by Erica Boyce
“I would love to.” She lays one freckled hand on her chest, below her collarbone. “Really, I would love that.”
I turn back to the shelves. “Speaking of, do you remember what it is that’s best for tomatoes?” I say it calmly, as if I would be able to think of it on my own if I just stood there and concentrated long enough.
“Mulch,” she says. “Definitely mulch.” Without so much as a pause, she adds, “By the way, I haven’t seen Charlie up here in a while.”
There’s a question in her voice that I’d rather not answer. I grip the handle of my cart until my knuckles bleach. Charlie’s name has echoed through my thoughts every day since he blasted out our front door. “Yes, he’s doing great out west. He’s so busy with his new practice that he doesn’t have much time to come out to visit.” I chuckle weakly.
Allison hums knowingly, sympathy moist in her eyes. Her two daughters, over at UNH and UVM on scholarships, come home to visit every weekend, with their hair ironed straight and their nails painted pink. “Well, good for him, working so hard. I’d better get back to Ben before he gets worried.” She laughs, high and clear, and trundles over to the checkout counter.
Alone again with the gardening supplies, I stare at the bright cans of pesticides and weed killers until their greens and yellows blur together and all I can see is Charlie’s face, lean and handsome and rough.
* * *
He left ten years ago, when he sat us down at the kitchen table just after Christmas and told us he wanted to be a doctor—had in fact already sent in applications to NYU and Columbia. For half a moment, I felt a hiccup of relief. The last we’d heard, Charlie was majoring in agronomy and planning on moving back to Munsen after graduation. Sam had been setting aside bigger and bigger swaths of our fields for him, brainstorming new crops Charlie could grow there every night over dinner.
It turned out, though, that that had never been Charlie’s plan. He hadn’t been honest with us for four years. Longer than that. He’d held so much back from us. My chest ached to think how he must have imagined us.
Sam’s face flushed red. “You’re what?”
Charlie bit his lip and broke our gaze, staring down at the tabletop. “You heard me, Dad. I’m going to med school.”
I reached for Sam’s hand, but he shook me off. I found I couldn’t try again. I leaned away from him as he shook and spat.
“Bullshit you’re going to med school. Do you have any idea how hard your mother and I worked to get you here? How much we’ve given you to get you where you are today? And now you’re just going to leave that all behind? All of this, just abandon it? To go to medical school?” He spoke it like a curse, this dream that most parents would cherish.
Charlie’s eyes widened, then narrowed. I wanted to say something, anything, to balance out his father’s rage, but nothing would come. Some part of me had always known that Charlie shouldn’t end up here, and I’d only nodded whenever Sam came in to tell me about his latest plans for him. Still, I’d hoped Charlie would at least tell us he’d been thinking about it before making a final decision. Yes, that’s where I would start: the hope. “Charlie, honey, I think what Dad’s trying to say is that we wish you would—”
“Do you have any idea how much medical school costs? Do you have any clue how much your mom and I are struggling just to get by?” Sam’s voice crept back into a roar.
I gaped at him. Never in our lives had he mentioned any doubt that we would survive, that the sun would rise and take away the frost every autumn morning. And now Charlie, across from us, was shoving his lips between his teeth, about to cry.
“Sam, listen. It sounds like this is something he really wants, right, Charlie? So maybe—”
“Not now.” Sam’s voice was ice and steel.
I flinched.
I scraped my chair away from the table, walked over to Charlie, and laid one hand on his shoulder. “You need to calm down,” I said to Sam.
“Calm down? Calm down? You tell me how, for Christ’s sake, we’re supposed to afford medical school? And why exactly is our life here not good enough for you? Tell me that, Charlie. You tell me that. You think you’re better than us?”
Charlie’s shoulder rose and sank under my hand. “I’m getting a scholarship. So you can chill out about that. Remember all those good grades I worked for? Turns out they actually got me somewhere—somewhere outside this town. Vermont may be great for you guys, but it’s not for me, and you know it. No.”
Sam shook his head.
