19

19

A cool breeze stirs the trees and brushes off the rain left clinging to cherries and leaves. The orchard is glistening, and I am done. I’ve laid out the entire summer at Tom Lake with bonus tracks on either side. I’ve given my girls the director’s cut.

Nell shifts her feet in the wet grass. “You don’t ever think you made a mistake?” she asks.

“Oh, come on. All that and you still think I should’ve been an actress?”

“I think being an actress sounds like a nightmare,” Emily says.

The three of us look to Maisie to break the tie. “I’d take the shitting calf any day,” she says.

So I have won over two of my girls. As for the third, Nell thinks everyone secretly longs for the stage.

“Did Ripley wind up giving Duke a job?” Nell asks.

“Rampart!” Emily is forever astonished by the depths of our ignorance, though I knew the answer to that one. “It was Ripley’s show. It won ten Emmys.”

“Did Duke win?” Maisie asks.

Emily shakes her head. “Two nominations, no wins. No one understood him in those days.”

I can remember watching the awards show with my cousin Sarah back in New Hampshire, the two of us sitting in my grandmother’s bed because the better television was in her room. The camera panned regularly back to Duke. Even in a roomful of television stars he was the glittery thing. “Him!” I pointed to the screen. “That’s the guy I used to date.” They showed him in profile, laughing, his tuxedo slim and immaculate, the tie undone.

“Then who’s the girl he’s with?” my cousin asked, like Duke had been busted for cheating.

“I’m not dating him now. I have no idea who she is.”

She is a creature of inestimable beauty, I wanted to say. That’s who she is.

“What I want to know,” Nell says, the bucket around her neck half--full of cherries, “is what became of you.” She is wrestling with the knowledge that I’d been given everything she’d ever wanted, and that I’d given it away.

Emily and Maisie look over at their sister, then they look at me.

“What do you mean, what happened to me? I married your father. We came here. We had the three of you.”

“But how? I always thought you and Daddy fell in love at Tom Lake, that you dumped Duke for Dad and then the two of you went from there. But you left Michigan without even calling Dad from the airport. When you went to Los Angeles, did he stay here?”

“He stayed the rest of the summer helping Maisie and Ken, then he went to Chicago to direct a play.” Was it Chicago?

“Did you write to him?” Emily asks.

I shake my head. I didn’t know enough to write to Joe in those days.

“How long was it before he found you?” Maisie asks. Something in the construction of her question touches me, as if Joe had gone door to door, searching for me all that time.

“Three or four years,” I say. New Hampshire was its own eternity, as was New York. I did not tally up those days.

“So tell us about going back to New Hampshire,” Emily says, cheerful at the thought of additional chapters. “Tell us about New York. Tell us about when you met Dad again.”

“No, really, I’m done.” They are reminding me of the years when they were small and it was just me in the house beneath all that snow and Joe was in the barn trying to fix a tractor he didn’t know how to fix, and I felt like the children would eat me. Nell was eating me, still at my breast, and the other two rushed to crawl in my lap whenever I sat down. I thought, Joe will come home and find the three of them framing out a playhouse with my bones.

“You said it wasn’t a story about a famous man,” Nell reminds me. “It was supposed to be a story about you.”

“It was a story about me, the whole thing. But I can’t tell you every minute of my life. We’ll die of boredom.”

Maisie faces down the long row of trees, every one of them covered in cherries. “We’ll die of boredom anyway.”

I would pull off every last bit of fruit myself rather than go back there.

“A sentence,” Nell says, as if this were an improv class. “Start small. See where it takes you.”

I think about it. Those hard years can, in fact, be distilled to a single sentence, and so I try. “I went back to New Hampshire and stayed with my grandmother until she died.”

I was her favorite and she was my favorite. My grandmother married my grandfather when she was eighteen, and had her first child, my mother, at nineteen. My grandfather worked for the railroad and she could sew and together there was enough to keep them going. They had five children, the fourth of whom was a sleepwalker. Brian got out of bed one night when he was six, went down the hall and down the stairs and out the front door into the snowy night. Even asleep, he knew to close the door. When my grandmother went to get everyone up in the morning, Brian wasn’t in his bed. She looked all over the house and then went outside without her coat. She found him down at the end of the driveway by the mailbox, frozen to death. Her remaining four grew up fine. Over the years they brought fourteen grandchildren home from the hospital. Go look us up—-Kenison—-we’re everywhere. My parents met in high school and also married young, everybody married young back then. They had their two boys straightaway: Heath, who they called Hardy because he was, and Jake. That was the family. That was what they’d wanted. But when my mother was thirty--five I came along. Thirty--five sounds like nothing now, it sounds young, but being pregnant when she already had two big boys, one of them playing football on the varsity team, mortified her.

