The Roots of the Olive Tree

by Courtney Miller Santo

  The relationship was more than physical. He’d called while the plane was moving from the runway to the gate and told Calliope he thought he’d fallen in love with her. Still, she’d not confessed this to her mother or grandmother, or even Erin, who she thought, now, would have understood the relationship. She’d visited him twice so far, both times making up excuses about wanting to see two of her children who lived in the Northeast. She’d flown into New York to spend Christmas and a few days with her eldest son’s family and then claimed she needed to attend a conference in Pittsburgh, so she could spend the rest of the week with Amrit. In March, she’d flown to D.C. to visit her middle son and claimed an allergy to a cat so she could stay in a hotel in Alexandria with Amrit, who drove down to meet her.

  Before her relationship with Amrit, Calliope could never understand how her daughter could have loved her husband more than her own child. But what Amrit awakened inside of Calliope made her aware of the possibility of such selfishness. There were times, like when they were in the hotel elevator and she couldn’t stop herself from pressing against him until they were both breathless. At that moment, getting caught didn’t matter, being embarrassed didn’t matter—she needed him too much to stop. But Deb was gone, and she’d never get the chance to explain to her daughter that she was finally beginning to understand why she shot Carl.

  There was no one else to tell. She felt that if she kept it to herself, it would be safe. Nancy, because she was privy to Calliope’s affairs, was dangerous. She feared that if she told Nancy any of the truth of her feelings, that the woman would somehow make her feel foolish, point out that there was no difference between Amrit and the contractor she’d slept with a few years ago, who’d only wanted to convince her to sell the Pit Stop to his brother so he could replace it with a Jack in the Box franchise. So Calliope had told her own family almost nothing, and admitted to Nancy only that Amrit was something new for her old bones.

  Nancy took her glasses off and said, “It is difficult to stay in love over long distances.” She spoke in such a way that Calliope began to wonder why her cashier had married late and who she’d loved before she found Mr. Elvis.

  “Who mentioned love?” Calliope asked.

  Their conversation was interrupted when a young family came into the store, filling the place with conversation. Calliope smiled at Nancy and then went to the storeroom, calling out to her stock boys as she went, “Roberto. Pedro.”

  They stopped stacking boxes and shuffled to her. She motioned for them to follow her and started to explain to them in Spanish about the mess. She wasn’t fluent, and as she walked she stumbled over the words. She felt her mind spin, like loose gears, and then catch when she found the first word she needed. Sucios. Filthy.

  She stopped to point out the grime that was apparent on the nearly empty shelves and leaned heavily against one of the poles that distributed the weight of the roof. She’d gone too long between Vicodins, and the throbbing that had been present since she woke had turned into a stabbing pain. The older boy looked at his younger brother and then cleared his throat.

  “We can speak English, if that’s easier for you,” he said. His brother nodded.

  “And honestly we’d be happier if you called us Robert and Pete. My friends call me Petey, but I don’t like that so much.”

  His brother laughed and punched his arm. “You should call him Petey.”

  The muscles in Calliope’s thigh began to strain to keep her upright. Most people didn’t understand her pain. They were used to healing—to scar tissue knitting itself over wounds and the gradual ebb of pain. The tissue in her leg, after the crash, became infected. The doctors kept carving off bits of her calf, claiming to have gotten the last remnants of dying tissue and muscle, only to have to go back weeks later and take more. When they were done, there was a fist-size concavity on the outside of her lower leg. The pain had never ebbed.

  “It’s okay if you want to speak to us in Spanish,” said the younger boy. He looked worried, and Calliope thought that she must be grimacing.

  “I didn’t realize,” she said, trying to recall what her backroom manager had said when he suggested he hire the boys. “When Juan hired you—”

  “Keep speaking Spanish to Juan. His English is awful,” Robert said.

  “And he evidently can’t keep a clean store either.” She sent Pete to get a bucket of soapy water and showed his brother how dirt hid in the crescents of space between the jars and cans.

