8

8

It’s a different kind of sleep when the girls are home. Even after so many years I am asleep but also waiting to hear the back door open and close. Nell comes home first, then Maisie. When they were younger I could hear the difference in their footsteps, a job that is simplified by Hazel barking. It’s strange to me that Maisie and Nell have continued to sleep in the same room now that Emily’s room is available, but they’ve always liked being together. Even when they were children, neither of them seemed to pine for a room of her own. At thirteen, Emily nailed a NO TRESPASSING sign to her door (purchased from Ace Hardware and put up not with tape or thumbtacks but nails), and even that couldn’t rouse her sisters’ interest in getting in there. All these years after the end of Emily’s hormonal rage, Maisie and Nell are still opting for the familiar comfort of their twin beds.

When I go downstairs in the morning I find a cardboard box full of eggs waiting on the kitchen counter, some of them the color of milky coffee and some of them the blue of clouded sky. I’m glad we don’t keep chickens because I regret the goats, but it means that eggs are always welcome. Maisie and Nell drag downstairs while I’m making French toast, Maisie clutching her dog like a pillow to her chest. I ask her if she’d been paid in eggs last night and she nods, yawns. “They tried to give me money.”

“Money’s nice,” Nell says, rubbing at her eyes. None of our girls have money.

Maisie shakes her head. “I can’t take money until I have my license. And anyway, what’s a person supposed to charge for helping a poor little shitting calf in the middle of the night?”

“Three dozen eggs?” I say, guessing.

“More or less.”

Animals aren’t much of a thing around here. Like our goats, the occasional cow or horse or flock of chickens represents a fruit farmer’s temporary insanity, the fanciful quest to make a hard job harder. Wouldn’t it be fun to sell eggs at the fruit stand? Goat cheese? Butter? But it isn’t fun. We know how to tend to our trees but the animals are largely a mystery to us, which is why Maisie’s phone is always ringing. No one cares that she hasn’t finished school. She knows more than they do and they need her now.

“Is the calf okay?” her sister asks.

Maisie nods again, thanking me as I put breakfast on the table. “I got a stomach tube down her for fluids, and they had some Albon tablets. It turned out okay.” She cuts a corner off her French toast and slips it to the dog.

I brush my fingers through my middle daughter’s curling hair before sitting down. Chemistry was nothing for Maisie. Sick calves are nothing. She is never afraid.

Maisie looks at her sister as if she is just now awake enough to see her. “What did you wind up doing last night?”

Nell swirls a piece of French toast in a puddle of syrup. “I went to the little house. Benny told me I could borrow his copy of Moby--Dick. He said by the time I finished reading it the pandemic would be over.”

“You went to the little house to read Moby--Dick?” Maisie reads journal articles about small--animal vaccinations, and Emily?reads journal articles about weed control and pesticides, and Nell reads novels and plays, each of them marveling at the other two.

“No,” Nell says. “We wound up playing Pictionary.” She stops because there’s something else she wants to tell but she’s conflicted about it. Nell is a girl without secrets. Watching her face is like going to a movie.

“And—-” I prompt.

“Maybe I’m not supposed to talk about it. They didn’t say I couldn’t so I wonder if maybe you already know and haven’t told me.”

Maisie and I put down our forks.

“Let’s assume we don’t know,” I say.

“Let’s assume we do,” Maisie says.

Nell takes another bite, weighing the options. “Do you know they’re getting married?” she asks.

Maisie slaps the table with her open hand, sloshing her coffee, startling the dog. “They got engaged?”

Nell folds her lower lip into her mouth. “You didn’t know.”

“We didn’t know,” I say, and what I feel—-and I am ashamed of this—-is a very old prick of exclusion. Emily didn’t come to me. Emily, who didn’t tell me when she started her period and didn’t tell me when she decided to go to Michigan State, didn’t think to tell me that she was marrying Benny, though Emily, had she been at the table, would have said it was because I already knew those things.

“I don’t think it’s an engagement per se. I mean, it wasn’t like she was holding out her hand to show me a ring. They were just talking about whether or not they should try to fit in some kind of wedding between cherry season and the apples. The only reason it even came up was because one of the pictures I was supposed to draw was ‘marriage vows.’?”