I would say nothing against my parents or my brothers. They were good to me, but there was from earliest memory an understanding that I would live mostly at my grandmother’s house six blocks away. My grandfather had died of emphysema and everyone said she needed company, insofar as a very small child can be company. I suppose I didn’t live completely with her but I was mostly with her, playing with fabric remnants and ribbon wound onto spools while she worked. The alterations shop had a small selection of needles and yarn because we didn’t have a knitting shop in town. When I got older, my mother would watch me knitting a sweater at the breakfast table and say she was sorry she hadn’t paid more attention to her own mother’s attempts to teach her things. I tried a hundred times to teach her myself but my mother was like a border collie. She couldn’t sit still for it.

My grandmother and I though, we were the absolute masters of stillness. She taught me to play honeymoon bridge, how to watch movies while silently keeping up with my stitch count. Those were the days before audiobooks, and she asked me to read to her while she sewed, following my progression from The Little House in the Big Woods all the way through Moby--Dick, which I never would have finished were it not for her insistent requests to hear another chapter. Every book I had to read for school, along with all the ones I read for pleasure, I read to her. This was probably the origin of my acting, as I can remember her telling me to be a little more interesting, and then later on to be a little less interesting. When I played my first Emily in high school, she helped me memorize my lines and I helped her make the costumes. We each had a copy of the play and we read it through breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

“She’s just like you,” my grandmother said. “The smartest girl in the class.”

My grandmother had been the smartest girl in her class as well, everyone said so, but there wasn’t much to do with that distinction once she’d married on the Saturday after graduation. Five children made for a full life, and then four children did the best they could to make life full. Her math was sharp, it had to be to make patterns and run a business. She kept the red leather--bound dictionary her husband had given to her on their first anniversary on the bedside table where another woman might have kept a Bible. She wanted me to go to college, and then she wanted me to go to California and be an actress. She wanted me to have everything I ever thought of wanting. “Look at her getting up on that stage like it was nothing,” she said to her friends. I went off to the University of New Hampshire, and after that I got on a plane to California and checked into a hotel room all by myself. I amazed her.

She never once made me feel bad about leaving. I don’t know that I would have gone if I’d thought she’d be lonely. But she was so cheerful about everything, so happy for me. She had plenty of family around her still, and she knew everyone in town, so off I went. I don’t regret that. She would never have wanted me hanging around for her sake. She meant for me to do something with my life, the kinds of things she hadn’t been able to do herself. But when I think about what those years away added up to, I would rather have spent them with her.

My grandmother closed Stitch--It around the time I moved to Los Angeles. Even when she used her brightest light she had trouble with her eyes, which turned out to be the early stages of macular degeneration. She couldn’t do the fine little stitches anymore, though she could manage plenty of other things. Even without the shop, people brought their clothes to her. She kept the yellow tape measure around her neck and did the work as long as she could because she believed that was her role in our town. Neither of my brothers settled in New Hampshire after college, and then my parents moved to Florida because my mother suffered terribly with arthritis in the winter. They invited my grandmother to come with them but that was never going to happen. She had other children, and they had children, and, in a few cases, those children had children. When I came back, my foot still locked in the fiberglass boot just the way it had been on television, it was clear to everyone that I was the person my grandmother wanted. Why not stay? I had money and no plans. I moved back into my room, which now housed two sewing machines and the button--holer and racks of thread and the Juki serger which, after me, was her pride. I helped her with the sewing. She would talk me through whatever needed to be done if she couldn’t quite manage it herself. In the evenings I read aloud. I told Ripley to have his secretary mail me any books he didn’t want to deal with and she shipped them out in boxes. People stopped me on the street to tell me what a good job I’d done in the movie. I was easy to spot: the crutches, the cast. They thought I was famous, and so were amazed that I’d come home at all. The leaves turned red. The cast came off. I was sure there had been some terrible mistake since now I was in excruciating pain all the time. I couldn’t put my foot flat on the ground, but the doctor said it would happen and after a while it did. I started physical therapy and then I finished it. My sweaters came out of the cedar chest. I found my boots. I wondered about Duke and Pallace and Sebastian, sure the three of them had gone their separate ways. More than anything, I wondered if they ever wondered about me. I tried to find Veronica but she was gone. Veronica, her mother, her brothers, all of them. Those were the days when people could move away and not even the post office knew where to find them.

