12

12

It had rained all morning but by the time we’d finished breakfast the sun was out. Sebastian said that he should drive to Traverse City, his Plymouth had a big back seat, and so we piled into the car, boys in front, girls in back. We rolled down the windows, waving goodbye to everyone we passed. Goodbye, Tom Lake! None of us had been farther away than the coffee shop in town since we arrived, none of us except Sebastian, who had an entire life about which we had no curiosity. Ubiquitous fruit stands lined the road and I wanted him to pull over so that I would have a gift to bring to Nelson’s aunt and uncle, a pie or some flowers, something more than three uninvited guests.

“These people own an orchard,” Duke shouted, the wind reaching inside the car to carry his voice away. “All that stuff at a fruit stand is the stuff they’re trying to get rid of.”

“What good. Is sitting. Alone in your room,” Pallace sang absently. I could see Sebastian’s eyes go to her in the rearview mirror. The sound of her voice called him like a bell.

“You should have been Sally Bowles,” I said, because even though that German--looking girl who played Sally was pretty extraordinary, I had no doubt Pallace would have been better.

Half of Pallace’s face was hidden behind her enormous black Jackie Onassis sunglasses. Who knew what she was looking at. “I should have been a lot of things,” she said.

“I coulda been a contender.” Duke said it like Brando, conTENdaah.

It was fun to be in the car, fun to be together and going somewhere other than rehearsal. I saw an antique store up ahead and leaned forward to tap on Sebastian’s shoulder. “Stop, please.”

“No!” Duke cried. “Antique stores are worse than fruit stands. They’re full of things the grown children had to sell off when their parents died so they could put the farm on the market.”

“You just keep raining on that parade,” Pallace said.

Sebastian stopped the car.

Duke turned to Pallace, leaning over the seat. “Don’t let her out.”

But I was out. I’d been invited to lunch by our director and I’d be damned if I was going to arrive without a gift. Just inside the door, on top of a glass display case, a dozen linen napkins with cutwork around the edge were sitting in a basket waiting for me. They were a blue nearly pale enough to be white, nicely ironed. I knew very little when I was young but I knew the role of Emily and I knew fabric. These were good napkins. I counted them slowly, looking for stains and finding none. As a bonus, they were expensive, and that pleased me more than anything.

“You must have come in looking for these,” the woman at the cash register said when I handed them over.

Two minutes later I was back in the car.

“Let me see!” Pallace held out her hands. Sebastian turned in his seat to look.

“Napkins!” Duke cried. “They must have seen you coming. Napkins are for tourists. First they try to unload a tractor on you, then they bring out the napkins.” He clutched his head as Pallace held a single napkin up to the light.

“I can’t imagine anything nicer than these,” she said.

Sebastian waited until the napkins were back in their bag so they wouldn’t all blow out the window once we started driving again. Pallace sang single lines of show tunes along the way and we guessed the musical. (“Because it’s JUUUNE! June--June--June.”) Duke recited pieces of dialogue and we guessed the play. (“Always tell the truth, George; it’s the easiest thing to remember.”) Duke was crackerjack at memorization. He believed in memorizing any part he wanted, both for the discipline of it and to make sure he would always be ready. “You never know when something’s going to open up,” he said.

“What’s your secret talent?” I shouted to Sebastian.

“Driving,” he called back, leaning his elbow out the open window.

By the time we got to Traverse City, the sky was clear. The rain had given up and gone to Canada. Duke read Nelson’s directions aloud—-a complicated series of poorly marked turns onto twisty roads. Finally up ahead we saw a small sign reading NELSON nailed to a post beside the drive. “He named the place for himself?”

“It’s his aunt and uncle’s farm,” I said. “Their last name is Nelson.”

Duke stuck his head out the window like a dog. “So I can call my cherry farm ‘Duke Acres’?”

“Dukedom,” Sebastian said.

The rutted drive was filled with rainwater. Every leaf and blade of grass was shining. Once we turned we quieted down. The towering woods to our left, the white clapboard house with blue shutters up ahead, the gentle hills of fruit trees to the right that spread out behind the house past where we could see—-it looked like a sampler stitched by an eighteenth--century girl.

“They have a barn,” Pallace whispered.

It wasn’t as if I’d grown up in Los Angeles. I’d seen plenty of farms in my day, but never had I seen a place that made the tightness in my chest relax. The order in the rows of trees and the dark green of the lush grass beneath them soothed me like a hand brushing across my forehead.

