Hard Cider

by Barbara Stark-Nemon

  Praise for Hard Cider

  “In this moving, compelling novel, a character who makes cider from a variety of different apples says, ‘I can’t help but feel that there’s some magic in the mixing.’ Barbara Stark-Nemon reminds us this is true for families, too. Through its exploration of the many forms family can take and the possibility of new beginnings in midlife, Hard Cider is easy to love.”

  —Gayle Brandeis, poet, essayist, and award-winning author of The Art of Misdiagnosis and The Book of Dead Birds

  “In this absorbing and thoughtful novel, the alchemy of turning apples into hard cider becomes a potent metaphor for the way in which time blends and distills the characters into a family. With grace and compassion, Stark-Nemon examines the forging of relationships under the pressure of shocking revelations. A deep valuing of connection to land, work, and loved ones emerges from this beautifully written story.”

  —Jessica Levine, author of The Geometry of Love and Nothing Forgotten

  “Hard Cider is a coming-of-age story for women of a ‘certain age’ finding their own paths after the kids are raised, unlocking their own dreams. Barbara Stark-Nemon woos her readers to fall in love, but not with a romantic notion of idealized marriage and family and not with the blush of new infatuation. Instead, we are immersed in the sensual details of her glorious Michigan landscape, where we are defenseless against falling in love with the natural world she so vividly paints. When I closed the last page, all I wanted to do was book a flight to Michigan in the autumn.”

  —Betsy Graziani Fasbinder, author of Fire and Water and Filling Her Shoes: A Memoir of an Inherited Family

  “I just flew through Barbara Stark Nemon’s new novel Hard Cider. Well written and easy to read, with loving descriptions of northern Michigan, this is a story of Abbie Rose Stone, who strikes out on her own to create a cider business. In the process, she meets an intriguing young woman with secrets to uncover, secrets that could blow Abbie’s cherished family apart—or enrich it. Abbie is an expert by experience as the true center of her family, navigating the subtle challenges of her loved ones. This character gives credit to women who hold their families together by sheer goodwill and small and large acts of love. A book that celebrates family.”

  —Caitlin Hicks, author of Readers’ Favorite award winner and iBooks Best New Fiction pick A Theory of Expanded Love

  “Hard Cider is magical in its rootedness even as it explores the way we seek home and community and the lives of our dreams.”

  —Andi Cumbo-Floyd, author of The Slaves Have Names: Ancestors of my Home, Steele Secrets, and Love Letters to Writers: Encouragement, Accountability, and Truth-Telling

  “Hard Cider is the intriguing story of a strong woman struggling with the psychological fallout of infertility decades after achieving motherhood. Just as she is opening a new chapter in her life by beginning a business of her own, a seemingly harmless encounter leads to a revelation that threatens her hard-won confidence and the cohesion of her family. The reader follows with interest this vividly told story of a woman fighting to regain her bearings, master a major personal challenge, and protect her already-challenged family.”

  —Monica Starkman, MD, Psychiatrist, University of Michigan Medical School, author of The End of Miracles, and columnist for Psychology Today

  “In Hard Cider, I enjoyed how we are dropped immediately into a story—and a family—that we are eager to know. The story guides us through the amazing landscape of Michigan, the details of making cider, and Abbie’s family and other characters who are well drawn and full of surprises. I loved getting to know this family, and found it easy to empathize with the struggles and challenges that arise with the sons. We see how history is always coming to tap us on the shoulder, and we have to find ways to cope with it. As the deeper emotional story started unraveling, I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough.”

  —Linda Joy Myers, president of the National Association of Memoir Writers and author of Songs of the Plains and The Power of Memoir: How to Write Your Healing Story

  “A lyrically told, powerful story of a middle-aged woman who has the courage to pursue a long-held dream on her own terms while still grappling with the emotional push-pull of mothering adult children whose lives and dreams are not hers to control.”

  —Jenni Ogden, author of Sarton, Readers’ Favorite, and IPPY award winner A Drop in the Ocean

  “Hard Cider is a fabulous novel about starting a business, taking on challenges, and building a family. The real treat was spending time with protagonist Abbie Rose. Multi-talented and capable, she’s the type of woman one admires from afar. Forced to reckon with potentially shattering news, she is human to the core. I so enjoyed being on this ride with her, watching her gain acceptance and eventually find grace. Not just a great story, it’s a beautiful example of how to live.”

  —Jeanne McWilliams Blasberg, author of Eden

  “Hard Cider is a beautifully written novel that will make Stark-Nemon your next one-click author!”

  —Nicole Waggoner, author of Center Ring and The Act

  Copyright © 2018 by Barbara Stark-Nemon

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

  Published September 18, 2018

  Printed in the United States of America

  Print ISBN: 978-1-63152-475-2

  E-ISBN: 978-1-63152-476-9

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018940392

  For information, address:

  She Writes Press

  1563 Solano Ave #546

  Berkeley, CA 94707

  Interior design by Tabitha Lahr

  She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  To Everywoman-maker and keeper of families, especially when it isn’t easy.

  “I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself.”

