“Dad’s fine where he is,” she said. “He’s been there for ages, getting by. I just don’t understand why Gloria’s doing this. I think I’m a pretty good neighbor. I mean, I try to be. I know that living next to the farm can be kind of—kind of—”
“Like living next to a farm,” Sam put in.
“Yes. But still—it’s not like I’m going out of my way to antagonize her.”
“Is there anything she wants from you?”
Olivia thought a moment. “She wants my boarders out of the barn.”
“That makes sense.”
“Most of the time things are fine,” Olivia said. “But then once in a while, there’s a, oh, a minor problem. Like last month, when one of the boarders took a nap on her porch swing. That’s wrong—I know it. But I can’t evict all the boarders because of one or two bad apples. And they’re not bad. Not really. They’re just … lost. People don’t come to stay with me because they’re perfectly happy. They come because they’re stuck in the middle of something tough. And it’s not always easy to make good decisions when you’re in that mind frame.”
“You’re good to them, Olivia,” Sam said. “I bet your mom would have been proud.”
“Thanks,” she said. “That’s … I … It means a lot.”
A moment passed. She glanced at Sam to see him looking firmly back. Men had been coming to the farm, heaping praise on Olivia for years—lauding the beauty of her tomatoes and her rarely brushed hair—but not one compliment had made her chest feel as warm as if the sun itself were shining from inside her. Though he hadn’t moved and she hadn’t moved, she felt as if she was being drawn toward him, that the afternoon around them was shrinking down so that the only point to exist was the patch of earth where he stood and she stood and a small watermelon grew between them. She thought maybe Sam was feeling it, too—until he stepped back and cleared his throat rather abruptly. “So Gloria wants your boarders out. Where does she expect them to go?”
“Oh. Right. Well, she wants them in the new homeless shelter. She keeps stuffing these fliers about it in my mailbox for the grand opening. I’m pretty sure the reason Gloria and her White Lake Ladies Club had it built was because they want my boarders out of the barn. They don’t understand that these women aren’t here because they have nowhere else to go. They’re here because they don’t want to be anywhere else. At least, not until the maze gives them their answers.” She shook her head, wishing Gloria was with them right now so they could clear things up once and for all. “I won’t let her take the Penny Loafers away from me. I won’t. They’re too important. They’re—”
She stopped. She’d almost said, They’re the only friends I have.
Her father had moved into Solomon’s Ravine early in the winter when she was sixteen. The days at school were bleak and lonely. The nights alone in the farmhouse were filled with noises that they’d never been filled with before, sinister and lowering noises that made her heart race with fear. When she trekked down into the ravine to see her father, he no longer smiled; instead, a look came over his face that was so despairing she couldn’t help but feel it echo within her. It was the longest, coldest, saddest winter of her life.
When the Penny Loafers finally began to trickle in with the spring rains, Olivia felt a relief like nothing she’d ever known. She crawled into an empty cot at the end of a row and faced the wall so no one could make her doubt her right to live among them. But as days passed, not one woman reprimanded her for skipping her showers, or for not doing homework, or for throwing rocks at the window of the farmhouse kitchen until it broke. Olivia hadn’t been surprised, exactly, when the boarders began looking to her for direction about the garden maze. It was their faith in her that gave her the confidence to quit school and take over managing the farm.
She remembered her last day of high school in vicious detail—mostly because there was nothing special about it. She hadn’t told any of her former friends she was leaving; only a few teachers knew, and she avoided looking at them because she didn’t want to see the pity in their eyes. Her former friends did what they always did: They mocked her openly because she’d pulled away from them without explanation. She passed Sam in the hallway—he didn’t look at her—and she wished she could curl up in a hidden hallway and cry. By the time the bell rang and school let out, Olivia was filled with a sense of enormous relief that she would never have to return to high school again.