My grandmother said I should open Stitch--It again, there would be plenty of business. I believed the part about the business, I just didn’t know if I was ready to sign off on a life in New Hampshire spent sewing. Then one night a report about breast cancer came on the news, all about mammograms and early detection, women talking about finding a lump in their breast. We were making dinner. We always turned the television off when we sat down to eat but we could watch it while we were cooking. That was the rule.

“I have one of those,” she said to the television set.

“You had a mammogram?”

She shook her head. She wasn’t looking at me. “A lump.”

I had been cutting up a head of broccoli and I put down the knife and washed my hands. “What did you do about it?”

“I didn’t do anything about it.”

“What did the doctor say?”

She looked at me then. “The whole thing scared me to death.”

“So what happened?” My brain insisted on hearing it in the past tense, I had a lump in my breast once. I couldn’t understand that this was something that was happening.

“I thought I’d wait for you to come home,” she said. “You’re always so good at figuring things out.”

“I’ve been home three months.”

But she had found the lump a year before, and taped a gauze square over it when it started to leak. When I looked at her again I could actually see a disruption in the pattern of her dress. That’s how big it was.

Once we started making the hopeless rounds of oncologist appointments, the past broke away. All the things I’d thought about myself before—-I am an actress, I am not an actress, I was in love, I was betrayed—-disintegrated into nothing. I made bowls of Cream of Wheat she wouldn’t eat and then scraped them into the trash once they turned cold. I managed the schedule of people who wanted to come and see her, her two sons and two daughters—-one of those daughters my mother—-my father, my brothers, all my cousins, all her friends. I made sure no one stayed too long. I sat by her bed and read to her. I read her Our Town, doing all the parts, and we cried at the end when the Stage Manager talked about the planet straining away to make something of itself and how we were all so tired. I told her about Uncle Wallace then, not that he had died but what a wonderful Stage Manager he had been. She held my hand and later I held her hand. I called her Nell in those days because Nell, which was her own name, was all she answered to.

“You know who’s here?” Nell said to me, her eyes closed. She had been asleep all afternoon and I was sitting there turning hems because, unbelievably, people were bringing their sewing by, thinking it would give her something to do while she was dying. She wanted me to finish it.

“Who?” So many people came in and out.

“Brian. Whenever I wake up now he’s sitting at the foot of the bed.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“He hasn’t changed. I always wondered if he would grow up but he didn’t.” She was looking out the window at the snow, or maybe she wasn’t. Her eyes were clouded.

“Do you want a pill now?”

She nodded a little and I poured a glass of water and helped her sit. When she was asleep again I went to the kitchen and called my mother to ask her who Brian was and she told me the story of her brother who had died in the snow. All those years and I’d never heard of him.

“It was too sad,” my mother said.

I found Brian in the cemetery once I knew to look for him, one more Kenison among the many. We buried Nell beside him. I stayed in New Hampshire for a long time after that. There were things to look after, of course, and I didn’t have anyplace to go. The family took what they wanted: a sewing machine, a Christmas tin full of buttons, the dining room set. I cleaned out the rest. I found the five copies of the Monitor in the bottom of her blanket chest, the review of the play, the picture of me as Emily in high school. The cousins came over and we painted the house room by room, fixed the floor in the bathroom, paid someone to fix the roof and paid someone to take down the half--dead oak that had leaned precariously over the back porch for so many years. We did all the things we should have done while she was still alive. I was in good stead with my family and had plenty of invitations to stay once her house finally sold, but once her house was gone that was that. The one person I’d stayed in touch with from Tom Lake was Cat, and Cat knew a costumer in New York who was looking for a seamstress. After I got the job, one of my uncles packed my things in his car and drove me there.