“Outed by Pictionary,” Maisie says.

Nell looks from her sister back to me. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Of course you should have. How else would we have known?” I can hear the petulance in my voice.

“They were always going to get married,” Maisie says.

Nell nods. “When I was a kid I thought Benny must have hated his parents because he was here all the time.”

The French toast has grown cold but we make ourselves eat it. We know how the morning will go if we’re hungry. “Come on,” I say, picking up plates. “Let’s get to work. I bet your father thinks we’re still in bed.”

We remember our hats. The day is clear and bright as we walk out to take our place between the trees. We see the six members of the Ramirez family in the distance and shout out our greetings, and they in return wave their arms above their heads. Their family is safe and together in this cherry orchard they have come back to year after year. Our family is safe and together in this cherry orchard. Our eldest daughter is going to marry our neighbors’ son, a boy she loves, a boy we love, and I am mad at Duke, who, through no fault of his own, or through only the fault of his essential Dukeness over which he had no control, tore the fabric that bound me to my daughter. And though it has been repaired, expertly, repeatedly, this lumpy seam remains between us that keeps her from telling me she’s getting married. The dog has run ahead and Maisie jogs after her while Nell drops back and takes my hand. “I want to see if the daisies are up,” she says.

We climb the little hill to the cemetery where to my surprise the tall grass is tangled with flowers—-white petals, bright--yellow hearts. She’d called the seed and feed store more than a month ago and asked them to put a couple of packets of daisy seeds in with our order.

“I was just here,” I say, amazed by the degree to which everything is changed by the presence of daisies. The girls like to bring the goats up to the cemetery in the summer—-they do a beautiful job trimming around the stones—-but no one’s had the time this year and now we’ll never do it. The place looks too pretty.

The shaggy and shaded wilderness of the cemetery was always Emily’s favorite place on the farm. Even when she was a tiny girl she liked to run her fingers along the tombstones, the letters worn nearly to nothing, the stones speckled with lichen. I would lie in the grass between the graves, so pregnant with Maisie I wondered if I’d be able to get up again, and Emily would weave back and forth between the granite slabs, hiding then leaping out to make me laugh. Like every other mother in the history of time, I wondered if I would ever be able to love another child as much as I loved her.

“Listen, she isn’t mad at you,” Nell says. “They were thinking out loud, that’s all. I just happened to be at the table while they were thinking out loud.”

I laugh. “I should have named you Veronica.”

“Veronica from high school?”

“She knew how to read my mind.”

Nell smiles. “Maybe I’ll start a mentalist act, even though I think yours is the only mind I can read. Well, yours and Emily’s and Maisie’s. I can’t read Daddy’s mind.”

“I wonder why not,” I say. Veronica. She will always be eighteen for me. I can see her so clearly.

“He’s too good an actor.” She leans over to brush her hand across the daisies. “I’d make a fortune if I knew when we were getting out of here.”

“Don’t you sort of love it, though?” I am projecting, of course. I know this.

“Love being trapped with my family on the farm while the world goes up in flames? Not so much. I mean, I know we’re lucky. I know that pretty much everyone else has it worse, but it’s hard. You and Dad and Emily live here anyway, and Maisie’s got the shitting calves to give her life meaning, but for me it’s pretty much just picking cherries.”

I can do nothing about the world and the flames beyond leaving free masks in the fruit stand, but the part in which we’re trapped is joy itself. “I’m sorry.”

She shrugs. “At least we have the past.”

Nell and I agree that we’ll come back at the end of the day and pick a bouquet for the table but for now we should get to work. Maisie has her bucket around her neck by the time we catch up and Emily’s bucket is nearly full with a good six inches of cherries already in the lug.

“You knew Benny and I were getting married,” Emily says before I even pick up my bucket. Just as well, since I didn’t know how to start the conversation. She tilts back her head so she can see me from beneath the bill of her cap, so I can see that she’s fierce again.

I glance over at Maisie but she keeps her back to me while deftly picking cherries. I understand now that the detour to see the daisies in the cemetery was meant to give Maisie and Emily a minute to talk. “Listen, I’m thrilled about this. You know we love Benny.”

