“For the next few weeks anyhow, or so long as the fruit’s ripening in my pawpaw patch. It’s a pleasure sleeping on the hill at night. Coolest place in town.”
“Well, all my rooms are full, so I got no place for you here.”
“Oh, don’t worry about me. I got a little bed in the back room of my shop,” he said. “But you ought to come out and join me in the cool night air and see my pawpaw trees. If I don’t stay out there, the squirrels are going to eat my pawpaws, so I guess I won’t be able to come over and sleep with you anymore for a while.”
“Well, I don’t remember asking you.” Susanna wiped the sweat off her forehead with a bandanna from the nightstand. She had truly believed Wendell Wagner was going to fix the air-conditioning—that showed what a fool she was. They both listened to the sound of the barking dog and the shouting children. When something heavy hit the floor in the living room, the barking and shouting went silent, and then it all started up again, louder. They heard the front door open and close three times. Heard the storm door bang shut three times. Susanna normally would’ve gotten out of bed to stop all that going in and out.
“You know, I’ve never had a pawpaw,” she said. “I’ve heard of them, but I’ve somehow never had one. Never even seen one, truth be told.”
“Well, they’re fine tasting and they’re a mystery, too, a tropical fruit growing right here in Michigan, tropical as your banana. Sometimes they get ripe in late August, and sometimes it’s not till November. This year I figure it’s going to be early because of the heat.” A horn blared in the driveway. Wendell Wagner recognized the two-tone blast from his Ford Econoline work van. He asked, “Would those kids be getting in my truck?”
“You didn’t leave it unlocked, did you?”
“I believe I left it unlocked. You don’t think they’ll get in the back and mess with my tools, do you?”
“I sure hope you didn’t leave the keys in the ignition.”
Wendell felt his pocket and was relieved to find the wad of metal. “My keys are right in here.”
“Good. It’ll take my grandson Tommy at least ten minutes to hot-wire it.”
The truck’s horn sounded again, a sustained blast this time, like somebody leaning on it, and soon the ducks were going wild in the creek. By the time the horn stopped and the ducks quieted down, the donkeys were he-honking again to be fed.
“Maybe I can take a look at that old Ford tractor you said has got a worn-out engine. My dad had an old 8N most of my life, and I worked on it with him. Maybe it’s just a head gasket.”
“You can’t fix my air-conditioning, so why should I think you can fix my tractor? And I’ve got no money to pay you.”
“Maybe I’ll just do it in my spare time,” Wendell said. “If you don’t mind it taking a while. Maybe you’ll have a few tomatoes for me.”
“Tomatoes don’t look so good this year, unless you want them sun-dried on the vine.”
“Maybe you can give me some tomatoes next summer. It might take me all winter to fix that tractor.”
“You really going to give Larry a job?”
“You really think he’s too dumb to work?”
Susanna realized she wasn’t helping herself by criticizing Larry. If somebody gave him a job, he could pay rent.
“He’s an okay kid, I guess, so long as somebody’s telling him what to do.”
“I figure he could run errands, clean parts for me, change filters.” Wendell could imagine Larry assisting him in working on Susanna’s tractor between furnace jobs. Wendell imagined taking a break now and again to drink some coffee with Susanna and study the Ford manual—he could send Larry to borrow the manual from his neighbor Joe, who had a tractor of a similar vintage. “You ever drink coffee in this bed? This bed would be a nice place to eat breakfast. Or play cards.”
“Why’d your wife kick you out, anyhow?” Susanna asked. “Are you damaged goods?”
“Claimed she couldn’t stand my snoring anymore. She was my second wife, and we were only married three years. For the last two years she made me sleep on the couch. Then one day she said she couldn’t stand to look at me ever again.”
“Hmmm. Well, I didn’t hear you snoring,” Susanna said, re-weaving her fingers over her chest. She’d always enjoyed disagreeing with snooty women. “And I guess I never liked quiet anyway.”
“When I’m sleeping in my tent, I can hear coyotes. Frogs and crickets can be awful loud, too.”
“I don’t get much quiet around here. And if there’s coyotes yipping, it’s too noisy to hear them.” Since Rachel brought the yellow dog around, Susanna hadn’t heard the coyotes, but she didn’t want to give Wendell the satisfaction of saying how she missed them.