  “They should make rectangle containers,” the boy said, grabbing a rag from his brother.

  She took a stack of inventory logs to her office, which was an elevated space near the front of the store. Calliope was short and had spent her life looking between people in crowds. After her husband, Greg, died, she’d had the walls, which used to go to the ceiling, lowered. The Pit Stop had been his idea, the location hers. In her childhood, the building had housed a Lucky’s. Greg never liked that no matter what they did to the place that it still felt like a grocery store, but Calliope always felt at home there. By the time she reached the office, she could no longer hide her limp. She pushed the swing-gate set into the half-walls that surrounded her office and eased into her ergonomic chair. There was a small supply of pills in her desk. She fished one out and swallowed it dry.

  From the space, she could see the entire store. The tasting bar took up the middle portion of the store, and the aisles around it were divided by country of origin, with the largest section devoted to California and, specifically, Kidron. The far corner of the store housed a small lunch counter, and around the perimeter of the store were the novelty items—olive soap, olive wood, postcards, and kitschy olive-serving devices. They didn’t sell as well as the olives themselves, but the markup on them was high. Plus, many of the items were from local artisans, and she sold those on commission. Louisa Ramirez, with her olive wood roses, did well for herself. She had to come in every three days or so to restock the delicate flowers. Lucy Talbot’s Olive You platters weren’t doing so well. Calliope couldn’t remember the last time she’d sold one. She’d have to consider offering Louisa some of Lucy’s space.

  The truth was that in the last few years, the Pit Stop had become a money pit. The spring storms had been especially bad for business. The rain kept those on I-5 in their cars—stopping only for gas and a quick spin through a drive-thru for lunch. On years when the winds from the south were gentle and the flowers stayed on the trees, visitors felt they had time to spend. They drove along the streets near the orchards and lingered in Calliope’s store, asking questions about olives and growing techniques, and always those conversations led to purchases.

  It used to be there were very few retail places to get specialty olive oils and products, but the Internet had made what Calliope had to offer less exclusive. She sometimes saw customers scan a bottle of oil with their phones to compare prices. She’d lost contracts with some of the local suppliers, who now found it more lucrative to sell their olives themselves. Despite all of this, she couldn’t shake the feeling that a turnaround was coming. What was it they said? There are no second acts in life? Well, Calliope knew for a fact that the women in her family not only got second acts, but sometimes even thirds.

  While waiting for her laptop to start, she flipped idly through the front section of the San Francisco Examiner. She sold copies at the store, and the out-of-date ones were always laid on her desk. The news was no different than it had been before Deb’s escape. It was like betting on all the horses at the track; the paper had no idea what would retain its importance, and so it reported on elections that would be forgotten and businesses that would close. The story, the one that would change Calliope’s history, was tiny—just the briefest mention in the columns of a section entitled “News Around the World.” Hong Wu, the oldest living person in the world, had died two days earlier at home in the Shinxing province. His daughter, the article stated, was inconsolable.

  “Anna’s the oldest,” she shouted. The boys, who were el
bow deep in soapy water cleaning the shelves, looked up at her. Nancy shook her head and said, “I’ll be.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Origins

  Do you believe in miracles?” Calliope asked Anna the next morning.

  “What’s not to believe,” Anna said. She stood up, twisted side to side at the waist and then bent down and touched her toes. “Used to be I could do the splits, but my bladder isn’t what it was when I was a hundred.”

  Erin laughed, and at the sound of his mother’s voice, the baby tried to mimic what he’d heard. Bobo responded with short high yelps.

  “It’s like a circus in here,” Calliope said, shifting uncomfortably in the deep couch. Next to her, Bets, in an uncommon gesture, put her arm around Calliope’s shoulder and pulled her close. They slid together, pushed by the couch, and for a moment, she felt like a girl curled up on her mother’s lap.