You know we love you.

“It’s not like we were making plans behind your back,” Emily says. “We were only having a conversation. If this isn’t a good time for you—-”

“Don’t say that.”

She squeezes her eyes closed. “I don’t want to feel like I’m doing this wrong before I’ve even done anything.”

“Emily.” I put my arms around her from the side, the buckets dictating the shape of our embrace. She tries to pull away but I have her. I hold her, and then she starts to cry.

“Oh, Emmy.” Nell touches her sister’s shoulder. “Oh, god, I’m so sorry.”

Emily shakes her head, covers her face with her hands.

“Somebody didn’t get enough sleep,” Maisie says.

That’s what I used to say to the girls when they wailed over whatever it was they wanted and didn’t get—-another puff of cotton candy, a final spin on the Zipper. The perceived injustice of the phrase enraged them, but when they got older and started saying it to one another it was suddenly hilarious. Sure enough, Emily’s sobs are disrupted by her own hiccupping laughter. She pulls up her T--shirt to wipe her face, blow her nose.

“You’re so gross. You should be a vet,” Maisie says.

Emily shakes her head. “I don’t know how to do this.”

“Get married?”

“I don’t know how to do any of it.” She turns up her face to shout at the sky. “Are we going to get the cherries picked in time? Will anyone be working at the processing plant? Is everything going to rot in a warehouse? Then Benny says we should just go ahead and get married, at least get that knocked off the list, and I think, why not? If we do it now we don’t have to invite anyone—-no relatives, no neighbors, no friends from school. We’ve got the perfect excuse. It can just be us and the Holzapfels. We can bring blankets and sit in the grass by the pond. I can wear something I already own and nothing will cost anything and we won’t have to write thank--you notes.” The breeze shifts imperceptibly through the leaves and just like that she’s crying again. Maisie lifts the yoke of stone fruit from her sister’s neck and Emily rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Whenever I think about getting married I feel like I’m losing my mind, and maybe that’s because I’m losing my mind, and then I think of poor Benny getting stuck with a crazy wife and what a burden I’m going to be for him, then two minutes later I don’t feel that way at all. Getting married is bullshit, if anyone wants to know. The whole institution is designed to drive women crazy. We don’t have the time or the money to blow on some princess fantasy I never had in the first place. So why can’t we just get married on a Thursday after lunch and then go back to work? Done. I love Benny, you know I do, and I want to marry him. I just don’t want to be a bride.”

Maisie and Nell and I are staring at her, and while I’ve always said my daughters are capable of a perfect communion of thought, this time I’m in on it. Emily has solved the age--old problem.

“You slipped the harness,” Nell says.

“You’re a fucking genius,” Maisie says, her voice gone soft with wonder.

Emily stands radiant before our adoration. “Dad doesn’t know this, does he?”

We shake our heads.

“Hold off for a minute, will you? Let me tell him. Benny’s going to want to talk to him. I want to talk to him. He’d be hurt, you know, if he thought we’d worked the whole thing out without him. We’re together all the time.”

Emily! I want to say. This sorrow at the thought of exclusion you wish to protect your dear father from, that’s what I’ve been feeling all morning. But I have been here long enough to understand the difference between daughters and mothers and daughters and fathers. We promise to wait. Secrets are at times a necessary tool for peace. “Take as long as you need.”

“I’ll tell him,” she says, then opens up her arms to take the three of us in.

When all of this is done we feel that we have lived enough for an entire day. We’ve done enough. Now we should be able to go home, sit on the porch or in the bathtub, go back to bed with our books and our dog and our sewing, but the truth is the sun is ticking up and we’ve barely started to work. Sweet cherries must be picked today and every day until they’re gone. We’ll start shaking the tarts before the sweets are finished. They overlap at the end. When all the cherries are harvested there will be just enough time to get the trees pruned and finish up the farm maintenance and take care of equipment repair before we start in on the apples. And the pears. Only a few acres but still, we have pears and they will have to come off the trees. Everything does.

“Did you ever think that you were going to marry Duke?” Emily asks, bringing the story back to me.

Given that marriage is Topic A, I try to remember. Did I ever look at Duke in my bed asleep, the cigarettes on the nightstand, his arm thrown out across my chest, and think, yes, you, every morning, forever?