“Put that pipe wrench down, Sara,” said a boy’s voice. “You’re going to knock a window out.”
Wendell held his tongue. He had collected those tools over his whole thirty-year career, and he didn’t want to lose them, but he didn’t know if he’d ever get into such an interesting situation with a woman again.
“Ow!” shouted a kid. “I’m going to tell Granny you hit me.”
“I’m a little fearful of your grandchildren. There’s so many of them.”
“Just six or seven.” When Susanna tiptoed out of bed in her long T-shirt, Wendell wondered if he was supposed to get up, too. She locked the bedroom door and then crept back to her side of the bed. As soon as she got under the sheet again, somebody jiggled the door handle and whined.
“Granny, open up,” said a kid, jiggling harder. “Do you got the air-conditioner man in there with you?”
“Locked it just in time,” Susanna whispered.
Another girl’s voice sounded outside the door. “Tommy hit me. I’m going to hit him back with this pike wrench.” Something banged heavily against the lowest wooden panel of the door.
“You’re so stupid, you don’t even know what it’s called,” said a third kid with an authoritative voice. “It’s not a pike wrench. It’s a pipe wrench. For pipes. You think you’re going to hit a fish with it or something? You’re retarded.”
“Shut up, Tommy!”
“I believe she’s got one of my big wrenches,” Wendell said.
“Granny, Tommy said I’m retarded,” the smaller voice whined, but when Susanna didn’t respond, she added, “I’m going to hit you with it, Tommy,” and the tool clunked against the door again. Footsteps sounded down the hall and there was another sound, this time of the heavy tool crashing into a wall.
“Granny, are you in there?” said a new little girl’s voice. “We can’t find the air-conditioner man, but his truck’s here. Tommy says the man drowned in the creek.”
“You don’t think they’ll throw my tools in the creek, do you?” Wendell whispered. “I don’t want them to rust.”
“You got any kids? Grandkids?” Susanna asked calmly.
“My two daughters live in California. Hardly ever come home to visit. I’ve been thinking of taking a trip out there, if I can get a break between heating and cooling seasons.” He was sitting up a little now, propped on pillows. “My oldest is having a baby, my first grandkid.”
“You’ll probably move out there, then,” Susanna said and felt a pang of something like regret. “It’s never quiet with kids around.”
“Oh, I’ve got some things I’m interested in around here,” he said. “I don’t want to move anywhere else.”
Though she wasn’t looking at him, she could almost feel him wink, and it made her blush as she hadn’t in years.
“I guess you don’t remember,” he said, finally getting to a subject he’d been saving. “But we met once before.”
AFTER WENDELL PACKED up his tools and left, Susanna drank iced coffee in her hot kitchen and then spent an hour in her garden picking tomatoes. She tossed the split ones into five-gallon pails to feed to the chickens and pigs; a decade ago she would have cursed herself for such waste. She experienced a twinge of guilt over the state of her garden, but only a twinge; the heat
had made weeding toilsome, and the jungle might be considered shameful, but the overgrown pokeweed and burdock had shaded her tomato vines and protected them somewhat from the sun, and truth be told, the vision of the neglected garden made her feel cheerfully liberated this morning, like the ladies who burned their bras in the old days. When she finished, she stood beside the trunk of the exploded pine, among the wood chips and splinters, listening to the roar of cicadas and crickets. In this kind of heat at least she didn’t have to worry about mosquitoes.
“My uncle said he’s going to hire me,” Larry said later when he passed her in the kitchen. He was wearing his bath towel like a skirt again, but now he was grinning.
“I told him he was a fool if he did,” Susanna said. She continued slipping skins off the blanched tomatoes and dropping them into jars, but she couldn’t stop smiling. A dozen years ago, Wendell’s hair had been as black as Larry’s. Now she remembered the man clearly.
Though Susanna was way too busy to visit some guy’s pawpaw patch, she kept looking at the map he’d drawn for her. He’d made a stick figure with motion lines to designate a quarter-mile walk along a path. It would be a moonlit night, he said, but still it might be better for her to get there before it was dark. She’d been shaking her head no all the while.
