Pruning week began auspiciously, with bright sunshine, cool temperatures, and little wind. I arrived well before our 8:00 a.m. start time, but five men were already at work sharpening tools and gulping last cups of coffee when I drove up. They’re waiting for me. I tried to appear calm while my heart pounded, and I introduced myself before setting out the morning’s plan and directing each helper to a designated row.
Instructions given, I strode to my own line of trees and, pulling my pruner from my tool belt, stood before the first one. After eyeing it carefully, I made a first sure cut, with five pair of eyes watching.
At ten thirty I called a break, pulling out the monster thermoses of fresh coffee and homemade Danishes Melissa had left for us. Just as we were ready to resume our work, Julia’s Toyota pickup turned off M-22 and pulled around the drive to the orchard. She hopped out, overalls and work boots signaling readiness to work.
I couldn’t help but smile. “Hey there. How are you?”
“Great.”
I hadn’t seen her eyes look this clear and relaxed since I’d met her. “Good. Are you ready to prune some trees?”
“Yes, I am. Where do I start?”
“I’ve got four more trees in this row. Why don’t you come and work with me? I’d be glad to have another set of hands.” Julia smiled and I handed her my backup hand pruners. “If you need a saw, I’ve got one here,” I said, lifting the tree saw from my belt.
We had worked for almost an hour, with my occasionally advising Julia on where to prune and admiring the skill she already possessed. With the lunch break approaching and my arms starting to ache, I tucked my pruners away and turned to her. “There’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”
Julia turned toward me and looped her arm over a branch of the tree she’d been working on next to me, comfortably resting her back against the trunk.
I smiled at her and said, “How are your parents doing? I’ve been thinking about your mom a lot, but I haven’t been sure how to approach her.”
Julia’s eyebrows rose, and the ghost of a sardonic smile passed over her features. I realized immediately what she must be thinking: I hadn’t had any hesitation approaching her mother two months ago.
I shook my head, smiling again. “I mean now, and moving forward.”
Julia looked up into the bare branches of the tree and then off toward the hill that shielded the orchard from the brutal winds off Lake Michigan. She answered in a steady voice. “We all had a good week together last month. My mom’s not a big talker, but she and I had some important conversations. We’re going to be okay.”
“I’m really glad to hear that,” I said, and I meant it. “Steven—and I—will want to get to know your family. Keep us posted about when you’re ready, and when you think they’re ready, for that. There’s no rush. We’ll work with whatever you think is best. Meanwhile, let’s finish these babies.”
“Awesome,” she said.
I shook my head, smiling, and turned toward my future.
Chapter 26
The idea of a family vacation in Arizona had pleased all my children—we all needed a seasonal break from the Midwest—so the weekend had come together easily.
Carrie and Andrew arrived in Scottsdale several hours before the rest of us and were already in bathing suits by the pool, drinks in hand, when we got to the hotel. Carrie’s radiant face revealed her pregnancy as clearly as the baby bump that graced her tiny frame. Alex and Seth had met us in Phoenix, and we’d driven together to this exclusive resort for the long weekend.
I hoped it wouldn’t be too long. Dry heat and fierce sun stunned my winter sensibilities. Though wearing only a sundress and sandals, I felt like I still needed to shed a woolly layer of northern Michigan. I sank into the nearest deck chair by the pool to let my body catch up with itself. The infusion of vitamin D and warmth created a current under my skin, as if fortifying me for what lay ahead. Only a gentle breeze off a great lake would have improved the sensation.
I’d arranged for steak and a good red wine in a private room for our first dinner. The meal began with the requisite teasing exchange of news among my three sons. After the banter moved to politics, I cleared my throat and tapped my knife against my water goblet. Five pairs of surprised eyes turned toward me.
“Dad and I are so grateful to be together with all of you, and we want to thank you for making the effort to get here, especially on short notice.”
“Hey, pay for a fat bucks resort weekend, and I’m here,” Alex said.
The others chuckled.
“I am looking forward to just relaxing and enjoying everybody,” I said. “The next time we do this, there may be baby cousins with us.”
Carrie blushed and smiled, and Alex rolled his eyes and shook his head, but he didn’t look altogether displeased.
“You all know that our family has been at the center of Dad’s and my life for the last thirty years, and you also know we had to work harder than most to create it.” Andrew went back to eating his steak and Alex tapped his fork on the tablecloth. Seth leaned back in his chair, his head cocked to one side. Steven stared straight ahead, looking for all the world like a deer in the headlights. I waited for Alex to reprise his oft-repeated taunt—that he never had to imagine his parents having sex, since he and Andrew were adopted and Seth was conceived in a test tube. He spared me this time, and I took a deep breath.
“Two new members of the family are on their way, but recently, Dad and I got some news that’s a little shocking, and we wanted to tell you all together.”
“You’re pregnant too.” Andrew’s deadpan one-liners always made me laugh, and my nervous burst joined the others.