Sebastian parked the car beside the gray Chevy we knew to be Nelson’s. Then the screen door of the house opened and Nelson came onto the porch and waved.

“Go tell him you invited us,” Duke said quietly, his eyes straight ahead.

I shook my head. “Not on your life.”

“He didn’t invite us?” Pallace lifted her sunglasses.

“Emily invited us,” Duke said.

I might have looped my purse strap around Duke’s neck but Nelson came to the car smiling. “You found us!” he said. “Those roads can be tricky.”

“You draw a good map.” I held the package lightly. The napkins weighed nothing. I suddenly thought how nice it would have been to have brought a gift for Nelson as well, for all he’d done for us, but I would have had no idea what to get him.

Sebastian held out his hand and introduced himself.

“You’re the tennis player,” Nelson said, smiling. “The other Duke. I’ve seen you at rehearsals.”

“I think we may be crashing the party,” Sebastian said.

Nelson laughed. “There is no party, or there’s always a party, depending on how you look at it. People on farms love company. The more people showing up, the better.” Pallace walked right up to Nelson and kissed his cheek like they were best friends. She kissed our director, who, in his blue T--shirt and jeans, looked nothing like the person who’d been telling us where to stand and how to speak for more than a month now. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen Nelson outside before.

Duke was making the slow rotation I had wanted to make the first day I came to Traverse City, and when he stopped he looked at Nelson. “I’m from Michigan,” he said.

“So am I,” Nelson said.

“But I’m not from this Michigan.”

Nelson nodded. “This is my uncle’s farm. I worked here in the summers when I was growing up. I took the bus here when school let out and then my parents would drive up from Grand Rapids at the end of the season and bring me home. As far as I was concerned, August fifteenth was the saddest day of the year.”

“I’ll bet it was.” Duke cast his gaze out over the cherry trees.

“It’s like Tom Lake,” Sebastian said, by which he meant we weren’t exactly driving over from Flint. We were trading beauty for beauty.

“I’ve got nothing but praise for Tom Lake,” Nelson said. “But it’s not like this.”

That was what Duke had meant. For all of Tom Lake’s splendor, this was superior by an order of magnitude. Nelson turned and led us up the stairs and into the house.

“Stop,” Emily says, raising up on her elbows. “Are you saying that Duke came to our house? You brought him to the house?”

“It wasn’t our house then but yes, he was here.”

“The happiest day of your life was the day Duke came to our house?”

“Maybe you could just shut up and listen to the story?” Maisie suggests.

“Why wouldn’t you have told me that?”

“Maybe,” Nell says, choosing her words judiciously, “you were a maniac who was in love with a movie star and Mom didn’t feel like throwing gasoline on it.”

“I wasn’t in love with Duke,” Emily says. “I thought he was my father.”

“Right. Your father. Forgive me.” Maisie pulls the towel over her face. “Please proceed.”

“None of you think she should have told us this before?”

Emily says, looking at the three of us in disbelief.

“I’m starting to think I shouldn’t have told you this now.” I wonder if the red in Emily’s cheeks is sunburn or rage.

“I just can’t believe—-”

“Please,” Nell shouts. “Please! Mom is about to go into our house for the very first time and it’s the happiest day of her life. Can this not be a story about you for two minutes?”

“The happiest day of the summer of 1988,” I remind her. “Not the happiest day of my life. Not by a long shot.”

“All I’m saying is that I think it would have helped me to know,” Emily says.

Beneath the towel Maisie shakes her head. “It would so not have helped you.”

The long oak table in the kitchen was set for four but Nelson’s aunt Maisie was already pulling more placemats out of the drawer. She was a tall woman with short, curly hair, an oversized laugh and oversized feet she housed in blue Keds. “It’s the first time we’ve ever had a movie star come to lunch,” she said. “You’ll just have to forgive me if I say anything stupid.”

For all the world it appeared she was looking at me. “Me?”

“A huge star,” Nelson said. “Once your movie comes out.”

“Joe can’t stop talking about how good you are,” his aunt Maisie said. “Joe says you’re the best actress he’s ever worked with, and you know he’s worked with a lot of good ones. We’re going to drive down on Thursday to see you. Opening night! And Uncle Wallace, I can’t believe we’re going to see Uncle Wallace.”