Of the years in New York there is nothing to say. I worked hard. I had a few friends. I went to rehearsals sometimes with the designer to take the actors’ measurements, the yellow tape measure around my neck. I made costumes, refreshed costumes, got house tickets to plays if there were seats available an hour before curtain. I sewed on countless thousands of beads. I thought about night school or even going back to the University of New Hampshire. Every now and then someone in line at the deli would look at me hard and ask if I wasn’t the girl in Singularity. I told them no. I told them I got that question all the time.

Then one day I was in a theater basting long clumps of tulle to the waistband of a young woman’s skirt because the costumer wanted a sense of how things would look from the back of the house if her skirt were fuller, and I heard a voice say, “Emily?”

I took the pins from my mouth and slipped them into the pincushion corsage I wore on my wrist. I couldn’t see anything because the house was dark and the stage lights were on. I didn’t know who was out there or who he was talking to. For all I knew the girl I was pinning was named Emily.

“Emily,” he said again, but this time it wasn’t a question.

And I knew, and I had never been so glad to hear the sound of another voice saying a name that wasn’t mine.

“Did you know right away that you loved her this time?” Maisie asks.

Joe has come by on the Gator to pick up the lugs. Once he realizes we aren’t talking about Tom Lake anymore, he switches off the ignition and stays. “This time, yes,” he says. “Right away.”

I nod in agreement. In the city where people thought I might have been the girl in a movie, I’d been found by Joe Nelson, the one person who actually knew me, the one person I knew. When we left the theater together that afternoon we were laughing. He told me he’d been brought in the week before to try to save a lousy play. I told him it had never been my intention to work in theaters, to be with actors, but I needed a job and this was where Cat had sent me. We felt like we were picking up something that had started a long time ago. But we hadn’t started, had we? I told him I could just as easily have been taking measurements for some other show, or been pinning tulle on the underskirts of wedding dresses in a bridal salon. He said he should have been back in Chicago but then he never would have found me. And then what? It would have been a different life, one that I will never be able to imagine. A life without Joe and the farm, without Emily and Maisie and Nell.

“Did you come back to Michigan after that?” Emily asks. She is sitting in the grass, we all are, and no one minds that the ground is damp.

“Not right away,” Joe says. “I didn’t ask her. I was always afraid of scaring your mother off.”

“When we came back to Michigan the next summer to see Maisie and Ken they pretended I’d been your father’s girlfriend all along, like we’d been together for years. God, she was good to me. She put out those napkins I’d brought her.”

“Did you stay in the little house?” Emily asks.

I look at Joe. “We did, didn’t we?” We slept in the lumpy double bed that Benny and Emily got rid of. We kept the windows open. The noise of the frogs would wake us in the middle of the night and then sing us back to sleep.

“Did you ever get the books straightened out?” Maisie asks.

“I still haven’t gotten the books straightened out,” Joe says.

“Your father gave them the money to stay afloat. He gave them all the money he had, and when that wasn’t enough, he directed a couple of very lucrative peanut butter commercials.”

“Don’t tell them that,” he says.

“He directed iconic peanut butter commercials to make the money to pay off Ken and Maisie’s bills.” Money that, over time, resulted in his buying out their interest in the farm, though that had never been his intention. Ken kept a record of every cent, then one day called Joe up to say he owned the farm.

“Which peanut butter?” Nell asks.

“Skippy,” I say. “He made one for crunchy and one for smooth.” They nod in silent appreciation for his gifts. Looking at so many trees decked out in cherries, it’s easy to understand how it might have all gone another way.

“What if we didn’t do this anymore?” Joe asked me one morning when we were sitting in a diner on West Thirty--Eighth Street, eating pancakes.

“I stopped doing this a long time ago,” I said.

“They were my bills, too,” Joe tells the girls. “My father owned half the farm even if he didn’t work on it, so if you inherit the land you’re going to inherit the bills. By 1995 we already owned the place. Ninety--five was the year that wiped people out. All summer long it was perfect—-the perfect temperatures, the perfect amount of rain, not a single blight on any tree on any farm. The crop was huge, like nothing anyone had seen in decades, and the price went through the floor. I was just glad Ken and Maisie were in Arizona already.”

“If your father hadn’t paid off all the bills and put the rest of the money away we would have lost the farm,” I say, but Joe gives me a look and I stop. I know better. We do not talk of losing the farm.

