A few weeks later we had a day off from school, a misery, a punishment. When we left the classroom it was clear that Mrs. Kraselnik didn’t want to be without us on a weekday, either, a mournful tone in her good-bye. The so-called holiday took place right after she announced an assignment that she said we could do in pairs. To my dismay, before I could make my choice Amanda had raced across the room and chosen me for her partner. There was nothing I could do, no wriggling out of her hold. It was an important, primary-source research project—that’s how Mrs. Kraselnik had described it. We were to interview someone in our community, someone who had valuable information about the history of our region, or who held a job of interest. Because Amanda had snapped me up I told her that I would chose the subject of our interview, that this was only fair. I was thinking of my father, because he was the chairman of the Farmland Preservation Committee for our town. Or Mrs. Bushberger, who was a member of the Reverend Moon’s church. She’d even had a baby for someone in her congregation in Chicago, Reverend Moon having demanded that charity of her. Stephen Lombard then crossed my mind as a subject. Did any other classmate have a relative who was probably a secret agent? He was going to be with us at least for the harvest and maybe longer now that he and Gloria were supposedly in love. But he was not someone who was truly a part of our community, Mrs. Kraselnik probably taking off points for our failure to follow directions.
At dinner the assignment slipped my mind because Mr. Gilbert, a library patron, the man who always came in with his snake, Rosy, wrapped around his neck, had been arrested for possession of drugs. My mother told us all about it. The police had discovered not only marijuana in his house but also his exotic pets, the bearded dragon, the leopard geckos, the poison dart frogs, the veiled chameleons. My mother said that the one time she’d gone to his door to collect a fine the smell was overpowering. So because of the Mr. Gilbert story I had forgotten to ask my father if he would submit to the interview.
The next morning, with no school, William and I wandered over to the apple barn. By eight o’clock my father and Gloria were already hours into their ritual of cider making on the precarious old press that had been in service ever since we could remember. Their fuel, their drug, was the assorted sweet rolls in the bakery box, bismarcks stuffed with crimson jelly and long johns with the jolt of chocolate inside, fritters and crullers, Danishes and elephant ears, and if Dolly happened by she’d want an ordinary dull brown donut, so my mother, the shopper, always included that drab puff in the mix. When the cider makers wished most to sleep they ate another cruller. William and I had a few questions about Gloria, questions a person couldn’t ask her directly, which was one of the reasons, besides wanting a sweet roll, that we made the trip over to Volta.
For years, for all of our lives, cider day was the fourteen-hour stretch wherein Gloria always sent my father her love note. So, the immediate questions: Was she going to do it, now that she had run after Stephen? If Stephen himself was in the cider room would she act as if she’d never done the love note, not ever, and would my father understand that the fifth-cloth fun was over?