Later we’d walk down to the market and stroll through the stalls. Sometimes we only bought a baguette for brunch and ate it on the way home, tearing off chunks and washing them down with a smoothie. A few times we decided to make things on the spur of the moment and came home with forty tomatoes and peppers, splattering the kitchen with a blind attempt at salsa. Those were usually my ideas. Mary always had a shopping list and a plan; she coolly checked off items as we made our way down the rows.
When we first started going, she raised her eyebrows at the number of Hmong vendors, but she never said anything beyond, “They don’t farm out by my family,” and she bought anyone’s produce as long as it was good quality and not overpriced. She talked shop with the farmers, discussing rainfall and temperatures. She didn’t care about herbicides or how the cows were treated. I was the one who insisted on the organic stalls while Mary would roll her eyes and laugh. When I tried to show her articles about the effects of chemical fertilizers and insecticides, she scoffed and said, “There’s a study for everything. You know you’re going to die anyway, don’t you?”
She was never interested in organic farming. So where the hell had this come from?
“I’ve been talking to a guy near Rochester who has the whole operation down. Mobile coops and vegetarian feed. He sells to restaurants in the cities at a premium price, and we’re going to start doing the farmers’ market circuit in the spring.”
“We?”
“Me and him and a few other farmers in the area. There’s a demand. All those people in the cities like you, wanting their eggs from happy chickens, wanting their meat grass-fed and humanely slaughtered.”
She shook her head on the last two words. It was a point we agreed on, but for cosmically different reasons.
“Where is this coming from, Mary? You know Elsa’s not going to last the year.”
She flinched at the words and I backpedaled, lowering my voice.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say it like that, but it’s obvious the doctor was right. She’s weaker every day. She remembers less and less of what anyone tells her. The other day she didn’t even know who I was.”
I didn’t mention that—because she didn’t know me—she was nicer than she had been since my wedding day. She patted my hand and called me Hank and asked me to read her a few obituaries. Hank was happy to oblige. It was the first time in months I’d felt welcome in this house.
The retention-rate issue was becoming hard to ignore. She’d weakly asked Mary every day for two weeks why we’d bought “that five-dollar pepper” until it was finally drilled into her head that it was “Peter’s fancy pepper.” She watched the weather forecast on the news at least two times a night and still acted surprised when it snowed the next day. If the oxygen wasn’t sufficiently reaching her brain anymore, how much longer could the rest of her body survive?
I phrased the next question carefully. “Why would you invest in a whole new business when we’re only here on a temporary basis?”
She didn’t say anything and, to be honest, I already knew. The answer was right in front of me.
“You’re not just here for Elsa.” I dropped into one of the kitchen chairs and stared at her profile. She didn’t confirm or deny. “You like it here. You’re not going to move back to Minneapolis when she dies, are you?”
Still she didn’t speak. She just kept washing dishes, her hands idly squeezing the rag over a saucer as she gazed out the kitchen window into the abyss of white.
“Dammit, Mary, answer me. I think I deserve an answer. Have you been planning this since before we moved?”
She rinsed a dish and set it in the rack, then slowly pulled a coffee cup out of the suds. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Clearly I don’t. How can I understand what you won’t say?” I crossed my arms, determined not to leave this room until she came clean.
“It’s . . .” She stopped, shook her head, and started again, moving the soapy cup from one hand to the other, still staring absently through the glass framed by faded gingham curtains. “I don’t know how to say it. It’s like the trees.”
“What?”
“In the city you can’t see them.” She paused, thinking. “They’re all squished together, tangled into each other until you can’t tell where one tree stops and another starts. Their branches are sawed off so they don’t hit power lines or roofs. Some of them have those red spray-painted death rings around their trunks and they’re chopped down when their roots grow too big under sidewalks. They’re sad to look at, all contorted and disfigured or pruned down into nothing.