“No,” I say.

“But you loved him,” Emily says.

“I was twenty--four.”

“That’s a yes,” Maisie says.

Did I ever wonder if my parents had been in love with other people, or think of them as having lives before their lives included me? Maybe it’s just that my girls are modern, or that Duke was famous, or that we’re mired down in work with only the past for distraction. I have no idea.

“So you did your first table read and then you went for a walk along the lake,” Nell says.

“And you smoked!” Maisie says. “We haven’t talked about the smoking. I can’t believe that. You’d kill us if we smoked.”

I nod, picking, picking, picking. That is all I have told them, and now I can feel them bearing down on me as if they are once again crawling into my lap, pushing my book aside, trampling my sewing. Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, they cry.

The most amazing thing was how well I slept—-in a new state with a new job and a naked man I scarcely knew in my bed—-I went through the entire night without so much as a dream. The window had no curtains, and when I opened my eyes to the brightness of Michigan I felt myself to be newly and fully adult. Certainly I hadn’t been an adult in New Hampshire, and in L.A. people made money by herding me around, Ripley or Ashby, my agent, a producer. But I’d gotten to Michigan all on my own, into the play and into this bed. “Hey you.” I tapped the small dip in the middle of Duke’s chest.

He kept his eyes closed, smiling as he pulled me to him. “Oh, perfect. This is perfect.” He snuffled into my neck. “I was hoping you’d still be here.”

“Where else would I be? It’s my room.”

“And you’ve been nice about sharing. What’s the time?”

I lifted up enough to see my travel clock, which was on his side of the bed. His side, my side. “Eight--seventeen.”

He yawned like a lion, showing me his molars, his fillings. “We start at nine.” He took my face in his hands and looked at me with great seriousness. “You shouldn’t be late, the star, her first morning. You’ve got to be disciplined. Either breakfast or sex. Not both. You have to choose.”

I was making good choices these days, which meant that by the time we rolled apart there wasn’t even a moment for coffee, and no time for Duke to go back to his dorm to change. “Lend me something,” he said.

I was pulling my favorite dress over my head, the smocked one with the daisies and the wide pockets that my grandmother had made for me to take to Los Angeles. “You can’t wear my clothes.” Small female, large male, I could think of so many reasons why it was inappropriate.

“I’m not going to rehearsal dressed in something I wore yesterday.”

I looked at him. “No one remembers what you wore yesterday.”

He threw off the sheets, leaping up. Duke, naked and twenty--eight, opened the dresser: underwear, socks, and two nightgowns in the first drawer, T--shirts, shorts, and two swimsuits in the second. “Your organization is impeccable.”

“Put your clothes on,” I said. “We have to go.”

He chose my Disneyland T--shirt, just that word in swooping pink script on a bright white background. I had wanted to go to Disneyland when I first went to L.A. and so Ashby had taken me. The two of us spun in teacups and had our picture taken with giant mice. “This,” he said, tugging it over his head like a butterfly trying to stuff itself back inside the papery chrysalis.

“I don’t think—-” I started to say, but it was already done. He was back in his surgical scrubs, his espadrilles, the T--shirt straining to hold itself together across those wide, bony shoulders where so recently I had slept. He took my hairbrush from the dresser, my toothbrush from the sink.

“You’re using my toothbrush?”

He stopped his brushing. “This is not intimacy,” he said, holding the toothbrush up, the toothpaste foam sliding down his hand. And he was right, of course. He was even right about the Disney shirt, which was cute on me but was on him both scandalous and spectacular.

We came down the hall behind a Black girl wearing shorts and a Boy Scout shirt. I remembered her from the table read, her face but not her name. Or not even her face—-I remembered her legs. Never had one person been in possession of such preposterous legs. She was an average height—-by which I mean taller than me and shorter than Duke—-but all that height was in her legs.

Nell raises her hand.

“What?”

“You’re objectifying her.”

“Pallace? What am I doing wrong now?”

Maisie agrees. “She’s a person. She isn’t a great pair of legs.”

“If you’d give me another minute I plan to establish that.”

“But you can’t just lead with a body part.”