And there will be no talk of our meeting again at that theater, about the years spent dating, living together, deciding to marry, moving to Michigan. Joe has thrown the switch that takes the train from love to the precipitous decline in crop prices. He has seen to it that when he leaves we will be contemplating cherries and not our courtship, which is fair, because the courtship is ours alone, and there is work to do, and we’ve already lost half the day to lightning.

“I should get back to work.” Joe gets up stiffly, the backside of his jeans muddied and wet. Then we all get up and start hefting the lugs into the Gator. The neighbors never thought that a couple of New York theater people had come to take over the farm. Joe Nelson and his wife had come. Joe Nelson who’d been there since he was a boy.

And for his efforts, the farm we took over was in better shape than we expected, by which I mean better shape financially. The main house, the little house, the barn, the trailers where the summer crews stayed, the fences and the trees themselves all existed in varying degrees of disrepair and decay. Ken and Maisie took what was theirs and left for Arizona to live near their daughter. After Ken died, Maisie spent the summers with us, providing a stupendous amount of help. “All that sunshine,” she’d say to me as we stood side by side in the kitchen, the girls crawling and toddling and walking around us. “A person can only take so much.”

“So Dad saved you,” Emily says.

I keep picking. I will not stop for the rest of the day. “I guess he did. Unless I saved him. I might have saved him, too.”

“It’s a good story either way,” Maisie says. “And to think if it wasn’t for Duke we might never have asked.”

“I wouldn’t have asked because I thought I knew it already,” Nell said. “And I had every part wrong.”

“To tell you the truth, I just never thought about it,” Emily says. “I mean, I thought about the Duke part but I don’t think I ever wondered about you and Dad.”

“We weren’t particularly interesting,” I say. Good marriages are never as interesting as bad affairs.

“Did you ever go back to Tom Lake?” Nell asks.

“You mean, did we ever drive down to see a show?”

“A show,” she says, “or, I don’t know, did you ever just walk around for old times’ sake?”

I do not explain that “old times’ sake” is a condition of fond nostalgia. “We never did. You know how it is in the summer.”

“I guess Duke never went back either,” Maisie says. Maisie has never been as interested in Duke as her sisters. She has no trouble letting him go.

“Duke was too famous to go back to Tom Lake after that summer,” Emily says.

She’s right about that. “On your way up or on your way out.”

“So you never saw him again.” Emily has made her peace with this, and I give serious consideration to leaving that in place, peace being a hard commodity to come by in this world. But one thing is left, the part of the story I wouldn’t have told her when she was young because there would have been no context for it, the part of the story I couldn’t have told her when she was a teenager because she would have submitted it into evidence against me. And so I’ve held it all these years, the random thing she would most want to add to her collection of ephemera.

“Once,” I say.

He came to the house in October of 1997. Dates near the end of the last century are easy for me to remember based on the season and who I was pregnant with, in this case Nell, who was due in a matter of weeks. That meant Maisie was two and Emily four. I liked being pregnant. I was good at it. Joe and I had decided that two was the right number of children, but once we’d had them for a while, we wanted more. One more baby, we whispered to each other when the snow was starting to melt, one more under the wire, a terrible extravagance we could in no way afford, but we did it anyway. We went back to bed.

There was no best time in northern Michigan, only the time that best suited you. I was partial to fall because I liked the sharpness of the air and the brightness of the light on the leaves. The kitchen was still small in those days and I kept the girls in there with me while I peeled potatoes for dinner. They were making jam tarts, which meant they were smearing jam into their hair. I picked Maisie up when I heard the knock on the door, giving her my stomach for a perch. Emily, my big girl, followed on her own. Someone was always knocking, a neighbor needing me to watch a baby for an hour or a neighbor bringing a pie because I had watched the baby the day before, someone from the picking crew needing Band--Aids or eggs or butter or salt, or it was a stranger driving by who wanted to know our price on apples because the fruit stand was closed.