“It’s even more mythic than that. As part of our effort to create a family, we tried an arrangement with a woman to be a surrogate parent.” I suddenly couldn’t bring myself to say “mother.” Do they all know what a surrogate is? No one looked confused yet, so I forged ahead. “We tried it once, and the surrogate told us it didn’t work. We never tried it again.” I paced my delivery, though every particle of me wanted to finish disgorging this information quickly. “It turns out that the woman did get pregnant, and gave birth to a baby girl, but she couldn’t go through with the arrangement to release the child to us.”
Now they were all staring at me. Steven’s face looked as shocked as the others around the table, as if hearing again what he already knew deepened its impact. Seth sat bolt upright, the color leaving his face. Alex looked stony and Andrew breathed out, “What the fuck?”
By now my voice shook. “Right. Well, it turns out that the child she had never knew about any of this until about six months ago, which is when she started looking for her biological father. She found me, and asked for my help because she wasn’t sure, but she thought it could be Dad.” All the eyes in front of me widened, and Carrie’s hand flew to her mouth. “It turns out Dad is her biological father.”
“Holy shit, it’s that Julia girl.” Alex rose from his seat and leaned across the table, his hands planted on either side of his plate.
Unable to speak, I stared straight at Alex and nodded as the table erupted with questions. How could Alex know? But then again, Alex always seemed able to divine crucial information out of thin air with lightning speed. For another spacey moment, I let the questions fly like meteors around me.
“You mean she didn’t TELL you?”
“Who is this woman? When did this happen?”
“Could she do that? Didn’t you have a contract?”
“How did you figure it out?”
“She can’t just waltz in here—”
I turned to Steven and he snapped out of his frozen state. As if on cue, our waiter appeared and I ordered another bottle of wine. I realized I’d stood up and had backed myself up against the wall behind me. I returned to the table and sat down.
For the next forty minutes, Steven and I relayed the story just as it had unfolded, trying to answer as many questions as we could. My steak went untouch
ed.
That Fiona could have flat-out lied stupefied Carrie. “I mean, I get that once she was pregnant, she wouldn’t want to give up her baby, but that’s what she signed up for, right? I mean, I could never make that arrangement in the first place.”
“Exactly,” I said. “That’s why I couldn’t try surrogacy again.”
“Why?” Alex broke in. “It’s not all that different from adoption, is it? You didn’t have a problem adopting two kids, did you?”
I sighed. “There are important differences, Alex, and at that time there were aspects of surrogacy that I had a hard time with.” I picked up my knife and fork and started to eat my dinner. With that question, Alex had come closer than any of my other children to asking about the circumstances, the stresses, and the feelings surrounding all those years of fertility treatments, adoption proceedings, and the surrogacy attempt. I’d been somewhat able to share those feelings with close friends, and with women who’d gone through similar means of forging their families. Certainly Steven and I had fought, cried, and celebrated through those complicated times, but he had a low threshold for delving into the emotional reaches of circumstances he could not change. We had been united in devoting ourselves to our family and the energy it took to raise them. So I’d mostly lived alone with the feeling part, the deeper sense of how our challenges had changed my identity as a mother and changed my worldview. It suddenly occurred to me that I’d never talked to my children about my experience of such things—but tonight wasn’t the night for that conversation.
Alex and Andrew’s raised voices brought me back to the table conversation. They had engaged Steven in a rapidly heating discussion of the legal issues surrounding this revelation. Could Steven sue? Would Julia claim an inheritance?
“Whoa,” Steven said a split second before I could step in. “We aren’t in a hostile situation here. Julia has good parents that she loves and who love her. And by the way, so do you.” The collective eye roll went right by Steven. “She didn’t ask for anything more than to understand the truth about her biological father.”
“Yet,” Alex murmured.
“She’s as shocked as the rest of us,” Steven continued. “There isn’t anyone evil here.”
“I don’t know about that,” Alex said, the force in his voice belying his indifferent posture. “If I were her, I’d be thinking my mother was a downright bitch right about now.”
I winced. “I will admit to thinking that way myself while this all developed,” I said. “But I went down and met Julia’s mother, and got a sense of who she is, and I didn’t get any evil out of it. Failure of courage leading to serious dishonesty, yes, but I don’t think she’s evil. She’s got a lot of work to do with her daughter. There’s been a serious breach of trust there. I don’t envy her those conversations.” As I said this, I realized how truly I felt it.
“Oh, so we’re the good guys?” Alex pressed, reaching for what had to be his third Coke. His bobbing knee and rapid speech signaled that he’d had enough caffeine.
“Down, boy,” I said. “We have no idea where this is all going. There’s a lot for everyone to sort out, and there’s no rush. So don’t get carried away here.”
“Yeah, Alex, she had the hots for you and now she’s our sister. That sucks.” Andrew put his arm around Carrie and grinned at his brother. Alex shook his head but a small smile played across his face. These brothers!
After another twenty minutes of questions and discussion it appeared as if they’d exhausted the topic for this first round, so Alex and Andrew turned to planning a golf outing with Steven and Seth the following day, a once-a-year fiasco involving many lost balls, unforgiving golfers in front and behind them on the course, and months-long exaggerated stories of mishaps.
Carrie caught my eye. “Knit shop?” She held out her cell phone with the local store’s mapped location.
I laughed. “Absolutely. Let’s do that tomorrow.”
Seth had been quiet for a long while.