  —May Sarton

  Prologue

  “There would have been no rescue here!” The Ann Arbor fire marshal held my arm as fiercely as my gaze, neither of us paying attention to the breast milk leaking through my shirt. I tore my eyes away from his and tried again to look at the house, still reeking of wet char, a crazy perimeter of crime tape separating the ugly remains of our home from the brilliant June morning.

  I stepped back and out of the chief’s grasp as he turned to my husband and began again his obsessive relating of this fire story. It had raged so fast and ferociously during the night that the house was lost before the first pumper truck arrived. An accelerant placed under the car, my car in the garage, had exploded into the second story, spawning an inferno that raced through all the bedrooms until their floors collapsed into the rooms below.

  An accelerant? Placed under my car? Who placed it? This was arson? I looked up. What remained was a shell with blackened eyes where once the windows had stood.

  Our next-door neighbor had called in our fire, but another fire close by had caused a mix-up.

  “We’ve responded to that fire, ma’am, we have a truck on the scene,” the dispatcher had said.

  “There’s no truck here!” my neighbor had yelled.

  More addresses, more time . . . and then the prob
lem with the hook-up at the hydrant . . . I was only half-listening, and it was my husband, Steven, who the fire marshal was clutching.

  “There would have been no rescue here! It was so fast!”

  That I heard again. Without a word or a look, Steven placed baby Seth in my arms. Automatically I began to sway and twist from side to side, a little bounce at each knee like an insurance policy against the baby’s waking. He’d slept all the way from the remote cottage in Canada where we’d been staying with friends when the Provincial Police had knocked at the door. We’d dropped our older children, Alex and Andrew, at my parents’ an hour earlier.

  Seth’s warm body lay nestled over my swollen breast. I’d need to nurse him soon. I should go inside and . . . The wave of nausea hit me like the hot air that wouldn’t come until later in the day. There was no inside, only the burned house behind the smoky façade.

  I began to make eye contact with neighbors and strangers on the street behind me; horror was writ large on their faces. Their looks separated us, the people whose house had been torched, whose worldly goods had vanished, along with our peace of mind, from them—the people to whom this had not happened.

  I looked back to Steven, staring at the house. He wore old basketball shorts and a ragged T-shirt, his long arms hanging at his sides, sandals planted on the sidewalk. His oversized, horn-rimmed glasses tilted slightly more than his head did. I saw the lawyer in him rapidly assessing the damage, the crime.

  I didn’t want to go into “do” mode. Steven had already gotten us here, starting six hours ago. Another hit of nausea. In twenty-four hours, he would go to work. He had a big hearing.

  He wouldn’t try to get a continuance, or have a junior partner substitute. He would rely on me to move forward.

  He doesn’t have clothes. We need a place to sleep . . . STOP! One thing at a time.

  Seth pulled his knees up reflexively, a grunt of discomfort muffled by the breast his baby face was pressed into. I loosened my hold slightly and dipped my nose across the top of his fuzzy head, inhaling the baby sweetness as I adjusted his tiny body onto the shelf of my front. His once-more-contented head rested quietly under my chin.

  Seth was nine weeks old. Thirty-six hours of labor, followed by a C-section, was still too close to have recovered any sense of my body apart from his. After six years of agonizing infertility treatments, in vitro fertilizations, and adoption proceedings, we finally had our family, and now we were supposed to get to live our dream life. Arson?

  “ . . . We will continue to consider this a crime scene until we have completed our investigation, at which time we will determine which areas of the structure are safe to enter for recovery purposes.” The fire marshal watched me as he spoke and I guessed he knew I hadn’t heard the first half of whatever he’d been saying. The chief pressed a business card into my hand and I turned away, looking behind me as though I knew what I needed or wanted to see. I did not.

  The numbers of people had at least tripled. Gawkers—those who averted their eyes and those who stared, fascinated—were drawn like magnets to the awful spectacle. Again, I recognized that look in their faces—dread and fear. I’d seen it on so many faces along the bumpy road of my life. Would I ever be free from its sucker punch? Would I ever get to simply live my dreams?

  “Abbie Rose!” A friend’s slender arm went around the bulk of Seth and me. I hugged her but did not cry. I had work to do.

  Chapter 1

  Twenty years later.

  Alex is coming. Let there be sun or snow. January thaw is more often a cruel joke than a welcome reprieve from winter freeze in this microclimate at the tip of Michigan’s Leelanau Peninsula.

  Abbie, Abbie Rose, I thought. This is what you asked for. And it was. I stared out into the light, steady rain, nearly invisible for the gray mist that rose from soaked ice on the long driveway. The haze softened the shoreline, dulled the green waters of the bay, and fed the lichen on the split-rail fence surrounding the overgrown orchard.

  It wasn’t as though Alex didn’t know about January in northern Michigan. We’d been vacationing in this spot for more than twenty years. Shortly after our house fire, we brought our three boys to a cottage on this stretch of Lake Michigan, perched on a dune not half a mile from here. It overlooked the expanse of the lake and a string of islands that beckoned a sailor toward the open water and the distant reach of Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula on the other side.