The Penny Loafers had gathered her in, opened their hearts, and made a place for her in their improvised and jerry-built home each and every summer as she grew into adulthood. They didn’t question her rules about not wanting to be touched; they simply treated her as one of them, a woman as lost as they were, in a way. In the cold and brittle chill of the winters, when the barn was empty and the fields were frozen and the possibility of summer seemed as remote as the possibility of flying to Mars, the Penny Loafers’ return was Olivia’s sustaining hope. She would never have close friends, never know a husband’s touch, never have children of her own. Her father would eventually pass away. But as long as Olivia had the Penny Loafers to care for, as long as she could offer them something they couldn’t find anywhere else, she knew she could bear the loneliness of her condition for the rest of her days. Otherwise … she could not think of the otherwise.
Sam was studying her; she could feel it. She began to look down, but he reached to tip up the brim of her wide, round hat so that he could see her face.
“Olivia,” he said. “Whatever I can do to help you with your father, with the boarders, I’ll do it. You must know that.”
“I … I don’t know how to thank you.”
He held her eye, not speaking, and she knew—then—how he might want to be thanked. She broke away first, looked out to the long fields, and balled her fists at her sides.
“Okay,” Sam said.
“Okay?”
“Don’t worry. I’m going.”
“Going? Why so fast? No enormous spiders to show me? No questions about what the shapes of the clouds might mean?”
When he spoke, his voice was unusually flat. “I just wanted to tell you about Gloria. That’s all.”
Some of Olivia’s happiness at seeing him began to ease out of her. Although he had come to the farm many times in the past few days with an eagerness to talk, it appeared that her façade of indifference was finally starting to wear down his determination. He just looked at her, with a hint of sadness in his eye that caused disproportionate pain to bloom in her own heart.
She tried to smile.
“Well, I’ll let you get back to it,” he said. He started to walk away. Her whole body felt heavy with disappointment. He’d been so unfailingly kind to her. He looked out for her. And yet, how awful she’d made herself act toward him. His walk seemed heavier than normal as he headed away.
“Wait, Sam!” she heard herself say. He stopped. The words had come out fast, and once they had left her mouth, she wished she could take them back. She really had nothing else to say to him; she simply didn’t like to see him leave looking so sad. “I’m sorry if I seem … if I … you know … I just want to say, it’s good to know someone’s looking out for me. It’s … it’s a nice change.”
He did not fully face her. “I’m not going to give up, Ollie.”
A shiver rustled along her spine. Ollie. What he’d always called her. “What do you mean, give up?”
“I’m not going to just disappear. I live here now, so I don’t care if it takes twenty years for you to warm up to me again. I’m not going anywhere.”
“I’m not not warm to you,” she said softly. Some part of her was feeling quite warm, warmer each day she saw him crossing her fields. She looked at his narrow face, his skin that was less pale than it had been a few days ago. “I just don’t understand …”
“What?”
“I don’t understand what you want. From me, I mean.”
“What I want?” He frowned, tense with frustration. “What I want is to have at lea
st one neighbor in Green Valley that I actually like. And Gloria’s not exactly the leading candidate.”
“You want us to be friends?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Oh. Well—okay,” she said. Her relief felt like a rush of cool wind. He only wanted friendship, nothing more. The declaration should have made her happy; instead, she felt the slightest chill of disappointment—which she intended to ignore. “I’d like to be friends.”
“You would?”
“Sure,” she said lightly. “I didn’t know we weren’t friends already.”
He smiled, but there was something to it that wasn’t exactly pleased or earnest. She wondered if he knew she didn’t quite believe her own words. Like him, she too thought it would be nice to have a neighbor again—someone who could sit on the porch with her in the evenings and talk lazily about the day past, someone who might come over during the long, lonely winter for the occasional game of cards. But were the risks of befriending Sam greater than the rewards—for both of them?
“See you around,” he said. He turned and walked his slow, serious walk back toward the road. And when her walkie-talkie chirped she was glad to hear Tom’s voice, calling her back to the steady, dependable work of the farm.