“A penny for your thoughts,” I said.
“You always said one reason you pursued in-vitro was that Dad wanted to continue the Stone genetic heritage. I guess now there are two of us.” Seth spoke quietly.
“Yep. That’s right. What do you think about that?”
“What do you think about it?” he shot back at me.
Always thoughtful, Seth was good at checking in with his mother, but this seemed to be about something else. He still looked pale, and his deep-set brown eyes, so much like Steven’s, were pools of worry. Julia is Seth’s genetic half sister. I hadn’t really thought much about this fact. We rarely made a point of genetic ties in our family. What is he asking me?
“I think she got half of the good stuff you have,” I said lightly, trying to joke my way to what troubled him. “The rest we’re going to have to transmit through osmosis. I’ve actually come to like her. She may do some cider work with me. Mostly, I think we just need to get to know her, and let her get to know us. One step at a time here.”
Seth twirled the stem of his wine glass. He wasn’t looking at me. I thought to move to what I hoped was safer ground. “How’s Sophie doing, by the way?”
“She’s good,” he said. “She’s studying really hard for her boards. She’s lined up some great clinical rotations starting in July.” His face transformed, the color and sparkle returning. Oh my, looks like she may be a keeper. Plenty of space for her too.
“Maybe you two could arrange to come up to the lake house this summer if she can grab some vacation days,” I said. “I’d love some quiet time with her. And with you.” I reached across the table for his hand. “I know all of this is a lot to take in right now. In my better moments, I’m trying to see it as new branches on the proverbial apple tree.”
Seth smiled as the rest of the table erupted into laughter at a joke I didn’t hear. “That’s my mama.”
Epilogue
Hugging baby Lily to my chest and watching the sheriff pace back and forth, déjà vu took my breath away. This time, however, the officer was my son, not a fire marshal; the baby in my arms, my granddaughter; and the house before us, my solid functioning cider house, not the long-ago, burned out shell of our family home in Ann Arbor. The twenty-three years since our fire had served up enough additional challenge and complication for a lifetime, but the scene before me brought a flush of gratitude like a hot spring from my center to every part of my body. Good fortune, my own doggedness, and the love and support of my family, however flawed and tested, had brought me to this fulfillment of my dream.
The fruit press inside hummed away, producing the apple must from which I’d age another batch of hard cider. The impossible blue of the sky, set off by a riot of autumn color, ignited all my senses, and I nearly squealed with delight as I squeezed my sleeping granddaughter in her down bunting. I’d kept that blue baby bag since Seth was her age, along with all the sweaters I’d knit for the boys over the years. I’d get to see them all over again on new members of the family.
The machine sounds slowed to a stop and Julia stepped out of the cider house.
“Hey Andrew, when did you guys get here?” They exchanged an easy hug.
“We’ve been here about an hour,” he answered.
“Oh my god, there’s Lily!” Julia crossed the yard to stand next to me, pulling the bunting aside to see Lily’s full cheeks and turned up nose. “She’s so adorable. Her pictures don’t do her justice.” Julia gazed at the sleeping baby another moment and then said, “We’ve got another box of Roxbury russets and Kilcherman’s said we could get a box of Tydeman Oranges, and that should do for two more batches.”
“Great.” I said.
“So when will this cider be ready?” Andrew asked. “You know I’m volunteering to be a taster.”
“Three or four months,” Julia and I answered at the same time. We laughed.
“We might have something interesting by Thanksgiving from the first batch, but for sure by New Year’s,” I said. “The last batch .
. .” I searched for the right word.
“Sucked comes to mind,” Julia filled in. “Is Carrie in the house?”
“Yeah, she’s making lunch,” Andrew said.
Julia headed toward the back door.
“So your first batch bombed?” Andrew asked.
“Actually, the first batch was okay, and we’re about to put it in bottles, but the next one not so much. I’m still trying to figure out if we had bad juice or didn’t wait long enough for it to ferment. We’re still working on our recipes.”
Telling Steven about the failure of our second test batch had been punishing, but I’d talked through the possible reasons and my plans for a fix. Eventually, he’d actually assured me that any new business would be a series of fits and starts. I still worried about the finances, especially since I’d started paying Julia a salary, but I’d secured my first contract from a local bar based on a tasting of our first batch.
“So is Julia going to be in business with you?” Andrew asked.
“She’s learning about it, and I’ve hired her to help me this fall. She’s applying to graduate programs, so she’ll be around this fall and maybe even in winter, but I don’t know after that.”
Andrew turned toward the woods and eyed the path out to the point, his usual preliminary destination when he visited.
“Go ahead,” I said. “I’ve got her.” Lily awoke and her eyes scanned the blue expanse, punctuated with towering pine trees, spread out above her. Such a face. Andrew’s face. I grinned down at Lily, knowing that Andrew saw himself in her; for the first time in his life, he had a family member who looked like him. What could she see at three months? I’d forgotten all the detailed milestones, but Carrie would know. Lily could see her Nani and Papi—that I knew for sure. For the last month when we’d seen her, Steven and I had both been rewarded with the full-face, irresistible baby grins I had always believed contributed to the continuation of the species.
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