The Simplicity of Cider

by Amy E. Reichert

  “We’ve been over this. There . . .”

  The two walked out of earshot the way they came, and Bass breathed deeply. Why were they in the orchard? He’d have to tell Miss Lund—then he remembered he didn’t like her anymore. He wrapped his arms around his knees and set his head down. He tried counting seconds, but lost count at 578. From the distance he heard the thrum of the ATV, and it stopped not far from Bass.

  “Bass? You out here?” It was his dad. He did come to find him. “Bass.” His voice trailed out the vowels like he was calling a pig and the sound needed to carry a long distance. It wrapped around Bass almost better than a hug. He gave his face one more swipe to make sure there were no more tears on it and duck-walked out from under the branches.

  “Here, Dad.”

  Isaac ran in his direction and pulled him in tight while Bass wrapped his arms around his neck, letting his dad pick him up and hold him tight. He didn’t normally like being picked up like a little kid—unless they were wrestling—but Bass wanted to be as close to his dad as possible.

  Isaac carried him to the vehicle, then set him in the passenger seat, bending so he could look him straight in the eyes. His dad’s forehead looked like the dunes they played on in California before heading east, all deep, curvy lines.

  “You okay?”

  Bass nodded.

  “When you weren’t with Sanna and she didn’t know where you had gone and what had happened . . . I was so worried. You are too young to go running off by yourself without telling anyone where you are. You can’t run away, Minnow.”

  “I didn’t. I was trying to find you, but then I couldn’t so I hid until you found me. Like I always did when Mom would get angry.”

  Isaac kissed his forehead.

  “Yeah, that’s what you did. You want to tell me what happened?”

  Bass looked down. Up until today, he had liked Miss Lund, especially since she didn’t treat him like a kid. He didn’t want to tattle.

  “I already know what happened. I just want to know from your side. You won’t get in trouble, and Miss Lund and Einars have left for the doctor.”

  “I was playing with my baseball inside and I was being careful but I knocked over a stack of crates on accident. I was going to clean it up. But . . .”

  His dad’s lips pressed together, almost disappearing into his beard, and his eyes pinched at the corners.

  “But what?” he said.

  Bass swallowed and finished.

  “Then she looked at me like Mom used to and told me ‘Out,’ so I ran. I know I should have stayed anyway and helped, but I just couldn’t.”

  His dad pulled him in tight again and being close eased some of his worry. Dad couldn’t be that mad if he was hugging him so much.

  “You did the right thing. You don’t ever have to let a grown-up make you feel afraid. I wish you would have found me or gone back to the trailer, but if you liked it here, then that’s okay, too.”

  “Do I have to keep working with Miss Lund?”

  “No.” They got in the ATV and headed back toward the house. “How would you like a sleepover with the Dibble boys? I can call Mrs. Dibble and see if that would work out.”

  Aaron and Zach were awesome and they had told Bass that Mrs. Dibble let them sneak cookies from the cookie jar whenever they wanted. That sounded like a lot of fun.

  “Can I bring my iPad?” Maybe they had Wi-Fi he could use.

  His dad’s forehead got all wrinkly again.

  “No. But maybe we can pick up a cool outside game you can bring.”

  Visions of flying balls replaced shattered glass and Bass already looked forward to a night of fart jokes and never-ending cookies, thoughts of the mysterious people disappearing along with his tears.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Sanna put the rest of the dinner dishes away, staring at the barn wistfully. It had been so long since she’d blended a new cider, the colors were piling up inside her imagination, muddling to a flat brown. And she hadn’t followed Bass after he ran away. She had cleaned up the fallen boxes and found the baseball in the wreckage. The damage hadn’t even been as bad as she’d initially thought. She knew she’d overreacted, but still, he shouldn’t have been playing ball inside.

  Sanna sighed. Even she knew that was weak, or “sad,” as Bass would say, and her stomach twisted with regret as she remembered the scared look on his face. She never wanted to cause a look like that again. First the ruined apples, now her overreacting at a harmless mistake. All the evidence that she had no right being in charge kept stacking up against her. All her life, her dad made it look so easy, and now she couldn’t even keep from snapping at a little kid over a few broken bottles.

