21

21

There are always four or five days when picking the last of the sweet cherries overlaps with the start of shaking the tart cherries, when things get so busy you can’t find your own hand. The crew we have kept our distance from this summer, the crew who has kept their distance from us, comes closer as we bring out the giant mechanical shaker. Together we unspool the tarps beneath the tree and then attach the shaker. Ten violent seconds later all the cherries are on the ground. The tarps are then rolled back, dumping the cherries into a long, mobile conveyor belt so the whole operation can move forward—-unroll, shake, roll up—-tree after tree, acre after acre. When the conveyor belt fills, the cherries progress into a giant tank full of water. We climb to the top and use our old tennis racquets to skim off the branches and leaves that have fallen in. There is no talking over all the noise, no extra moment in which to remember the past or examine how we feel about anything. There is work and only work, and with a lot of help, we get it done.

At the end of the first week of August, after all varieties of cherries have been harvested and sent off to the processing plant, we spend the day at the lake—-me and Joe and Emily and Benny and Maisie and Nell and Hazel—-swimming a little but mostly sleeping on our towels because we are that tired and the next day the pruning will begin. We’ve got six weeks to get things ready before apple season and there’s a year’s worth of maintenance around the farm to attend to. There’s a wedding to think about.

It is during this season of maintenance that Maisie leaves work in the late afternoon to go back to the house for a phone meeting with her advisor. Ten minutes later she returns, a tall, gray--haired man at her side. “Mom!” she calls out in a loud voice, and I turn in her direction. Six weeks have passed since Duke drowned in the Tyrrhenian Sea, four weeks since I finished telling the girls the story of when I had known him. There are no visitors in the orchard, no one but the people who work with us, but as I get closer I can see that it’s him.

“Sebastian!” Maisie says, and in her excitement she waves. She might as well be hopping up and down. I can tell that he means to be sheepish but he’s not, he’s glad, and I walk straight into his arms.

He puts one hand on either side of my head and looks at my face. We are both so much older now, and we are alive. “I didn’t think you’d be here,” he says.

“I’m always here,” I say.

He smiles. “I met Maisie.”

“He was on the porch swing,” Maisie tells me. “Just sitting there. I knew exactly who he was.”

“She opened the door and said, ‘Sebastian Duke?’?”

I look behind me. Emily and Nell are hanging back like shy children. I introduce my girls.

“Emily!” he says. “My brother used to say, ‘Someday I’ll live on an orchard in Michigan and have a daughter named Emily.’?”

“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” she said, her cheeks red.

“Did you know that your mother was the greatest Emily of all time? Your father was a very good Stage Manager but this one was in a class by herself.”

“He’s basing that on two Emilys,” I tell the girls, but I will admit it, I am grateful.

Sebastian shakes his head. “I went on to have an entire life after I knew you,” he says. “You have no idea how many actresses I’ve seen.”

“She should have stuck with it,” Nell says. “We tell her that all the time.”

“It looks like your mother did just fine,” Sebastian says.

“One of you go get your father,” I say to them. “Tell him who’s here.”

But miraculously, they all go, because in some ways they are grown--up women who understand.

Duke was sixty when he died, which makes Sebastian sixty--one, which makes me fifty--seven. “I look at you,” he says, “and I can see the whole thing, you and Duke up there onstage, Uncle Wallace. You’re still that girl.”

I shake my head. “I’m so sorry,” I say. “I’ve thought of you every day since we heard but I didn’t have any idea how to find you.” Which is true, but it also never occurred to me to try. We knew each other such a long time ago.

“Duke loved it here,” Sebastian says, looking out over the trees. “He was always talking about the day we all came out and had lunch with Joe’s aunt and uncle. The place hasn’t changed.”

“I could tell you all the ways it’s changed but you’re right, essentially it’s the same farm.”

“Did you know he tried to buy it? I found him a lot of other orchards over the years but he always said no. This was the place he wanted.”

Even now it’s such a strange thought, Duke picking cherries on the Nelson farm. “He showed up one day in a big black car. The girls were so little then, in fact Nell wasn’t even born.”

Sebastian nods, and I understand that he knows every story about his brother. He sees Joe and the girls coming out of the barn and he waves, then we start up the road towards my family.

Generations of Nelsons had cleared the trees and planed the boards and pulled out the roots and the enormous rocks and planted the orchard. They looked after the cherries and the apples, the peaches and pears. They weren’t about to sell this place to anyone. He called them for several years making offers, and after so many polite refusals he suggested a compromise: Would they sell him a place in the cemetery? Just a little place under the oak tree, he said. Duke would be cremated, after all. How much room would he need? Maybe just a small stone with his name but maybe not even that. The privacy appealed to him, along with the memory and the view. Duke told Maisie and Ken if he couldn’t live here he would at least like the right to be dead here. “Why are you even thinking about that?” big Maisie had asked him. He was so young! But she liked his television show, and even though she knew it wasn’t real, Duke had so many people shooting at him and pushing him out of speeding cars. That had to wear a man down after a while, put him in mind of his own death. The price he offered them for a corner of their cemetery came to more than what Ken and Maisie had cleared in profit for the last five years combined. The money bailed them out. Duke bailed them out, and we never knew it. The lawyer came to the house with a check and a nondisclosure agreement. They were told that Duke would like to come and sit from time to time if they didn’t mind, and of course they didn’t mind. They would be thrilled to have him visit, stay for dinner, sleep in the guest room. He was welcome. That’s what Duke told Sebastian. The Nelsons liked him. But after he bought a piece of the cemetery they didn’t hear from him again, and he never came to visit, except for the one time he did.