The enormous black SUV with black--tinted windows idling in front of the house called to mind drug lords, federal agents, movie stars. Duke had knocked on the door and then stepped back to admire the pumpkin patch Joe had planted for the girls. His sunglasses were tortoise shell, round. If time had marched for the rest of us, it had left Duke alone. He was exactly the same, or he was lovelier, his complexion all snow and roses, his hair curling gently at the collar of his navy peacoat. I guess the cop show was a long time ago. Circumstance would dictate that I should have been the one who was surprised, but Duke took the honor for himself. He didn’t have the slightest idea what I was doing there. When I opened the screen door and said his name he looked back down the drive like maybe he’d taken a wrong turn into the past, then looked at me again, me and my girls, I wouldn’t say in horror because it wasn’t horror, exactly, more like acute discomfort. “What are you doing here?” he asked finally.

“I live here.” Whatever he’d come for, it wasn’t me.

“This is the Nelson farm?” Was he even thinner now? Somehow taller? Was it possible that every part of him had been polished?

“Duke,” I said, “this is weird. Why are you here?”

He took off his sunglasses and I saw the tiny scar at the corner of his right eye where his brother had hit him. He pressed his eyes closed, then covered them with his hand as if maybe he expected that when he took his hand away again I’d be gone. He was wearing a wedding ring.

I was still there.

And so he tried to restart the moment, begin again. “These are yours?” he asked. Maisie pressed her sticky face into the side of my neck. I hoisted her up to resettle her bones on top of the baby inside me. Emily looped one arm around my thigh and with the other hand gave Duke a charming wave. I made the introductions and he said their names aloud, bent from the waist. He was still making children’s movies in those days, or he was just at the end of that era, I couldn’t remember, but he had a very nice smile for children, a completely different smile from the one that was familiar to me, or maybe it was just that his teeth had been fixed. Those beautiful, wonky teeth had been ground off and replaced.

He straightened up. “A couple used to live here, the Nelsons.”

I nodded. “Ken and Maisie. They moved to Arizona to live with their daughter. Well, Ken died a few years ago, but Maisie comes back every summer.”

“I met them a long time ago, and I was just—-” He stopped to scan the fields again, as if the word that eluded him was out there. “I was nearby.”

“You met them with me.” Maisie was getting heavy and I set her on her feet. The girls went straight down the steps and started kicking leaves. “Remember? You and me and Sebastian and Pallace? We drove up here for lunch.”

He thought about that for a while and then I saw the light click on. It was as if he had just come into his body. “You wanted to stop and get them something,” he said. “We swam in a lake.”

“Right.”

“And you live here now?”

I nodded. I was wondering if he would put it together but I doubted it. He had no incentive.

“Can I look inside?”

“Sure.” I held the door open, turning my stomach at an angle. When he walked past me I expected something, a kiss on the cheek? He went right to the kitchen. “It’s messy,” I called out.

“I’m making dinner.” Then I was irritated with myself for anything that sounded like an apology. What the hell, Duke? That’s what I should have said. I stayed on the threshold, keeping an eye on the girls. I could see him, his hand on a chair, taking it in.

“It’s just the same,” I heard him say, though he may have been talking to himself. “I remember this table.”

“We want to make the kitchen bigger.”

In a minute he came back. “Don’t. It’s perfect. Did you buy the place?”

“I married in.” The girls were rolling now, then stopping to flutter their arms and legs. They were putting on a leaf show, which required an audience. “I married Ken and Maisie’s nephew.”

“Oh,” he said. I could read nothing into that. Not disappointment or relief or surprise.

“Did you come to see Maisie?” My daughter, who we called little Maisie in the summers when big Maisie was here, lifted her golden head.

“It was such a good day,” he said. “The day I was here. Someone told me years ago that I should always have a place in my mind where I could imagine myself happy, so that when I wasn’t so happy I could go there. Anyway, this is the place I go.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“It’s funny, I’d forgotten you were with us.”

“Understandable,” I said.

He shook his head. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m tired, that’s the thing. I’ve been tired a lot lately, and so I’m here a lot, you know, in my mind. I just wondered if I could find the farm again. To tell you the truth, I’ve thought about buying the place, just to make sure that nothing changes.”

“Nothing changes,” I said. “Unless you count the conveyor we put in the barn to sort the cherries.”

He shook his head. “I don’t count that.”

“I don’t think my husband would sell,” I told him. I don’t think my husband would sell you the orchard if you offered him the entire state of California.

“Is your husband here?”

I nodded. I would have guessed it would be strange if I ever saw Duke again. I would not have guessed it would be strange in this way. Every sentence that came into my head began with the phrase, Do you remember? but clearly, he did not.