  Her dad emerged from the bathroom. He’d been quiet since they’d left for his PT. Sanna assumed he was making his disappointment in her failure clear. The tactic was effective.

  After she had scolded Bass, Isaac and her dad had driven up in the ATV, laughing, as she had stepped out of the barn ready to drive him to the appointment. Isaac had looked around.

  “Where’s Bass?”

  “He ran into the orchard.”

  All humor disappeared from his face.

  “What do you mean he ran into the orchard? Did something happen?”

  Sanna swallowed. She had told herself she didn’t do anything wrong. He had made a mistake and she just told him to leave, she hadn’t even punished him. But the look on Isaac’s face told her there was no right answer she could give him, and those rationalizations wouldn’t help.

  “He knocked over a tower of crates and bottles because he was playing with his baseball inside. I told him to get out of the barn. He did.”

  Isaac flared his nostrils and turned to the ATV. Einars was already sliding out of the passenger seat and hobbling out of the way with his crutches.

  “Try the Looms. Kids are always drawn out there,” Einars said.

  Isaac had given her one last look of hurt and anger, like she had broken some unspoken vow. Her dad’s eyes spoke of disappointment.

  “I told you I don’t even like kids.” She had walked to the house to clean up, but the words soured her mouth. During the entire drive to the appointment, during the appointment, during the drive back home, and all through dinner, her dad had kept his silence. Normally Sanna would love the reprieve from his endless prattle, but it felt like a punishment for a crime she didn’t fully grasp or, maybe, chose to not fully grasp.

  When Einars emerged from his postdinner shower, after insisting he could do it all himself and didn’t need her help, his skin was pale and his face drooped. Every movement required visible effort. Sanna moved toward him.

  “Let me help, Pa.” She reached for his good arm to loop around her neck. He pushed away.

  “I don’t want your help.”

  With the effort of pushing her away, he lost his balance. It was like watching King Kong fall in slow motion—first his legs crumbled, then his body landed, at last his head bumped the side of his bedside table, knocking it hard enough to send the stack of papers on it flying. For the second time today, she watched, too slow to stop the fall.

  She flashed back to him tumbling backward off the ladder and she froze, but this time Isaac wasn’t there to shake her out of it.

  “Goddamn it,” Einars said. “Help me up, Sanna.”

  He was speaking, he was okay. She moved into action, looping her arms under his armpits and maneuvering him near the bed, where she used her legs to get him upright enough that he could slide onto the mattress. She looked him in the face, but only a small red mark indicated where he’d smacked the table.

  “I’ll get some ice.”

  “I’m fine. My skull is thick, maybe too thick.”

  The tone of his voice was serious, too serious. Sanna didn’t like it. Serious meant change, and she didn’t want more change. She looked around for something to distract them from this conversation and knelt on the floor to pick up all the papers that scattered. These were the same papers Ande
rs had tried to give her the night before. This time she didn’t avoid looking at them, instead she studied them in silence. Columns added up all their monthly expenses, including the loan for remodeling the barn and the cider equipment. The number was enormous. The next column, a much shorter one, listed their much smaller monthly income.

  “Are these figures correct?”

  Sanna knew they were, but Einars nodded and confirmed the fears her denial had allowed her to ignore for almost a year.

  “I had a plan. It had seemed possible, but now I realize that was just me being stubborn. I love this orchard, this place with every fiber of my being. If I had a soul mate, this orchard would be it. Idun’s has whispered to me for years, filling me with dreams. And you seemed to share a similar dream, but we can’t do it alone. I thought Isaac and Bass might be the last puzzle piece in the plan, but I can see now that’s not the case. I should have known better. You are who you are.” He rubbed his hands over his face, trying to scrub away the sadness. He maneuvered himself under the covers and turned off his bedside light. “Anders is right. We should sell the land and cut our losses.”