We are all sitting down to lunch as Sebastian explains it. I put out the good plates, the good napkins.

“I never knew how they did it,” Joe says. “How they came up with the money to get out of here.”

“So he’s going to be buried in our cemetery?” Emily is trying to find a place for this piece of information but there isn’t one.

Sebastian nods. “There weren’t many places he felt comfortable.”

Ken and Maisie are here now, their ashes together beneath a single stone. I miss them. I miss especially the summers when Maisie came when the girls were small, and how we would fill a bag with sandwiches and tramp up to the cemetery to sit and watch the clouds billow overhead. Sometimes we would go to sleep in sleeping bags and wake up in the middle of the night to see the stars. I try to imagine Duke up there with Maisie and Ken, and then I try to think if it matters at all. It doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t have anything to do with me. It was always about the farm, and how he thought he knew what it would be like to stay here based on just that single day. We all wanted to stay, me and Pallace and Sebastian and Duke and Joe. The difference being that Joe was a Nelson, and he did the work to make sure that there would always be Nelsons, some Nelson or another, on this land. The difference being I had the good sense to marry him.

“Duke didn’t have any children?” Nell asks Sebastian. “I feel like movie stars always have children, you know, all those wives.”

Sebastian shakes his head. “He saw himself as a liability.”

“What do you mean?” Joe asks.

“He just thought it would be better not to extend the line.”

Emily is sitting next to Sebastian at the table. “Everybody’s got their reasons,” she says to him.

Then Sebastian puts his arm around my daughter’s shoulder like he’s known her forever. “I always thought so.”

“Were you ever in love with him?” Joe asks me that night when we’re in bed. We’ve put Sebastian in Emily’s room, in the twin bed beneath the sloping ceiling stickered with planets and stars. He had planned to stay in a hotel in town, he had booked a room, but the girls wore him down with their insistence. He was ours for now. They told him so.

“Duke?”

Joe snorts, shakes his head. “I know you were in love with Duke.”

“I was and then I very much was not.”

“Which doesn’t answer my question.”

“Was I in love with Sebastian?”

“The better brother.”

The better brother, indeed, but I was young, and it was years before I could see the merits of kindness. “No,” I say. “I wasn’t. I was in love with you.”

“You weren’t in love with me then.” But he pulls me to him and I put my head on his chest, I rest my head on the old blue T--shirt he wears to bed.

“But that’s how it feels now, looking back. Now I think that I was always in love with you.”

After Joe falls asleep I stay awake, thinking about Capri and the sea and the boat, about Duke, and the moon on the water. It’s a place I’ve never seen and still it comes to me so clearly, the light and the dark and the quiet sea, and how he jumps from the bow feet first, straight as a knife, and how the hundreds and thousands of tiny bubbles break across his skin, his hair floating up. He lets himself go deep before he starts kicking up towards the surface, and then he swims away, from the boat and from me and from Sebastian. I think how hard it must have been for him to not turn around but he kept swimming for as long as he could go. I let him go. Not that he was ever mine but still, I let him go.

Emily carries a shovel and Benny, that genius, brings a post--hole digger. Hazel follows along. Sebastian carries what is left of his brother. He picks a spot beneath the red oak and together we make a place for him. The daisies held on all summer, becoming a wild tangle over all the graves. Sebastian turns the canister into the hole and then packs in the dirt with his hands.

Joe says the lines about the earth straining away, and how every sixteen hours we all need to lie down and rest. After that we all sit down. Nell sits beside me, then stretches out, her head in my lap. We stay in the cemetery a long time, thinking of Duke, and then after a while we start talking about other things, mostly the wedding. Emily and Benny promise to choose a day, maybe the first of the month because that way they’ll always remember. “You’ll remember anyway,” Joe says to them and it’s true, at least as far as he’s concerned. He never forgets. We were married in the house that later became our home. Ken and Maisie were Unitarians and said that their minister could come the next day after lunch and they would stand up with us and we both said that would be fine, which was how we finally decided to get married. Joe, the greatest good fortune of my life, these three daughters, this farm, I see it all and hold it for as long as I can, my hand on Nell’s head. I think of Uncle Wallace holding my hand, and then of Duke again, his long hair gelled and pinned, waiting for me to walk off the stage so that we can change out of our costumes and swim in the dark. Like Uncle Wallace, Duke had three wives, and like Uncle Wallace, he wasn’t married to any of them in the end. For all his glory, he is left with us and the wide blue sky and the high white clouds and the straight lines of trees stretching out towards the dark woods and then, on the other side, the lake. We can see everything from here. I would say that there has never been such a beautiful day, but I say that all the time. I can see how right Duke was. He only needed such a little space. There is room up here for all of us, for me and for Joe and our daughters, for their partners and their children, because this is the thing about youth: You change your mind. Despite everything we know there may still be children living on this farm and someday they will be buried here with us. Sebastian can come, too. I will remember to tell him this later. Joe will tell him. Where would he be in the world except with his brother, here with us?