“Maybe I’ll try to find him. Would you mind if I just walk around?” His hair was shining like a Pantene ad and he raked it back with his hand. I was sure that Duke’s hair never looked like that before, but then I don’t think he used shampoo when I knew him. I think shampoo was one of the things he didn’t believe in.

The girls were sitting on the lawn throwing handfuls of leaves in the air and then letting those leaves affix to them with jam. They were laughing like hyenas. “I don’t mind at all but seriously, can you just wait a minute? I haven’t seen you in a long time. Tell me something.”

“What do you want to know?” Suddenly he looked as tired as he claimed to be. Suddenly my mind was blank of questions.

“Is there a person in the car?” I asked. The windows were so dark it was impossible to tell but the motor was running.

Duke nodded.

“Should we invite him out?”

Duke shook his head.

Then I remembered the thing I did want to know, the person I had wondered about for years. “How’s Sebastian?”

His eyes had been wandering but they came back to me then and he smiled. “I always thought you were in love with Sebastian,” he said. “At least at the end.”

“Of course I was in love with Sebastian. Everyone was.” Pallace was, I wanted to say, but I couldn’t say her name without sounding punitive or hurt and I was neither of those things. I was the luckiest person in the world. “Is Sebastian still teaching? Is he still in East Detroit?”

“They got rid of East Detroit,” Duke said. “It’s Eastpointe now.”

“I don’t know why I can never remember that.”

“Sebastian works with me. He runs the production company. No more world history.”

“But he still plays tennis.” It wasn’t a question. Of course he played.

Duke nodded. “We play, the two of us. Sebastian is the constant. Everything is change except Sebastian.”

For a brief, horrible moment I wondered if it was Sebastian in the car, if Sebastian had driven him here, but that wasn’t possible.

He turned and looked at my girls spread out in a pile of red and gold leaves. “Do either of you know where the cemetery is?” he asked them.

Emily sprang up like puppet. “I do!”

“That’s where I want to go. Can you walk around like that?” he asked me, making reference to my stomach.

“I can.”

Duke went down the steps and into the leaves. When he leaned over, Emily held out her arms to him. “Oh, you are lovely,” he said, picking her up. Then he looked back at me. “I should get one of these.”

“Easiest thing in the world,” I said, Maisie climbing into my arms.

I didn’t walk him to the cemetery. I took him in the direction of the barn instead. “We’ll pick up Joe,” I said.

“Who’s Joe?” Duke asked Emily, his eyebrows turned down, his voice suspicious.

“Daddy!” she cried, laughing at his hilarity.

Duke had a look on his face as if he were working a particularly complicated math problem in his head. Then he found the answer. “Jesus. Joe Nelson?”

“Joe Nelson,” I said.

“You married Joe Nelson?”

“Who on the Nelson farm did you think I married?” Maisie put the end of my braid in her mouth and started chewing.

“That’s right. His family owned the farm. I forgot that part. Joe Nelson.” He shook his head. “It makes more sense now. Is he still directing? I haven’t heard his name in years.”

I shook my head. We owed him no explanation, Joe and I.

“Do you live out here all the time?”

“We do,” I said, a decision that was feeling better by the minute.

“Are you coming to live with us?” Emily asked.

Duke started walking again. “I haven’t been invited.”

“I invite you!” she said gleefully. “You can sleep in my room. I have my own room.”

“You have tremendously friendly children.” He bounced my girl up and down on his hip, his walk becoming exactly the kind of exaggerated canter the girls were always begging me to do.

I could see Joe in the distance. He was out in front of the barn, wiping his hands on an enormous dirty rag. I waved. I had never loved anyone more than I loved Joe Nelson at that moment. “Look who’s come to visit,” I called to him.

“As you know,” Duke said to Emily, his eyes two inches from her eyes, “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.”

The Chekhov wasn’t funny now that we were the ones who owned the cherry orchard, but Duke wouldn’t have known that. Joe was coming towards us quickly now, stuffing the rag in his pocket. “Nelson!” Duke called to him, his voice brimming with joy. “Hail fellow well met.” He was shaking Joe’s hand as Joe was taking Emily from his arms.

It was years later that Joe told me how he’d thought his heart would stop when he saw Duke there in the middle of the road, holding Emily.