  In the sudden darkness, Sanna clutched her stomach as if the words were punches. She gasped for air her lungs couldn’t find and backed out of the room, still holding the papers. She couldn’t unsee the stack of bills. Anders had been right about everything. The thought made her mouth pucker and her eyes pinch.

  Everything was falling apart and she couldn’t separate herself from it. Everything was her fault, she thought as she walked back to the kitchen. Her dad spent all that money for her to make cider, which she hadn’t been able to sell. She had been so busy and selfish making cider that he had to hire help for the orchard, which resulted in Bass breaking the window. And then again, she was too busy with cider making to help him fix the window, which caused him to fall. Now, while he was trying to heal, she couldn’t even keep the orchard running smoothly without being mean to a child. She was a failure.

  On the counter before her was an enormous loaf of bread, left earlier in the day by Mrs. Dibble. If she weren’t so angry and heartbroken, she’d tease her dad about how he was being courted with food. She unwrapped the six-pound beast and set it on the cutting board, where it spilled over the edges while littering the counter around it with errant sesame seeds.

  She wrapped her hand around the bread knife, her knuckles turning white as she squeezed the worn wood handle. She wasn’t ready to give up on this place. Staying here was the one balm to the deep, lingering hurt she’d nursed since college.

  • • • • •

  It was her freshman year at UW–Green Bay, her first time away from home. She settled into her dorm, which she shared with a girl who was rarely there. That suited Sanna just fine. Thad would often visit on the weekends, and they’d watch reruns on her little dorm TV or awkwardly make out. She’d made a few friends on her floor, and Anders wasn’t far away at another college, so they would meet occasionally for lunch at Kroll’s to feast on butter burgers and cheese curds. And then everything changed.

  It was a Thursday. She’d finished her first biology exam and picked up her mail. She often had a card or package from her dad, but that day she found a pale blue envelope. It was addressed to her in a handwriting she didn’t recognize. She ripped it open and pulled out a cream card with pink embossed letters spelling out THINKING OF YOU. The thick paper didn’t waffle in the late fall breeze, it stood stiff as she opened it and read the words inside.

  Dear Sanna,

  I know you’re probably shocked to have this letter from me. Why wouldn’t you be? Now that you’re in college, I had hoped we could reconnect. I can never make up for the years you had without a mother, but I’d like to explain my side and get to know the amazing woman I’m sure you’ve become.

  I can drive up from Milwaukee anytime you’d like to meet. My number is below.

  All my love,

  Mom

  Sanna stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, her world tilting sideways. This was the woman who had left her father. This was the woman who broke Sanna’s childhood in half and taught her never to get too close. This was the woman who kissed her six-year-old daughter on the head, then sent her out to play in the snow without another word. In her fuzzy memories, her mom was petite, with light brown hair and thin lips in a downward crescent. She had big, watery brown eyes, but Sanna understood now they were tears. Her mom had stayed in the house or ran errands at the local shops, but never worked in the orchard. She never ate apples.

  This little piece of stiff paper confused her. She wanted to tear it, burn it, flush the ashes into the toilet in her dorm room, then forget it ever existed. Just holding it felt like a betrayal to her father. But the six-year-old in her wondered what a hug from her mother might feel like, and she held the paper to her nose, hoping to smell a hint of her mom’s perfume, a hint at what her life was like. She was rewarded with a waft of spice.

  There was no address on the envelope, but it was postmarked from Whitefish Bay, a suburb near Milwaukee. Was that where her mom lived now? What did she do? Were her eyes still watery?

  Sanna didn’t call her but kept the card for weeks, taking it out, sniffing it, then hiding it again. She didn’t tell her brother during their lunches. She didn’t mention it to her father when she went home for her first Christmas break. She didn’t tell Thad, because why would she?