“Uncle Wallace is really something,” Duke said.

I held out my package to her and she looked so surprised. “You didn’t need to bring me anything,” Maisie said.

She put it down on the table and folded back the tissue.

Such a genuine pleasure lit her face. I could imagine that it had been a while since someone had brought her something so impractical and pretty. She ran her fingers over the cutwork. “Oh, Lara, will you look at these,” Maisie said quietly.

Maisie, look, the white canisters are still on the sink, the whole row of them including coffee and rice. I broke the sugar the year we moved into the house. My hands were wet when I picked it up and it slipped right through and smashed on the floor. I stood there crying and crying, until Joe told me it was just a canister and it didn’t matter. But they were yours. Everything was yours. I’d forgotten how small the kitchen was before we pushed out the back wall. You would have loved it the way it is now. I can stand at the sink and keep an eye out for Joe and make dinner and talk to the girls. There’s so much space. The first day I came to the house the kitchen was so small and we were all crowded in together. Look how beautiful we all were, Maisie. Can you believe it? Look how young.

“Maisie, this is Peter Duke,” Joe said. “He’s Editor Webb in the play. And Pallace Clarke, she understudies Lara’s part. Pallace is in Cabaret too, so she’s the busy one. And this is Sebastian Duke. He’s Peter’s brother.”

“What part do you play?” she asked Sebastian, holding his hand.

“I play the brother,” Sebastian said.

“You wouldn’t believe how good he is at it,” Duke said.

Maisie laughed. “You’re going to tell me everything,” she said to Sebastian. “We’ll sit down and you can tell me what it’s like to be the brother of a famous man.”

And Duke, who knew he was destined to be a famous man, smiled.

Joe was dispatched to the orchard to find his uncle but as soon as he turned to leave his uncle walked in the kitchen door. Maisie’s husband was Ken. Ken and Maisie Nelson. Their nephew, Joe. A bouquet of pink and yellow dahlias sat in a green drinking glass on the table. I didn’t know how there would be enough food for everyone but Maisie brought out plenty. Maybe we ate their dinner, too: fried chicken and biscuits and butter beans and corn cut from the cob and baked apples. We ate like children, greedy and unconcerned, and Maisie acted like nothing in the world had ever made her so happy.

“When I was growing up I used to lie in bed at night imagining what other people’s families must be like,” Duke said once the pie was served, cherry pie, which he told her was his favorite. “I would picture their houses, their furniture, what they ate and how they spoke to one another, and what I always pictured was this.” He turned to Joe. “Turns out I spent my entire childhood picturing your family.”

Joe smiled. “You were picturing this particular branch of my family.”

“I was, too,” Pallace said, setting down her fork. “Ever since I walked in the door I’ve been trying to remember what this place reminded me of and that’s it. This is where I wanted to live when I was a kid.”

“We would have been happy to have you,” Ken said.

“Except in my fantasy the family was Black,” Pallace said. “But other than that it’s a very similar vibe.”

Pallace and I tried to help with the dishes after lunch but Maisie shooed us away. “Let Joe show you around. Come back later and help us pick cherries. That’s when we’ll put you to work.”

The kitchen was small so off we went, because of course the work was not really for us. Maisie kept a cutting garden in the backyard, zinnias and dahlias and foxgloves and coneflowers.

The bees made such a racket we thought at first the noise must be coming from someplace other than bees.

“In my vision of the perfect childhood there were no bees,” Pallace said, and Sebastian moved her to his other side so that he would stand between her and the menacing insects.

Joe walked in front of us, pointing out trees. “Those are the Montmorencys.”

“Tart or sweet?” Pallace asked.

“Tart,” he said. “Pie cherries. They’re mostly sold frozen. The pie today was from last year’s frozen cherries. You can take some back with you if you want.”

But we didn’t have a freezer to keep the cherries frozen or an oven to bake a pie.

“And those?” She pointed to a very different group of trees on the other side of the road.

“Plums,” he said, shaking his head. “The plums are a disaster. We’re going to have to take them out.”

“How can plums be a disaster?” I asked.

“Gerber told the farmers they wanted more plums for baby food, but by the time the farmers put in the trees and grew the trees and picked the plums, Gerber said they didn’t want plums anymore.”

“Can’t people just eat them?” Pallace asked.

“I eat them. You probably wouldn’t. No one buys a bag of Stanleys at a fruit stand.”