I knew Sam wasn’t finished. I knew that what he had left in him wasn’t something that should ever be said.
“Both of you, that’s enough,” I broke in, but it was as if I were shouting out the window at a passing airplane.
They glared at each other, their hands gripping the edge of the table in exactly the same way.
“I guess you’re not who I thought you were,” Sam said.
Charlie laughed, and it was mean and fake. “You mean someone who was going to get himself a little wife and settle down and take over this godforsaken dead end? No, you’re right. That’s not who I am.”
Sam’s mouth crumpled. The only time I’d ever seen him faint was at his mother’s funeral. He’d stood there beside the freshly dug grave and grasped my hand as his face blanched. He looked worse now. “Well then,” he said, settling his hands in his lap. “I guess you can forget about ever coming back.”
Charlie’s shoulder wrenched out from under my palm, the door slammed behind him, and suddenly, the only thing left of him was the sound of his car’s engine in the driveway.
The two of us still in the kitchen stared at each other. Sam’s jaw was set with determination, an explanation ready.
I raised my hand to stop him and closed my eyes. “No. If he leaves right now, I will never forgive you,” I said. And I left the room.
After that, I used to call Charlie every Friday afternoon, when Sam was meeting with his friends to talk yields and inputs. The bitter coals in my stomach would glow hot after every call, and I could barely look at Sam when he returned home. Then one day, right after we first heard about Sam’s tumor, Charlie’s voice on the phone was cold and clinical, rattling off survival rates and progressions. I reminded him that this was his father, not just a patient, but I didn’t know who I was talking to.
Now we only speak when I fly out to California every once in a while. He is a wary stranger, averting his eyes as he deposits me into his clean, spare guest room. At night, I search the closet and the nightstand, greedy for receipts, ticket stubs, personal details of any sort. There is never anything. My boy is long gone.
* * *
In the feed store, I pick up a bag of mulch and drift over, hollow-headed, to the registers. I arrive home, though I remember nothing of the drive. The bag of flour I left out on the counter reminds me that I had other plans earlier, another family wanting another loaf, and I move through the kitchen, shoveling flour, water, and yeast into a big metal bowl.
It started as an obligation, the bread. Years ago, at a church meeting to discuss aid for a newly widowed parishioner, the women around me offered casseroles, childcare, hand-sewn quilts—as if any of that could bring a husband back. Then they turned to me, their hands folded neatly in front of them, a firing squad of unsolicited cheer. I swallowed and said, “I could make a loaf of bread to go with the Waldorf salad, I suppose,” though it had been ages since my mother taught me how. I could still feel her poking my arm when my attention wandered. The offer seemed to satisfy the group, though, and the secretary beamed triumphantly as she recorded it on her notepad.
As it turned out, I was actually rather good at it, scooping deep-brown loaves out of the oven over and over again. It became what I could offer, “Molly’s bread,” automatically added to the list for every family tragedy in town. I learned to love it, too, the meditative process of turning simple ingredient
s into perfect, round boules.
Today, I need it more than ever. Slowly, slowly, as I stir all the ingredients together and scrape the dough out onto the counter, I begin to come back. I push my hands through the pale mass, pressing it and pulling it and stretching it, the thumping of my palms against the counter drowning out the CharlieCharlieCharlie in my ears. In a few minutes, the muscles in my arms will start to ache, and the dough will cling less and less to my fingers. I will be able to strip off the sticky gloves of flour and water that are collecting on my palms and return to the kneading anew, with clean hands that will stay clean even while I keep coaxing the glossy, tacky pile. I close my eyes and picture the moment when I can pinch off a bit of dough and stretch it until the sun glows through it. Then it will be ready to rise.
“Another loaf in the works?” Sam’s voice booms across the kitchen and against my back.
My eyes startle open. “I got the mulch and fertilizer for the garden. Would you mind moving them over to the shed?” I start picking dough out from between my fingers.