  “Makes it feel like a home again,” Bets said.

  Calliope let herself be enveloped by the warmth of her mother’s love. Their relationship had borne too many strains over the years, and such intimacy was rare between them. The truth was, for the first time in Calliope’s life, Hill House was beginning to feel like home. Over the last few weeks, she had started to believe in miracles. The news about Anna not only had the potential to save the store, but it was also sure to bring Amrit back to Kidron. It had been many years since so much had gone so right for Calliope.

  “I’ve got something to show you,” she said, pushing herself off the couch.

  “Don’t tell me you can do the splits,” groaned Erin. “I’m still recovering from childbirth and shouldn’t be subjected to old ladies running circles around me.”

  “We’re not all old,” Bets said. “Just Anna.”

  Laughter echoed around the living room and followed Calliope down the hall. She couldn’t remember the last time her mother had been in a joking mood. The bottle of oil, which she’d lovingly wrapped the night before, stood on her nightstand. She couldn’t wait to share her plan with Anna and with the others. She closed her bedroom door, and out of habit, knocked twice on the frame for good luck. Don’t want it too much, she thought. The women were still giggling when Calliope walked back into the room, and she felt like joining in their revelry. She called out to Erin and then slid into a near perfect center split.

  “Once a cheerleader, always a cheerleader,” she said.

  “What is that?” Anna asked, pointing to the bottle. “Champagne?”

  “No. It’s your oil.” Calliope placed the bottle in Anna’s hand.

  “Mine, huh?” Anna said, struggling to untie the delicately curled ribbon that held the paper in place.

  Calliope was as obsessed as Anna with longevity, but unlike her grandmother, she needed explanations. How was it possible that Anna could still hear so well, or that she was able to walk unaided? Her yellow-brown eyes were rimmed in red, but her sight was strong enough to scan the headlines in the newspaper. “For years I’ve watched how carefully you strip the trees of the last of their fruit and press the oil. I know there’s something to it, something you may not even know yourself.”

  “So much of what I do is just out of habit,” Anna said.

  “But those habits, those are what keep you so youthful,” Calliope said.

  “There’s nothing special about me,” Anna said, sliding the bottle from its bag.

  “There is. There’s something special about all of us.” Everyone turned their eyes toward her, and their expectation made Calliope backtrack. “I mean, I just feel like there has to be or why else would Amrit have come so far to study us?”

  “I don’t think we should make too much of this,” Bets said. Erin disagreed with her, and the two argued back and forth for several minutes.

  Calliope took some satisfaction in knowing her mother would soon be proved wrong. Finding out why the Keller women were special had brought Amrit, and now it might even be able to bring much more. Her instincts told her that Hong Wu’s death was just the beginning. Once the press met Anna and discovered their family’s beautiful unbroken line of firstborns that stretched over six generations, people would be clamoring to find out their secrets. That was the way the world worked—people wanted explanations for the oddities in the world. They wanted to know what made supercentenarians able to live so long.

  Before Hong Wu, the title had changed hands every few months and during one brutally hot summer in 2002 the title of world’s oldest person had been held by fourteen different people. And then she discovered Jeanne Calment, the doyenne de l’humanité, as her French countrymen called her. She’d held the title for nearly a decade and when she finally died at age one hundred and twenty-two, she also held the title of oldest person ever. This “elder of humanity” had lived an extraordinary life. When Jeanne was thirteen, she sold Vincent van Gogh a fistful of colored pencils when he came to her father’s fabric shop. She remembered the painter as a dirty, smelly, disagreeable man and found his work to be of a similar nature. By the time she was in her eighties, she’d outlived all of her family, including her grandson, who died in a motorcycle accident, and her husband, who ate a dessert topped with canned cherries that were later found to contain botulism. Jeanne had eaten the same dessert herself but was only mildly sick from the canned fruit. In reading about this extraordinary woman, Calliope was fascinated by two items. The first was the way in which the press celebrated her. Once she became the oldest living person, reporters from as far away as China showed up in the small French town. She entertained them with witticisms, like “I’ve only got one wrinkle and I’m sitting on it.” She gave advice. “He who hugs too much, hugs badly.” She philosophized. “I’ve been forgotten by a good God.” She was their darling, and what she said delighted them. Her accounts of history were given more weight than any text, and it was said that the press would take her version of the construction of the Eiffel Tower over Mr. Eiffel’s own written words if it came to that. Calliope, who’d had her own brush with celebrity in the aftermath of the plane crash, envied the decade-long thrall Jeanne held over the press.

