I wasn’t. I was in love with you.”
“You weren’t in love with me then.” But he pulls me to him and I put my head on his chest, I rest my head on the old blue T--shirt he wears to bed.
“But that’s how it feels now, looking back. Now I think that I was always in love with you.”
After Joe falls asleep I stay awake, thinking about Capri and the sea and the boat, about Duke, and the moon on the water. It’s a place I’ve never seen and still it comes to me so clearly, the light and the dark and the quiet sea, and how he jumps from the bow feet first, straight as a knife, and how the hundreds and thousands of tiny bubbles break across his skin, his hair floating up. He lets himself go deep before he starts kicking up towards the surface, and then he swims away, from the boat and from me and from Sebastian. I think how hard it must have been for him to not turn around but he kept swimming for as long as he could go. I let him go. Not that he was ever mine but still, I let him go.