“Have you ever met dancers? Have you ever heard them talk about their legs? About other people’s legs?”

Nell thinks about this for a minute. “She may have a point.”

“Get back to the story,” Emily says.

Pallace dropped down the stairs three at a time, and when she got to the bottom, turned around. “Are we late?” she asked Duke.

“Right on time,” he said.

Then she saw me, one stair behind him. “Emily!” she cried.

“Pallace,” Duke said, holding his hand out to her by way of introduction.

She looked at us standing there together. “Seriously?” she said to Duke. “She must have been here for what, twenty minutes? Did you go to the airport and stake out the plane?”

“I didn’t like my room,” he said, his voice oddly prim.

“That explains why he didn’t try to sleep with me,” Pallace said. “The dancers are in the attic. The view is great but it gets really hot up there.”

“Walk, please,” Duke said, lighting the morning’s first cigarette.

I was trying to keep up. My room? “You’re a dancer?” Of course she was a dancer.

Pallace extended her left leg at a ninety--degree angle from her body and lifted up on the ball of her right foot, her little red tennis shoe straining in the point.

“Showboat,” Duke said.

“Not Showboat, you fool, Cabaret. But I’m studying acting, too. Right now I’m studying your acting.”

“Pallace is your understudy,” Duke said.

I hadn’t thought about that. Of course there would have been an understudy in place already. “So why aren’t you playing Emily?”

“Because then I’d be in Cabaret four shows a week and Our Town three shows a week and at the end of the summer I’d be dead. Anyway, Tom Lake’s idea of racially progressive casting is to let me be the understudy, not the lead. It’s a big step for them.”

“Better not get sick,” Duke said to me.

“That last Emily—-” Pallace began.

“Piece--of--work Emily,” Duke offered.

Pallace nodded. “That piece of work dropped out soon enough for the company to find a nice new white Emily.” She held an open hand in my direction.

“New and improved.” Duke put his arm around my shoulder.

“Very improved.” Pallace tossed me a smile. “And anyway, can you imagine it? A stage full of Caucasians with me standing right in the middle looking all lonely?”

Duke lowered his eyebrows, lowered his voice. “Whose town is this, anyway?”

“Not our town,” Pallace answered brightly.

“I don’t think—-” I started to say. What was I going to say?

“If you like things just a little weirder, I’m also your understudy on Fool for Love. Oh! and I’m the understudy for your mother, which is stupid. Your mother should have gone to a swing.”

“My mother?” My mother in New Hampshire?

Duke took back his arm. “I didn’t know that! That means if Mrs. Webb gets sick you’ll be my wife.” The kiss he gave her then had more intention than the kiss he’d given to the woman who was presently playing my mother. “Someday we’ll have to tell Emily she’s adopted.”

“What happens if Mrs. Webb and I are both sick on the same night?” Mrs. Webb, my mother. I couldn’t remember her name.

“Then whichever one of you is less sick will pull your shit together and go on anyway,” Pallace explained. “Dancers always go on. If you ever see a notice that a dancer’s out, you can bet money that she OD’d on whatever painkillers they gave her to keep dancing.”

“The show really must go on,” Duke said.

I stopped on the path. We were almost to the theater, actors arriving from every direction, understudies and swings, all of them with coffee in hand. I would have given a lot for a coffee.

“Do you two know each other?”

Duke and Pallace looked at each other. “Do we?” she asked him.

“No more than we know anyone else.”

“But not less than we know anyone else,” Pallace added.

“The way you talk.” I turned from one to the other. They were both beautiful, unusual, overly animated, the way actors and dancers are. This was something else though. “It’s like you’ve come out of the same improv group.”

Pallace laughed, her teeth as perfect as Duke’s were stricken. “Do you think? Maybe that’s because we came out of the same improv group.”

“The great state of Michigan,” Duke said.

Duke and Pallace had known each other a week but they were both from Michigan.