  The second item that Calliope paid particularly close attention to was Jeanne’s prescription for longevity. It included the usual tropes about enjoying life, living for the future and not the past, but in addition, Jeanne gleefully told reporters that she enjoyed three vices every day—one unfiltered cigarette, one glass of port, and a piece of chocolate—and that she was able to wash all these evils out of her body with a big dose of olive oil. She not only cooked with it, but she also used it as a moisturizer for her face, and every night before bed, she swallowed a tablespoon of it.

  Taken together, these two facts made Calliope realize her family was sitting on a potential gold mine. For the last thirty years, the Keller women had sold their olives to a neighboring orchard that processed them for canning. In exchange for the olives, the neighbor took care of the orchard and gave them 60 percent of what he made after his labor costs. It was enough money for Anna and Bets to take care of themselves and the house, including the cost of Frank’s care. However, there were always olives left behind, and in a good year a grower, especially one wanting to use the olives for oil, could leave the fruit on the trees through January. Most years, after the harvest was finished in November, Anna would wander into the orchard and glean what she could—using those olives and her father’s handpress to make her own oil. This olio nuovo, as the Italians called it, was revered for its bright, peppery taste and health properties. This year, while everyone else had been preoccupied with Deb’s parole hearing, Calliope had hired a few locals to strip the orchard bare of the leftover olives.

  Olive oil is notoriously tricky and olio nuovo is even more volatile. She’d arranged to have the oil pressed at one of the facilities on the outskirts of Kidron the day after the harvest, which coincidentally had been the day Deb was up for parole. If she’d not had them pressed immediately, there was a danger of fermentation. Once the oil was pressed, it was filtered into la
rge steel drums and left in a cool dark cellar to settle. No matter how fine the sieve, there were always bits of olives that slipped through during the pressing, and fresh olive oil, like the sort Anna pressed, had to be consumed quickly. Fresh-pressed oil was more green than gold, with an aftertaste of pepper. The oil took on a gold hue after it settled. In late March she tasted the settled oil to make sure nothing had gone wrong in the process. There was always a chance of an oil turning during settling, a chance that the bright bite of fresh oil would turn to a fustiness as it settled, or worse that the room would not have stayed cool enough and she’d have gallons and gallons of rancid oil.

  Her oil, which she’d been calling Sixth Generation, was beautiful, with an assertive olive flavor with a hint of pepper and a buttery finish with a bright, almost citrus note. She hired the stock boys, Robert and Petey, to help her bottle the oil and attach the labels advertising the oil as a special family blend from the Keller Orchards. By the time the baby was due, Calliope had more than five hundred bottles at the ready. Her plan was to present the oil as a gift to everyone when Erin had her baby. But then Deb pulled her disappearing act, and Calliope’s plans for the oil had gone with her daughter.

  Like all fats, olive oil has a tendency to turn rancid. She had, at most, until the beginning of fall before the oil would go bitter and be good for nothing more than fire-starter. Before they had electricity at Hill House, Anna and her mother, Mims, used rancid oil for light. Anna said they gave off light that was almost as bright as what you got from whale oil, but that the edges of the light were blue and afterward the air tasted like olives.

  In the living room, the women had turned their attention back to the bottle. Anna moved the bottle around in her hand and ran her fingers over the embossing on the gold label.