“I’ll get right on it.” He peers out the door at the truck. “You know, maybe we could use some corn husks as mulch instead of the packaged stuff. I mean, it’s not like we’re gonna use them for anything else, right?”
“Sure, why not.” I used to make corn-husk dolls with the children after every harvest. Nessa would tackle the husks like it was her job, busily bending and stuffing the fibers. Sam would tease her, telling her to leave some for the other children, while Charlie would stage battles and races with the finished dolls.
“You all right?” Sam stands in front of me, his hands moving toward my shoulders.
“Of course. I was just remembering the old days, playing with the kids after the harvest.”
His hands tap my arms, then fall back to his sides. He reaches out to press one thumb into the bread dough. “That’s gonna be a good one, I bet. Good thing the army of do-gooders recruited you, General.” He salutes me with one stiffened hand, and I stifle a laugh into my shoulder.
I give the dough a few more presses, Sam’s thumbprint disappearing into the fleshy lump, before dropping it back into the bowl and draping it with a kitchen towel to rise. Sam will be hungry, so I start to make lunch, sawing off slices from the end of last week’s loaf and piling them with slabs of cheese, squirts of mustard, and cold chicken from last night. I’m just pouring the cider when Sam returns from moving the bags. He rubs his chapped hands together and brings the plates over to the table, placing the sandwich made with the heel of the bread in front of my chair—the crust has always been my favorite part. He’s already shoving stray pieces of chicken in his mouth when I bring the glasses over, but he smiles through the food when I run one hand over his shoulder blades.
I sit down across from him. The hair on his arms has gone gray, and much of his head is shiny and hairless now, but his biceps are still muscled. His round belly has shrunk quite a bit in the past couple of years. I can’t think about why he’s lost that weight, about the walnut of disease packed in there. You wouldn’t think, looking at him, that our medicine cabinet is stacked with bottles of pills, that it rattles mercilessly every night when he opens and closes it. Sometimes, when he’s fallen asleep and I lie awake, my mind hounded by worry, I trace my fingertips gently over the freckles on his back, ones I memorized long ago. So much of my past is wrapped up in him. If I rub his skin hard enough, would those years and memories peel off like onion skins? Would he be pinker, brighter, newer? Would my skin look fresher, too?
He looks up and winks, not at all startled to find me studying him. I smile back and make myself eat.
Chapter Five
Daniel
Sometimes, I think the size of a farming town should be measured not by the number of horses or stoplights but by the number of old men sitting outside the general store. Munsen’s a pretty small town, so it has three, with pants pulled up over their bellies and big owl eyes behind their glasses. I’ve passed them three times today, each time mirroring their four-fingered half waves.
This morning, Connie Shannon shooed me out the door before I’d even had breakfast. “You’ve worked hard these past few days. Earl’s on a trip to buy feed, so why don’t you take the day off, and I’ll clean this place up,” she said. This happens a lot at the farms where I work, and I’m never sure if the days off are for my benefit or the wife’s, but Connie was waving around a bottle of Windex as she spoke, so I assumed she meant business and planned an escape route.
I could’ve jumped in my car and driven the hour to Burlington, maybe grabbed a slice of pizza and a beer and tried to see a movie. But towns like that make me uneasy, alone with all the college kids. I also could’ve found a corner somewhere and called home, but my mom always sounds so thrown off when I call outside our monthly schedule. Or I could’ve called Ken, the only friend from high school I still keep in touch with. But over the years, our calls have become less and less frequent, and while they always start cheerfully enough, they end in an exhale of “All right, man. I’ve gotta get back to studying and/or the party and/or making dinner. Talk later, okay?” We mostly just text now, a message every few weeks that doesn’t really say anything at all.
So instead, after calling Lionel for our usual check-in on the circle, I decide to wander around town for the day. Church, paint peeling; post office, square and brick; nursery school sign on someone’s front yard. It’s a late summer day, and the sun is still strong enough to make me sweat a little as I walk down and across the town’s main drag, over and over.