  After Christmas, she returned to school and on her birthday received another card, this time a pale yellow envelope, postmarked again from Whitefish Bay. The front of the card said HAPPY BIRTHDAY in different-colored letters. Inside it read,

  Dear Sanna,

  I assume because you didn’t respond to my first note that you have no interest in reconnecting. I understand. But now that you’re no longer with your father, I couldn’t let your birthday pass again without sending this card. If you ever change your mind, I can be up there in a few hours. I promise.

  Always in Love,

  Mom

  She had added her phone number again. Right at the bottom. All ten digits starting with a 414—the Milwaukee area code. It seemed foreign. She only ever called numbers in her own area code—920. She picked up her new cell phone, the one her dad had given her for emergencies. Without thinking it through, she called and held her breath as the phone rang.

  “Hello.”

  Sanna swallowed.

  “Mom?”

  There was a pause, and Sanna almost hung up.

  “Sanna? Is that you?”

  “I got the birthday card you sent. And the other one.”

  “I’m so happy you called. Can I see you? Can we meet?”

  Sanna stared at the posters on her walls, the ones she’d bought in the bookstore to make the room look less bare. Everything was new and didn’t have a history, so she had hung posters of Calvin and Hobbes and a map of the Shire—she liked hobbits. Her roommate’s side had one calendar—the kind that arrived free when you gave to a charity—stuck to the wall with a tack, still open to September’s panda.

  “I have some tests to study for this week.”

  “Oh, well, maybe another—”

  “But this weekend is open.”

  “Wonderful! Where should I pick you up?”

  She gave her mom directions to her dorm and wrote down the time on Saturday. Should she tell her dad about it? Anders? But she knew she wouldn’t. It was her secret, and she wanted to know how everything would turn out before she explained it to anyone. For the rest of the week she had envisioned the meeting. Her mom would hug her and apologize and tell her exactly the right things to make her understand why she left. She would realize her mistakes and come home to Idun’s. She knew it was a childish fantasy that her parents would reunite, but she couldn’t help it. When it came to her mom, she still felt like a child.

  She had wanted to wear a dress, but the below-zero temperature meant jeans and a sweater. She waited outside, peering inside every car and wondering if she’d recognize her. At last
a cream-colored car with gold trim pulled up to the curb. Out stepped a tiny woman. She only came up to Sanna’s shoulder.

  “I would have recognized you in a crowd—you’ve grown as tall as Einars.”

  She hugged Sanna, but Sanna could barely feel her mother’s tiny arms through her puffy winter coat.

  “Get in. It’s too cold to stand outside long.”

  Sanna folded into the seat, her knees almost to her nose, and fumbled for the seat adjustment. At last she found a button on the side. The seat moved like magic, silent and smooth, until it had gone as far as it could. She still couldn’t stretch out her legs, but at least they weren’t in her face anymore. The bauble on her hat kept bumping the ceiling of the car so she took it off. Her mom looked over.

  “I guess I should have brought my SUV. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I thought we could have lunch. I know a great Italian place.”

  Sanna nodded.

  When they arrived, the restaurant was dark, with white tablecloths and napkins folded into fans. Wineglasses already sat on the table waiting to be filled, along with three different forks. Sanna shifted uncomfortably in the chair, but her mom looked at ease.

  “The gnocchi is to die for. Would you like to get an appetizer? The calamari is good, too.”

  Sanna looked at the menu, conscious of her worn jeans and the stray thread from her sweater that refused to stay tucked in her cuff.

  “No. I’ll have the spaghetti.”

  They gave their orders to the waiter.

  Sanna’s mom looked at her as Sanna straightened the fork she’d knocked crooked with the menu and sipped from the water goblet. Her brown eyes were no longer watery and her formerly light brown hair was now a rich milk chocolate. Huge diamond studs sparkled at her ears, and another hung around her neck. No one would ever guess they were even related. Sanna’s eyes grazed her perfect pale pink manicure and stopped at the additional sparkles on her finger. Her ring finger. The diamond there was as big as a cherry pit. Pieces of her familial reunion fantasy disappeared with an explosion—in huge fiery chunks and all at once.