TWELVE YEARS AGO, as Wendell Wagner told the story, he had been sitting in the open side door of his work van, eating a sandwich in the parking lot of Gil’s Potawatomi Grocery, preparing for a one o’clock service call. A woman with wavy chestnut hair had pulled up beside him in a flatbed truck. She’d gone into the store, and when she came out and got back into the truck, it wouldn’t start and lost power with each attempt. She opened the truck’s hood, put her foot up on a landscape timber she was using for a bumper, and gazed inside. When he got out and stood beside her, he felt a jolt pass between them, a shock so powerful he feared the truck had an electrical problem. In the back of the truck was about a half ton of manure, and it was starting to smell.
“I’ve got cabbage rolls in the oven,” she’d said as he approached. “I hate for them to burn.”
“My ma called them things pigs in a blanket,” Wendell had said when he found his voice. Then he’d helped her jump the truck with the cables she produced, and she’d said thank you and driven away. He’d thought her a fine woman, and he would have liked to converse with her, ask her about the load of manure and about the cabbage rolls to see if she put chili sauce on them the way his ma did, but she’d been in a hurry. He’d been a married man back then, and his wife had been sick and he’d been busy taking care of her anytime he wasn’t working, leaving little time for talking to interesting people.
While her jars of tomatoes boiled, Susanna fixed up some more milk powder and went to feed the baby donkey. She moved out of the way just in time so Junebug banged into a fence rail instead of her belly. He looked up, stunned for a moment, before grabbing hold of the big nipple and sucking. Susanna inspected the long fuzzy ears for mites. She glanced around to make sure nobody was watching, and then she buried her hands in the plush baby-fur on his chest and belly, rested her cheek against his sweet, fuzzy neck. As much as she didn’t like to admit it, she had changed over the last few years. Other than the occasional rooster, she was not inclined to butcher her own livestock—she would happily eat meat from plastic packages. She didn’t really want to let this donkey die, and she didn’t even wish for the demise of the spoiled cats, truth be told. Like Wendell had said, she was a woman who did what she wanted now. She wasn’t as poor as she used to be when the kids were all at home, and even if Larry never paid his rent, she wouldn’t go hungry. But if she wanted to kick him out, she would.
Maybe she’d spent too much time with her New Age daughter-in-law, and that was why Susanna now considered that Junebug might be a reincarnation of her old friend Tom Taylor, who had been killed on the train tracks—Tom Taylor had limped on his left leg, too, and he was as stubborn as they came. Or maybe the baby was the last residue of her ex-husband, a stumbling ass unrivaled when drunk. Maybe she was no longer even holding a grudge against the man. She worked a few burrs out of the hair on Junebug’s chest. When the milk was gone, she climbed onto a fence rail and watched the little guy buck and fart across the barnyard toward his humorless mama.
Maybe by being a damned fool for all the needy creatures, Susanna had formed some new kind of energy field. Maybe her tractor would start right up now if she cleared away the shreds of broken pine tree.
After Wendell told the story, she had indeed remembered him jumping her car, though she’d been in a hurry that day, cooking cabbage rolls and doing six other things. He didn’t have a beard then, only a mass of curly black hair that fell in his eyes. His Adam’s apple had been so sharp-looking, though, she’d thought it might hurt him from inside out. Something about her faulty memory made her remember him as wearing nothing but a towel, though he’d been out in public, so that was absurd. Though her truck had been old and rusted, he’d said something like, “Don’t tell me a good solid Ford truck like this has let you down.”
She hadn’t had time for nonsense back then, hadn’t even had the desire to puzzle out what he was trying to say. She remembered only that when she’d met his gaze, his shaven face had assumed a peculiar mixture of surprise and terror. Susanna had otherwise seen that look in the eyes of horses who’d run wild for a few years, horses who’d gone hungry and uncared-for, horses who’d almost forgotten they were domestic animals until you caught and saddled them.
He’d offered to test her alternator if she wanted to come to his place, but she said no, thank you, and drove home. A few weeks later she’d had to replace the alternator. And she had forgotten Wendell, more or less. But all these years later, she had taken in Larry for no good reason.