I’ve done this during every job for years, pacing the neighborhood until I know it like a local. It gets me a few weird looks from shop owners and kids in playgrounds, but it also means I never have to ask directions, and sometimes, if I’m lucky, they forget I’m an outsider. This was really important in the beginning, when I was still scrawny and video-game pale, looking like someone who’d only read about farming. “The most important part is fitting in,” Claire used to say, eyeing my polo shirt and cargo pants. “Otherwise, they’ll know exactly where to look when weird shit goes down.”
Does it work? It’s hard to say. There are always at least a few people who look at me sideways after the big reveal, teenagers usually. But for the most part, you’d be surprised by how many people want to believe, to put aside their day-to-day and think that there’s something else out there, some big conspiracy. I always stick around for several months after the work’s done—again, to avoid suspicion—and every time, there’s this sort of buzzing all over town, a “what if” in the air.
After my third pass through the town center, I find myself wandering farther until I reach the driveway to Sam’s house and pick my way through the ruts in the gravel. Sam is riding a once-green tractor through the fields, but somehow, he sees me and lifts up one arm, then points to his house.
I wave back and remember what Norman said in the general store. Sam’s a little crazy, it’s true—big ideas and a bit of a God complex. Then again, everyone who’s ever asked me to build a circle is at least a little crazy. And mostly harmless. I head toward the house.
In the kitchen, Sam’s wife’s got her hands buried in a churning mass of dough that almost looks alive when I step into the kitchen. When I say hi, she nearly screams.
“Oh!” she exclaims. “I’m sorry. I didn’t see you there. I’m baking bread for our neighbors, and sometimes I get caught up in it.” There’s a streak of flour on her cheek, white over freckles. “Here, take a seat.” She pulls a chair away from the small table in the corner. “Sam is out working, but I’m sure he’ll be back soon. Have you eaten?”
I start to tell her not to worry, that she can go back to her dough and let the silence sit. But my stomach rumbles at the mention of food, and her smile looks relieved.
“I think we still have some chicken left from last night,” she says into the fridge, “although I hope you like white meat. No matter h
ow hard I try, Sam will only eat the dark.” Her smile says she doesn’t try that hard.
“Chicken breast would be perfect, thank you.”
She starts to fix me a plate. I know better than to offer to help, and soon she is sliding a mountain of neatly carved meat in front of me. I chew in silence as she turns back to her dough. With the rhythmic thwack of her kneading as my backbeat, I pull out my plans for Sam’s circle.
I’m staring at the curve on the design’s upper edge, picturing it traced in the field, when the thwacking suddenly stops. Molly looks up at the ceiling, sighs, and drapes a dish towel over the dough. “Daniel,” she says, “there’s something I need to talk to you about.” She sinks into a chair, tucks her hands under her thighs. “Sam has cancer.”
I stay still, wait for more. It’s not all that uncommon, being hired by sick farmers—people tired of sterile waiting rooms, looking for something fantastic. “I’m very sorry to hear that,” I say, but she shakes her head.
“This is his third recurrence.” I grimace. “Skin first. We didn’t worry too much about that one. Half the farmers in town have had it, with all that time out in the sun. Then colon. Then prostate, and now stomach.” I wonder if she knows she’s tracing a path on her own body as she speaks. “All this time, the doctors insist on still calling it skin cancer. They say we’re lucky that it’s never gone to his lungs or his brain, as if it’s a well-trained dog. Stomach cancer, though.” Her inhale is shaky. “They say only one in four survive.”
I feel like I should touch her shoulder. I think that’s what my mom would do. “That’s—” I start to say, then stop.
She turns her head, like she’s just now noticing me. “That’s okay, honey. There’s nothing you could say to make it better. Believe me, plenty have tried.” On any other face, her expression would look like a smirk. On her, it’s just sadness. “I wanted you to know, in case you hear it around town or…something.” She waves her hand and sweeps it over the table, cleaning crumbs that aren’t there. “Also”—her fingers land in front of her, a moth—“you should know why he wants to do this in the first place. The thought of leaving this town where it is…”