The small New Hampshire town where I’d grown up was as white as Grover’s Corners. In my class at school we only had Aly, who came in the ninth grade. We treated her the way we might have treated an alpaca, which is to say with fascination and solicitude but no actual friendship, so while I could give a comprehensive description of her hair, clothes, and patterns of speech (she said pop instead of soda) I had no idea why her family had moved there or where they had come from or why they had left abruptly in the middle of our junior year, though that last one probably wasn’t such a mystery. The University of New Hampshire was only slightly better than our high school, and Hollywood was only slightly worse. The Black makeup artist at my first screen test turned out to be an anomaly. Hollywood had nothing on New Hampshire when it came to the intermingling of the races.

So I followed the dancer in the snappy Boy Scout shirt towards the building, running ahead to open the door because the way she and Duke were talking they would have walked straight into it. I was going to have a boyfriend who crackled like a downed power line and a girlfriend who was Black. I was even more of an adult than I could have imagined.

It turned out the summer stock in the middle--of--nowhere, Michigan, beat both the University of New Hampshire and a Hollywood backlot by a mile when it came to diversity. A low bar but still, Tom Lake won. As all of us hustled off to our various rehearsals, we nearly resembled an American city. Most of the actors came from Chicago and Detroit, a few had come from as far away as D.C. and Pittsburgh. The cattle--call auditions for summer stock—-the auditions I had been spared—-drew from conservatories and regional theater companies. Theater people were always looking for work, and while they might not have chosen to build a life in Tom Lake, they were happy to get out of the city for the summer. Gene, the assistant director of Our Town, was Black. Gene checked to see if we had our scripts. Did anybody need a script? Auden, one of the other understudies, was Black as well. He was also a dancer, and he and Pallace started dancing at the far corner of the stage, executing an intricate, old--fashioned swing without benefit of music. They looked only at each other and didn’t seem to care that we were watching. Whether they were rehearsing for something that wasn’t Cabaret (which I was pretty sure didn’t include swing dancing) or killing time because Uncle Wallace had yet to arrive, I couldn’t say.

I did know that diving into Our Town without a Stage Manager on the first day of rehearsal would be a trick, and after waiting for twenty minutes (in which we all finally just sat on the floor and watched Pallace and her friend dance, hypnotized by the regular squeak of their tennis shoes), Nelson dispatched Gene the A.D. to find out what the hell was going on.

“He might have misread the schedule,” Duke offered, even though the top of the schedule said REHEARSALS BEGIN PROMPTLY AT 9:00 A.M. in a typeface large enough to be scolding.

The collective desire of every person in that theater was for the play to succeed. Emily had skipped out. Emily had been replaced. New day, let’s get to work. The A.D. returned, too quickly I thought, and the director met him in the aisle for a brief consult. The director, Nelson, already looked tired.

“Okay, people,” he said, clapping twice even though he had our full attention. Pallace and her partner let go of one another’s hands. “We’re going to get started. Albert will be here momentarily. Let’s go ahead with the understudy. I want a full day. Lee?”

A man in a light--blue golf shirt raised a tentative hand.

“Do you need a script?” Gene asked.

We were all looking at him. “I—-” he said, then stopped and held up his script.

“That’s good,” Nelson said.

“I don’t know the part yet,” Lee said.

“It’s early. You’ll be fine. Hopefully you’re just going to read for a few minutes. Nothing gets an actor out of bed like the knowledge that the understudy is reading his part.”

Everyone laughed politely except the man in the golf shirt. We were meant to sit in the row of chairs on either side of the stage whenever we weren’t in the scene. We went to sit in them now, leaving Lee out there alone. When the moment came for one of us to talk at the kitchen table or the drugstore soda fountain or in the cemetery at the end, we were to carry our chairs across the empty stage and put them in places marked with gaffer tape on the floor, but for now everyone was sitting on either side, waiting. When we had taken our places, Nelson told the understudy to begin.

Lee was in his sixties, his hair gray, his glasses heavy. He had the sunburnt look of a man who took his golf shirts seriously. When the play opens, the Stage Manager is alone. “This is a play called Our Town,” he says. “It was written by Thornton Wilder.” He then goes on to name the director, the producer, the actors in major roles, but Lee read the script exactly as it was written. “Directed by A,” he said, and then later, “In it you will see Miss C?.?.?.”