She was far too busy to go see Wendell Wagner, but after forty-eight jars of tomatoes were lined up on the counter in the hundred-degree kitchen, she put some crackers and cheese and tomatoes in a grocery bag and headed across town with the hand-drawn map.
She’d known about pawpaws from books and songs, but she’d never actually seen one until Wendell pointed out a plum-size peanut-shaped fruit the color of a d’Anjou pear dangling from a low branch.
“Can’t we pick it?” Susanna asked. They were sitting at a picnic table beside his tent.
“You can’t pick a pawpaw, woman. That’s sacrilege. You’ve got to wait for just the right moment. When it’s ripe, it’ll fall.”
“But you said it might take months,” she said. “Can’t we shake the tree, at least?”
“Shaking the tree, now, that’s a gray area. Let’s wait a little longer.” He’d shaken this very tree plenty, but with Susanna here, he could wait for things to happen in their own time.
“It’s a little cooler here, like you said.” Susanna took a deep breath and exhaled for a long time. The cicadas and crickets were as raucous as Susanna’s grandkids at breakfast.
THE THIRD MORNING after the third night she spent with Wendell in his tent, they heard a thud in the grass nearby. Wendell scrambled out with his pants in his hand. Susanna took her time dressing, and when she found Wendell he was still naked, sitting on the picnic table, but he’d finished cutting away the bruised green skin from the first pawpaw of the season. He handed her a peeled fruit the color of acorn-squash meat and closed up his pocketknife.
When she bit into the yellowish fruit, it gave only the gentlest resistance. The texture was that of custard. Susanna savored the sweet, dense flesh, found the mellow flavor resembled mango, but it didn’t have the tropical fibers, and it resembled banana, too, and also made her think of pears fried in brown sugar and butter, something she’d never eaten, but might, now that she’d thought of it. The grasshoppers rattled in the long grass all around them, and cicadas hissed from the trees.
“Thank you for this,” she said. Her sixty-third year had started with her doctor telling her she had high blood pressure and high cholesterol and was at risk for osteoporosis. Susanna had no
t been expecting that she would wake up one day and find life had gotten easier, that coffee would smell better, that tomatoes would peel with less effort, that she’d feel like jogging to the barnyard with the bottle of mare’s milk instead of walking, that she’d want to sleep in a tent and cook on a campfire. She noticed how intently Wendell was watching her, and she said in a measured way, “This is something new, all right, something different. I’ve never tasted anything like this before.”
She took another bite and wondered how on earth she had lived without this fruit all these years. The half dozen seeds disbursed evenly throughout the body of the fruit were smooth as magic beans against her tongue. Susanna thought about that radish-size moonstone Lydia was wearing, the way she smiled when she touched it. If Susanna could string a handful of these glossy, walnut-dark seeds into a necklace, she might wear it. She might reach up and touch the seeds to remind herself of this sweet taste.
“Are you serious about taking a look at my tractor?”
“As serious as the day is long,” he said.
She didn’t know if Wendell had any more idea than she did about overhauling a tractor engine. There was no law, though, that said she couldn’t give a man a chance.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THANK YOU, Heidi Bell, Carla Black Vissers, Andy Mozina, Lisa Lenzo, and Susan Blackwell Ramsey for sharing your time and wisdom during the creation of this book. Thank you, Bill Clegg, for helping conceive this collection, and thank you, editor extraordinaire Jill Bialosky, for its care and feeding. Kellie Wells weighed in early on the whole shebang, Alicia Conroy gave profound feedback on a late draft, and Margaret DeRitter helped me get the commas in the right places. Assorted kind souls helped me with one or more of the stories, including Diane Seuss, Heather Sappenfield, David Long, Steve Amick, Darrin Doyle, Jamie Blake, and Mimi Lipson.
It takes great friends, fellow writers, and supporters galore to make a writing life, and my crew includes the folks at W. W. Norton (thanks especially to Erin Sinesky Lovett) the brand new Clegg Agency (shout out to Chris Clemans), dynamic booksellers across the country (much appreciation to Dean Hauck of Michigan News Agency), clever librarians (thanks, Marsha Meyer for making so much happen at Portage District Library), Alison Granucci of Blue Flower Arts, and the good and kind publicist Sheryl Johnston. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation provided generous support during 2012.
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