  That cottage was a beloved escape from the high pressure of upscale Ann Arbor. It eased each of us, in different ways, through the stressful years of recovering our lives and rebuilding our Ann Arbor home after the fire, then working around the demands of Steven’s big legal career, and my smaller one teaching, as the boys grew up.

  The two-hundred-year-old farmhouse in which I now stood was another story. When I retired at fifty-three, a year earlier, I’d purchased the tract of land with a farmhouse, a log cabin, and five lake lots. Situated north of the town of North-port, surrounded on three sides by lake, the parcel was ideal for my dream of producing high-quality hard apple cider.

  I gazed out the kitchen window at what would become the cider shed, leaden in the mist. Settled into the side of a hill where the driveway swept around the back of the house, the old brown building’s reinvention was visibly underway with a new roof, repaired and finished with scalloped shingles. I’d saved the surrounding trees and therefore given up on photovoltaic roof tiles, so solar energy wouldn’t power the works. The grey day made that bet seem like a good one. A familiar tug of anxiety at the money I’d spent on this project momentarily took hold of my gut, but resolution reasserted itself with the will I’d learned to summon like a trusted dog. I had a plan. My dream was worthwhile.

  I turned back to the kitchen, preparation of Alex’s favorite dishes in various states all over the large space. Piles of chopped vegetables, waiting to become minestrone soup, covered the island countertop with its dated blue Corian. The steam and earthy smell of simmering kidney beans already filled the open room. Beef brisket lay roasting in beer and ketchup in the oven, and the pastry for lemon meringue pie sat rolled between sheets of waxed paper in the refrigerator.

  Suddenly, the tattered cover of my grandmother’s Settlement Cookbook floated into my mind’s eye. The way to a man’s heart . . . printed under the title. Was I trying to charm Alex with my life in northern Michigan by making his favorite food? He was my son, after all. It was okay to make a special meal for him, even if talking about my business would be on the agenda.

  My stomach fluttered with a mixture of anticipation and nerves at his visit. Raising him was the toughest challenge in my life of many challenges. Brilliant but moody and strong willed, he tested boundaries early and often, teaching Steven and me the need to cancel our expectations and love the child we had, not the one we thought we wanted.

  His fascination and skill with technology at the dawn of its use in schools, combined with his intense dislike of a teacher, had led to his removal from one school for “threatening” the teacher online. His refusal to allow a bully to act unimpeded in a middle school lunchroom had resulted in his sending the bully flying across the room, and both boys were suspended. When we were no longer able to safely manage his behavior at home, we’d survived by sending him to boarding school. Instead of going straight to college after high school, he’d enlisted in the army, where he’d distinguished himself in the honor guard but then felt compelled to challenge a superior on behalf of a sexual harassment victim. Finally, after training to become a physician’s assistant, he’d tried to rescue a young single mother with children in foster care, getting himself into trouble in the process. He’d moved to Iowa for a job so he could get on with the life he envisioned: working as a PA, going fishing, and drinking a beer or two on the back porch while his dog ran amok on the back forty.

  Alex’s troubles had forced him to reckon with demons reaching back to his stormy adolescence and then move forward with his life. It had been hard on him. It had nearly kil
led me, as grown children’s problems do their parents. But we had stuck with Alex, and he had stuck with us, and he seemed to have emerged into adulthood with his talent, intelligence, and life skills intact. Still . . .

  The phone startled me out of my reverie with a jolt.

  “Hey Mom, what’s up?” Alex’s voice was calm but, as always, tinged with challenge,

  “Hi, honey. Where are you?”

  “Just passing through Chicago. I’ll be on 94 in under an hour. God I love the speed limits in Michigan. I should see you by dinner. What’s it like up there?”

  No use pretending with Alex. “Well, the British would call this ‘filthy’ weather, but I’m cooking you one hell of a good dinner.”

  “No snow?! It’s January in northern Michigan! What the fu . . . Okay. Well, whatever. Is Dad up there?”

  Resist, Abbie Rose, resist. The “yeah, right” stayed where it belonged. Steven would not be part of this visit with Alex, or any discussion about my business. Though he still worked as an attorney, he’d recently given up many of his partnership administrative duties, with an eye toward retirement. He didn’t know exactly what retirement would mean for him, but he’d made it clear he wouldn’t be throwing his energy into a hard cider business in northern Michigan. If and when the time came, he would help with any legal documents I needed, as he had for dozens of friends and family members before me, but he was leaving it to me to pursue this dream on my own. If I decided to proceed, I’d be in the deep without him, to sink or to swim.

  “No, sweetie, he’s hanging out downstate this weekend, catching up on paperwork. He may make it up by midweek.” I waited a scant conversational beat for a sign of Alex’s response to this information, but no clues were forthcoming. “I hope you have some energy left for tomorrow, after all that driving,” I continued. “We have an appointment to see Charles Aiken.”

  “And I’m supposed to know who that is?” There it is. He is irritated. Does he want to see Steven, or has he forgotten about tomorrow? I looked longingly at the scotch bottle at the end of the counter.