I’d seen a lot of people read the Stage Manager, but I had never seen anything that approached this. I wanted to go back to New Hampshire and tell those men with their handkerchiefs and pipes what a good job they’d done. Surely Spalding Gray was speaking these same words in a rehearsal now. I willed myself to hear his voice, even though I’d never heard his voice before. Here in Michigan, the words were clearly painful for Lee to say, and they stuck a needle into the confidence of every person in the room. Maybe I wasn’t the adult who’d won the lead at an important summer stock in Michigan; maybe I was a talentless kid who’d been hustled out of the room because I was taking up too much of the air. “Send her to Michigan!” is what they’d scribbled on their notepads during my audition. “She won’t know the difference.”

Duke, in the chair next to mine, ran one finger lightly up my thigh while looking straight ahead, slipping past the hem of my daisy dress like a spider on a mission.

Things were just about to get better in Los Angeles, that’s what Ripley had been trying to tell me. I was supposed to stay true the course, be patient. I had failed.

This was what a bad reading of the Stage Manager could do to the room.

So when Uncle Wallace miraculously appeared at the very end of the first act, I once again loved him the way I had loved him as a child: In the face of tragedy our uncle has come to save us. What did I care that he looked like an unmade bed, or that he was walking the line between hungover and still actively drunk? He was there to lead us into Act Two, and I would no longer have to listen to Lee in his golf shirt telling me that the sun had come up over a thousand times.

“Alarm clock malfunction,” Uncle Wallace announced, applauding generously for the man who had made him look like a Barrymore. “But I’m here now. We can begin.”

“Aren’t you being awfully hard on Lee?” Emily asks. “It was only the first day. He wasn’t planning to go on.”

Nell agrees. “I wouldn’t have wanted to do it, and anyway, they wouldn’t have hired an understudy who was that bad. We know Nelson’s too smart for that.”

It is already hot. I am already tired of cherries. “Funny you should say that, because the understudies were great as a rule. The company was very rigorous about the understudies. Except for Lee. Lee was horrible.”

“Why would they hire someone horrible to cover the lead?” Nell asks.

“Because Lee owned a trucking company. His family had a big house right on the lake. They hosted fundraisers—-real money, major donors. Lee loved the theater, god bless him for that. He didn’t want to be an actor, he just wanted to hang out with us. Maybe it was strange. He used to bring popsicles and prosecco to rehearsals sometimes. Everybody loved him then.”

“So they sold him an understudy part?” Maisie asks.

“That would be a crass way to put it, but yes. They sold him the part.”

“Nelson?”

“No, no,” I said. “He wasn’t given any choice in the matter. Of this I am certain.”

“But why did he have to be the Stage Manager?” Nell says. Nell, who takes all injustice to heart. “The Stage Manager is too important.”

Joe and I have taught our daughters how to grade a plum and pick a stone from a goat’s hoof and make a piecrust, but I fear we have taught them nothing of the world. “Because you don’t go around at a cocktail party telling people you’re the understudy for Constable Warren.”

“Wasn’t he at least smart enough to be afraid Uncle Wallace might get sick?” Maisie asks.

“Lee was talentless but he wasn’t stupid. Uncle Wallace had been at Tom Lake for fourteen consecutive summers and had never missed a performance. That man was like a dancer. He always went on.”

“He went on drunk?” Emily asks.

Big old blustery Albert Long, red--faced and red--haired. My heart seized with unexpected affection at his memory. “Drunkish. He found a way to make it work.”

“And what about the George?” Nell asks.

“The George? What about him?”

“Was he bad?”

“Forgettable,” I say.

“As bad as Lee?” Maisie asks.

“Oh, no, nothing like that. I’m sure he was fine. I only mean that I’ve forgotten him.”

“Which means what? You can’t remember his performance?” Nell is concerned that this is further proof of my diminishment. To my children I am unimaginably old.

“I mean the kid who played George is gone,” I say, but they don’t understand what I’m talking about. Duke is as close as the cherries on the tree, as is Uncle Wallace, for reasons that are no doubt connected to how things ended. Lee I remember less as a person and more as a story, and George I do not remember at all. There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart--stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well, until one morning you’re picking cherries with your three grown daughters and your husband goes by on the Gator and you are positive that this is all you’ve ever wanted in the world.