The Forest for the Trees
It was just before sundown when she went in search of her father. She did not bother heading into the geological gutter that was Solomon’s Ravine because she knew he would not be there. She’d come to know his habits like she knew her own. On an evening like this, when the air felt a little lighter on a person’s skin than it had in ages, he was more likely to be found at Hemlock Pond than in the ravine. Certain summer days were made for fishing, and this was one.
“Hey!” Olivia called out toward the lake as she strode through knee-high grass. Her father, who was struggling to push the rowboat off the rocks and into the glassy pink water of the lake, looked over his shoulder with the quickness of a wild animal. He relaxed when he saw it was her.
“Olivia. How nice. You’re just in time!”
Hemlock Pond had been dammed in the early 1900s by some enterprising Pennywort. It was the family’s private fishing hole. The moldering ruins of a small bungalow stood near the water’s edge, its only inhabitants a family of mischievous raccoons.
She hurried past a cluster of wild rhododendrons toward her father; the keel of the rowboat was half in the water. “Allow me,” she said. He climbed in, groaning a little as he pulled one leg into the boat using his two hands. Olivia took off her boots and left them at the water’s edge; then she gave the boat a strong push and hopped in. A blue heron stood at the lake with its head bowed as if in prayer.
Her father had long relied on Olivia to bring him his food, his coffee beans, and his vitamins, but he had never stopped taking pride in catching his own fish. Pike, bass, perch, and sunnies—as well as a fair number of frogs—were plentiful in the pristine waters. Though Arthur’s move out of the farmhouse all those years ago had curtailed many of Olivia’s favorite father-daughter activities—like pancake breakfasts and hours spent paging through field guides and seed catalogues—they had never stopped fishing together. It was a thing they had done when Alice was alive; it was a thing they did now.
“Good day today?” Arthur asked in the way he always did.
“Yeah. Good,” Olivia replied in the way she always did. “Where we headed?”
Arthur scanned the perimeter of the quiet, low lake. “Round about those aspens at the far edge.”
She pulled the oars gently, in no hurry, absorbing the peace of the evening while it was still there to be absorbed. There were choppier waters ahead. She and Arthur had not had many serious talks apart from discussions of the farm. In conversation they regularly avoided anything that might call up any kind of deep emotion. They did not acknowledge Olivia’s long life stretching out before her, forever void of romance, children, or lasting friendship; and they certainly did not talk about what had happened with the poison garden—what was the point? What was done was done, and what was coming they could not control. Instead, they chatted as any two strangers would chat. They talked about their most basic of basic needs, always offhandedly. Moments of mild discord sometimes came when Olivia said Arthur needed a doctor, and Arthur was insistent that he could self-diagnose and heal. In the end they’d learned to compromise: No doctor would trek into the bowels of Solomon’s Ravine, but Arthur’s old friend Jacob, a retired veterinarian, agreed to do it—and according to Arthur, what was a human but an animal anyway?
There had been times, Olivia thought, when her father had meant to have some heart-to-heart with her. He would get a cloudy look in his eye and say I need to talk to you. She would wait patiently while he struggled to find the right words, muddling through convoluted logics and non sequiturs that would eventually sidle right up close to the thing he wanted to say—but then, inevitably, fail to reach it. He would remind her of a misstep or mistake that he or she had made, utterly trivial compared to the dramatic warm-up, and Olivia would know he’d dodged his true topic yet again. He usually ended on a note that went along the lines of “Well, I suppose we’re okay then.” At which point she would assure him, “Dad. We’ll always be okay.”
But now, they truly did need to have a difficult conversation. And Olivia found she had little useful knowledge of how she might seriously and directly approach the subject of his leaving Solomon’s Ravine. He knew it was on her mind; she alluded to it often enough, nudging him via offhanded remarks and short asides to consider it. But the time for consideration was over. This was serious, and needed a full, serious conversation. The few times she had tried to have a heart-to-heart with him—about Alice, about his unending grief—he looked afraid she might shoot him and she’d felt so guilty afterward that she regretted putting him through it.
She rowed in silence, glad for the friendly song of the peepers in the trees around them, while her father went about arranging his bait box and pole.
“Dad,” she said.