I had no idea that a Stanley was a plum, or that one plum was made into baby food while another was eaten over the sink. I didn’t know that a Napoleon was a cherry. What I knew was that the four of us were strolling through an orchard with our director, who, after Thursday, would come up here for the rest of the summer to do the work of sorting out his family’s finances. The show would go on. He would go on.

“How long has your family owned the place?” Sebastian asked.

“One Nelson or another has been here for five generations.

Either they hate it—-my father hated it—-or they were like Ken and couldn’t imagine doing anything else. All Ken ever wanted out of life was Maisie and the farm.”

“So who’s up next? Do they have kids?”

Joe walked over and pulled an errant weed near the base of a tree then dropped it in the road. “That’s the question. Their daughter Alice lives in Phoenix. Alice is out. She’s got a husband and kids. They’re settled there, they like the heat. I don’t think she even eats cherries. My cousin Kenny is a forester in the U.P. Everybody’s looking to Kenny to save the day but nobody knows for sure if he’s going to do it, including Kenny. There might not be anything to save anyway.”

Pallace was walking ahead of us in her little yellow shorts. She turned around to face us and started walking backwards. “Are they broke?”

“Pretty much,” Joe said. “This business runs on a very small margin. The crop is bad one year and you’re broke, or the crop is good, which means that everybody’s crop is good, and so the prices drop and you’re broke. Gerber tells you to put in twenty acres of plum trees so you sink all your capital into plum trees—-”

“—-and Gerber doesn’t want the plums,” Sebastian said.

“And you’re broke.”

“That’s so depressing.” I sounded like a petulant schoolgirl but the day was too beautiful to think that anything could change. Five generations of Nelsons had lived on this farm. Surely the sixth generation would live here as well.

“Farming is depressing,” Joe said. “But once it gets in you, you can’t put it down.”

“Farming is the new acting,” Duke said.

“Couldn’t they sell off part of the land to pay the debts?” I said this as if it were an original thought.

Joe laughed. “I’m glad you didn’t float that over lunch. Maisie would have handed you your napkins back.”

“So no one sells land.”

“Land gets sold when people die and the kids refuse to come home and take it over. Otherwise you keep the land.”

Duke put his arm around my shoulder. “As you know,” he said in a voice both animated and conspiratorial, “your cherry orchard is to be sold for your debts; the auction is set for August twenty--second, but don’t you worry, my dear, you just sleep in peace, there’s a way out of it. Here’s my plan. Please listen to me.”

Then Joe Nelson was walking on my other side and slipped his arm around my waist. The director’s arm around my waist! Nothing but me in between him and Duke. “Your estate is thirteen miles from town,” he said. “They’ve run the railroad by it. Now if the cherry orchard and the land along the river were cut up into building lots and leased for summer cottages, you’d have at the very lowest twenty--five thousand rubles per year income.”

Pallace was laughing her head off. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Where were you people raised?”

“I understand why I know The Cherry Orchard,” Joe said to Duke. “But I don’t understand why you know it.”

For the record, neither man removed his arm from me.

“I like Chekhov,” Duke said. “All the boys from East Detroit like Chekhov.”

“It’s true,” Sebastian said.

“And I always wanted to play Lopakhin.”

Lopakhin was the rich son of a peasant who was looking to install himself in Lyubov Andreevna’s cherry orchard, in her family—-new money legitimized by shabby aristocracy. Joe shook his head, letting me go so that he could take a step back to look at Duke. “You’re too handsome for Lopakhin.”

Duke disagreed. “It’s all in the performance,” he said. Suddenly I wondered if the afternoon had been one long audition. I wondered if Joe might take Duke with him come the fall, cast him in a bigger play.

Small orange butterflies tossed themselves through the air in front of us, one of them lighting on my wrist. “That means big change is coming,” Pallace said. Even when I held up my arm it stayed. I’d forgotten how many butterflies there were back then, how many bees.

“What’s up there?” Sebastian asked, staring at the hill ahead of us. From where we were we could just make out the pretty iron fence. Joe didn’t answer, he just started walking in that direction and we followed him, exactly as we had all summer.

It was the first time I had seen the farm, had seen the Nelsons’ house, had called Joe by his given name. The first time I had seen the cemetery and stood in its benevolent shade. The hill and the breeze and the shade always made it feel ten degrees cooler up there. “The Whitings are north,” Joe said, pointing to a farm a mile away. “And on the other side are the Holzapfels. And here we have all the Nelsons.” He opened up his hands to include the generations of his family.

