After some time on the ride home he said, “You’re quiet today, Marlene.”
It was disturbing, how often May Hill came into my head. Just then I’d been thinking how the one thing Tommy didn’t have was a May Hill. Even if I’d always forevermore be scared to death of her, even as I carried the Thing That Had Happened Years Ago as if it were a black stone around my neck, still I knew to be grateful for her machinery expertise. I said to my father, “What do you think would happen if a robber got up into May Hill’s house?”
My father never laughed at my questions. He said, “Well, let’s see. First, tell me—how would the robber get in?”
“Say he knew everyone was out working, and he slipped in to steal the money. Or—maybe just to look around.”
“A robber in daylight?”
“Yes. So May Hill wouldn’t have put the chair by the basement door.”
“Ah,” my father said.
“The robber,” I went on, “would start looking at—at everything but then, then, he’d realize that she was climbing up the stairs.” My heart was beating hard as I told this fictional although nearly true-life tale.
“May Hill coming upon a thief,” my father considered.
“What would she do?”
“I wouldn’t want to be the robber. Would you?”
“No,” I whispered. My voice was failing me. “Would she—would she knock him out? Would she injure him or—?”
“Hmmm,” he said. We were at a stop sign. He turned to look at me. I think it’s fair to say that if I had ever been in doubt that he loved me, which I hadn’t, but if I had, I would have known then that in fact he loved me maybe better than anyone. He didn’t drive on. We were at a standstill. He was smiling at me, a small, lopsided smile, and yet it was with his whole self. All the love in the world—it was in our car. “I imagine,” he said, “I bet she’d lock him up. The robber. Some of those doors have locks, as I recall. That would be punishment, don’t you guess, to be held just for a while, and to wonder how May Hill would deal with you?”
I nodded. I couldn’t look at him.
“Plenty of punishment,” he said, before he drove on down the road, saying he thought the Honey Crisp was probably a better apple than we had given it credit for.
I muttered, “Okay.”
“Give it a chance, Marlene,” he instructed.
Later in the summer I went with my father to a new farmers market that had been launched in a town six miles away. It was in addition to Sherwood’s market in Milwaukee and the market my father went to in Madison where, along with a crew of five others, we frantically did commerce from first light until noon. This new market, however, was for my father and it was for me.
I was happy for just about the entire vacation because Amanda went to three different band camps and I didn’t have to consider not playing with her, and also Coral was at horse camp and then at her family lake house in Michigan. It seemed that I had grown up enough not to need those girlhood companions, grown up enough to have consuming interests and obligations, even. I wasn’t at all the slightest bit lonely. Ten hours a week I worked at the library, a real paying job cleaning DVDs and doing the precision job of shelving. I didn’t get money for my orchard work, which was fine because I knew that when Sherwood had been a boy he hadn’t gotten paid, either. If you belonged to the work there was no reason to get money from it.
Best of all, every Friday, on our market day, my father and I loaded up the van with apple boxes, a basket of knitting worsted, the honeycomb display, the scale, the bundle of bags, the white tent, the cottage cheese container of change, and my carefully printed signs. Along the barricaded street opposite City Hall we made a line of stalls: the Lombard apple girl and man, the bread lady, the cheese lady, the sweet corn man, the plant people, the garlic and onion couple, the popcorn matron, the duck egg woman, the beef and pork guy, and at the opposite end, another apple vender, the Sykes Orchard representative. Tommy sent an employee to work the market who had the title Sykes Orchard Manager. He was twenty-three years old and his name was Gideon.