He blinked toward her; the rough gray-white of his beard made the color of his eyes stand out with shocking greenness, like moss against a fresh snow. He seemed, for the moment, happy. It had been some time since they’d fished together and she hated to ruin the moment. But the great hidden gears of Gloria’s machinations were turning, and something had to be done.
“There was one thing I needed to talk to you about,” she told him.
He was slow to answer. He put on his glasses then baited his hook, his eyes crossing as he focused on the work. “Go ahead.”
“You know the neighbor, Gloria.”
“Gloria?” He stuck his tongue out of his mouth sideways; his eyebrows were raised as he focused on his task. “Gloria … Gloria …”
He wasn’t paying attention. “The neighbor, Dad. Gloria.”
The worm popped on the hook. “Ah yes. Gloria. The one on the ridge.”
She hesitated. “You know Gloria’s been after me to kick the Penny Loafers out of the barn.”
“Bah,” he said. Olivia held her breath as he cast, and breathed easier when no bit of fabric or flesh was inadvertently hooked. “That barn’s as sturdy as it’s ever been. Hasn’t lost so much as a roof tile in ten years.”
“How would you know that, if you haven’t been up to see it?”
“Oh—well. An educated guess.”
She let off on the oars. “It looks a lot different since you were last up there.”
“I’m sure it does.”
“You should see the maze. We’ve been working on a new garden of all yellow flowers. I swear it’s shaping up to be as bright as the sun.”
Arthur glanced at her as if to say, I know what you’re up to. He adjusted the tension on his line. “So what’s this Gloria person doing?”
“She’s snooping.”
He scoffed. “For what?”
“Information on you.”
“Well, that’s not very polite.”
“We think there’s a pos
sibility she’s considering asking social services to, um, intervene.”
“Who is we? You and Tom?”
“Me and Sam,” Olivia said.
“Really? Well then …”
Well then what? she wanted to ask him. But instead she said, “You’re missing the point here. She’s got a problem with you living in the ravine.”
“It’s my right to live here.”
Olivia dug the oars in hard. “Yes, it’s your right. But I’m the one who’s going to get in trouble for it. She could say I’m neglecting you. Or abusing you. She could say that you’re unable to take care of yourself, and that I’m incompetent as a guardian.”
“Guardian? You’re not my guardian; you’re my daughter.” He shook his head, frowning. “I spend more time taking care of myself than any man my age. Look at me: I’m out here fishing for my own dinner, for God’s sake. I don’t have a guardian.”
“Okay, Dad,” she said softly. “Just calm down. I just … I’m afraid you’ll be taken away if we don’t do something about your living situation.”
The end of his fishing pole bobbed. “What’s this, taken away? To have me taken away? Do you mean to jail? Because I can’t be put in jail, Alice. I never broke a law in my life.”
“Olivia. Dad, I’m Olivia.”
“Of course you’re Olivia. That’s what I said.”
She sighed and rested her arms for a moment. She didn’t believe her father was crazy—even if the evidence mounted more each day to suggest otherwise. But he was getting older. And while he wasn’t losing his mind, he did seem to momentarily misplace it now and again. His life of solitude didn’t do much to help his clarity of thinking. Olivia knew this from her own experience: The long cold winters did things to her, body and mind, wrecking her with bouts of miserable and interminable loneliness, when the minutes crystallized into hours as the temperature dropped. As the days grew shorter and harder, she caught herself talking to people who weren’t there, or to herself, or to her houseplants. She waited in desperation for the mailman, who—truth be told—always seemed a little afraid of her. She lived for the work that needed to be done over the winter: of breaking the scrim of ice on the chicken’s water before she fed them, of organizing the seeds in her greenhouses, of chopping wood, of shoveling snow and ice, of anything that might ease the ache of being so completely and utterly alone. By March, when the Penny Loafers began to return, she had trouble finding the words she was looking for, trouble following the thread of a conversation for very long. Little by little as the valley turned green once again, she felt her spirit rejuvenated, her hope renewed.
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