“You don’t even have to leave when you die,” Duke said. Maybe it was part of the life he had imagined as a child: everlasting inclusion.

We looked at the pond and the rows upon rows of trees. We looked at the house and the garden, which was just a stamp of color from where we stood.

“What’s that little house?” Pallace asked.

“It’s an extra. Workers stay there sometimes. I stay there.”

“An extra house,” Pallace said in wonder, because none of us could imagine having one house.

“It’s very small,” Joe said, as if he were embarrassed.

Duke lay down on one of the graves and closed his eyes. “Does this bother you?” he asked. I didn’t know if he was talking to Joe or the residents.

“Be my guest.”

“I’d like to come back here. Could I? Do you have any vacancies?”

“I think you’d have to marry a Nelson,” Joe said. “Alice would be too old for you.”

“Your cousin is already married,” Duke said. “And she doesn’t want to leave Phoenix. I wouldn’t want to break up her marriage and then find myself buried in Phoenix.” He shook a cigarette out of the pack and put it between his lips.

“Hey.” Sebastian nudged his brother with his shoe. Sebastian wore canvas tennis shoes all the time, the way a tennis player would. “Get up.”

Duke shook his head, fishing his lighter out of his pocket. “I like it here.”

“Peedee,” Sebastian said. His voice wasn’t stern but we all understood his seriousness. Duke got to his feet and put the cigarette behind his ear. Pallace brushed some pine needles off his back.

“There’s one more thing to show you,” Joe said. “You can stay all afternoon if you want but after this I need to get back to work.”

We followed him down the hill, Duke coming last and closing the gate. “Wasn’t that something?” he whispered, leaning close.

“Beautiful.” It was the word I used for the entire day.

We walked back a different way, past a long stretch of apple trees and a smaller stand of pears, Joe telling us the names of every variety and which ones were for eating and which were for processing and which trees were past their usefulness and needed to be pushed out. That was another thing he was planning to do if he found time. We were back on the main road that ran alongside the woods, and when he reached a break in the trees that he alone had seen, he stepped inside.

Into the dark woods we followed.

“Look at this!” Pallace cried, her head craned back to see the place where the leaves cut the sunlight to thread.

“Keep going,” Joe said. He went past the hemlocks and white pines and the red oaks that were never felled or burned, past the giant rocks in mossy sweaters. We could smell the cherry trees and then the moss and then the water, and then the woods opened unexpectedly and let us out on a beach of the Grand Traverse Bay of Lake Michigan. He had brought us to the edge of the world.

“How much have I missed?” Joe asks, taking his place on the towel beside me. He is wearing his plaid cotton work shirt and jeans, his steel--toed boots. His hair is much the same, as is his smile. His back is straight, his blue eyes still bright behind his glasses. Of all the things in life that have changed, Joe has changed the least.

Nell gets up to sit beside her father, wraps him in her skinny arms. “You’ve just been freed from your cloak of invisibility and are now revealed to be the hero.”

Joe shakes his head. “Believe me, I wear the cloak of invisibility for a long time in this story.”

I admit that I was slow.

“Did she tell you the part about bringing a date on our first date?” he asks Nell. “She brought her date and her date’s brother and her date’s brother’s girlfriend.”

“You in no way posed the invitation as a date.”

“That’s because you were dating Duke. I was just putting out a feeler to see if I stood a chance.”

“Too subtle,” I say.

“I was playing the long game,” he says.

Nell, tucked beneath his arm, looks up at him. “You were in love with her then, weren’t you?”

There’s a question I’d never asked.

Joe is not a man to lie, even when the lie could be categorized as harmless and polite. I can see him digging around in his memory. Did he love me then? It was such a long time ago. “I like the thought,” he says finally, “but probably not. I don’t think I could have been in love with a person who was so clearly in love with someone else. That would be self--defeating and I wasn’t the self--defeating type.”

“I wasn’t in love with Duke,” I say.

Joe makes a ridiculous sound, an eruption of laughter and incredulity.

Nell keeps her attention on her father while making an effort to soften the blow. “So you weren’t exactly in love with her but you liked her very much and thought she was a wonderful actress.”

“Your mother was the best actress I ever directed,” Joe says. “If she had decided that that was what she wanted to do with her life, she would have been brilliant at it.”

“Shoulda, woulda, coulda,” I say, lying back on the sand, though it is true that his estimation touches me.

“No one was better,” he says.

“Well, actually, someone was better,” I say.

“That was your opinion,” Joe says.

I open one eye and stare at him. I use my amazing powers of mentalism to tell him to shut up, which he does.

Nell rests her chin on her knees. “What I don’t understand,” she begins.

“Here it comes,” Joe says.

“What I don’t understand,” she says again, looking at her father, “is how a person can grow up in Michigan, love the theater, become a famous director, and then ditch it all to come back and grow cherries.”

“I’ve wondered about that myself,” Maisie says. She is scratching her dog’s stomach with both hands and Hazel stretches out her four legs as far as she is able.

“It’s nice to see them turn their attention on you for a change,” I say.

“First off, you grew up on a cherry farm in Michigan and you want to be an actress,” he says to Nell.

“What choice did I have? You read us Chekhov at bedtime,” she said. “No Hippos Go Berserk for the Nelson girls.”

“Secondly,” Joe says, ignoring her, “cherry trees come equipped with invisible leashes. Just when you think you’re free they start to pull you back.”

“Emily inherited the cherry leash, not me,” Nell says.

Emily nods. “Thanks for that.”

“Are there more sandwiches?”

Maisie rifles through her bag and hands him one. We are partial to cheese and mustard, all of us.

“I had two lives,” Joe says, unwrapping his lunch. “Maybe more than two. I got to do everything I wanted. Who can say that?”

I raise my hand.

“So what happened to Duke?” Emily asks.

We look at her. The four of us are forever turning as one to look at her. “You know what happened to Duke,” I say.

“I don’t mean what happened to Duke. I mean what happened to him that day, that summer?”

“Duke liked the farm better than anybody,” Joe says, glad to be back on topic, glad to be thinking about anyone other than himself, glad to have a sandwich. “By which I mean he liked this place more than pretty much anybody who ever visited. Duke would have quit acting to pick cherries, at least on that day he would have. If Ken had offered him a job he would have taken it. I remember him running up and down the beach like a kid. He was crazy. That was the first time I ever saw him do a handstand.”

“Was it?” I ask. He used to do them on the chair in our room.

“But when did things change? Did it happen the day you brought him to the orchard?” Emily asks me. “The happiest day of your life?”

“Let’s strike the whole happiest--day--of--my--life motif,” I say. “You three refuse to understand what I’m saying.”

I can see that Emily is both irritated and making an effort not to be. We’ve had a good day so far, some real sweetness, and we both want to keep it that way. “You come up to the farm with Duke and Sebastian and Pallace and you leave with Daddy. Something must have happened.”

Joe looks over at me as if he might have missed some pivotal piece of information himself.

“I came up with Duke and left with Duke. I didn’t leave with your father.”

“Okay, so maybe not on that day but eventually you did. You were with Duke and then you were with Dad.”

I shake my head. A child’s ability to misunderstand is limitless, even when she is no longer a child. “I didn’t leave Duke for your father. Your father and I were never together at Tom Lake.”

Now Maisie is squinting at us as well. “But you and Dad met at Tom Lake. You fell in love at Tom Lake.”

“We met at Tom Lake and didn’t fall in love, and then we met again a long time later and we did fall in love,” Joe says to them. He looks at me. “I feel like I need a lawyer.”

Because now we feel the shift from Lara and Joe and Maisie and Nell on one side and Emily on the other, to Lara and Joe on one side and Emily and Maisie and Nell on the other. The jury does not believe us.

“You fell in love at Tom Lake,” Nell says, of this she is certain. “That was always the story.”

“It was never the story!” I say. “It may have been the story you told yourselves but it wasn’t the story we told you.” Over the years I told them I had dated Duke at Tom Lake. Over the years I told them their father and I met at Tom Lake. What I realize in this moment, and Joe realizes it too, is that maybe we’ve never told them more than that. Or maybe they are children looking at their parents and so our lives began when they began and everything else they colored in with fat crayons any way they wanted.

“The four of you can sort this out. I’m going for a swim.” Joe pulls off his boots, his shirt, his jeans. He had gone to the house and put on his swim trunks before coming to the beach, proving once and for all that these girls are his.