Читать книгу Better Food for a Better World - Erin McGraw - Страница 8

In the front corner of David and Cecilia’s living room, Sandy McGee, the most diligent of Cecilia’s violin students, sawed at a G major étude. Cecilia tapped out the time on her thigh and shaped her mouth into an encouraging smile. Talent didn’t always show at once; sometimes it needed time to be lured, to reveal itself like a slow miracle. Cecilia often found herself thinking about miracles when she was with Sandy, who shot her bow like a pool cue and whose red, bitten fingers displayed an embedded instinct for the wrong note.

After their first month of classes Cecilia had given the girl sheet music for easy fiddle tunes, “Old Joe Clark” and “Bile Them Cabbage Down,” songs that would make the most of her good ear and sense of rhythm. But when Sandy looked at the illustration of a man sitting on a stump beside a happy pig, tears came to her eyes. “You don’t think I can play real music, do you?”

“This is real. People study for years to play this. It’s more popular than Mozart.” Cecilia had picked up her own violin and played a few bars of “Old Joe Clark.” Usually kids liked the bouncy melody, but Sandy bit her lip. When Cecilia put her violin down, the girl started again with her honking rendition of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

In the two months since then she had barely improved. Her vertiginous notes wobbled around the tiny apartment—every week Cecilia imagined paint peeling, light bulbs rattling. Now she pressed her hands together, trying to catch her last flake of patience before Sandy’s playing scoured it away.

“Lightly,” she said, pointing to the bow the girl clutched as if it were a steak knife. “Easy. Listen to the sound you’re making.”

Sandy drew the bow across the strings, losing control partway through so that the bow rode right up on top of the bridge and produced a yowl. She scrubbed a furious hand across her eyes. “I practice. I know it doesn’t sound like it. Every day. My mom makes me go out to the garage.”

“Think of your bow as a feather on the strings,” Cecilia said.

“I try. It doesn’t help.”

“And relax your shoulder. Move your arm from your elbow.”

Chewing her ragged lower lip, Sandy confronted the sheet music, its single line of fat quarter notes stairstepping up the staff, and resettled her face against the chin pad. When she finally brushed at the strings, the bow landed so lightly she hardly made a noise. “Better,” Cecilia said.

She listened, she nodded, she discreetly rubbed her arm. Very BlueBerry ice cream, on special this week and selling like nobody’s business, always left her arm sore. David theorized the high sugar content in Very BlueBerry made it more difficult to scoop. He’d once actually talked to a chemistry TA at the university about temperatures and bonding properties of sugar molecules. The next day he insisted on coming to work during her shift, taking her place behind the counter and chipping at the rock-hard ice cream while she was left sponging tables that were already perfectly clean. Since then she’d been loading up on Advil, doing her own scooping, and assuring him she felt fine, never better.

“‘Fine?’” he’d said last night after dinner. “I don’t think ‘fine’ is good enough. I want you to feel magnificent.”

“Fine is good, David. Most people wish they felt fine. Fine is—fine.” She nodded at him brightly. His broad face wore an eager expression, right at the brink of enjoyment.

“I want you to feel perfect,” he said.

“I don’t think I could take the pressure.”

He had pulled her onto his lap, and she leaned against his heavy arms, even though the embrace was sticky in the room’s heat. “Well, ‘fine’ still isn’t good enough,” he said, shaking her long hair out of its braid. “We’re going to have to do something about that.”

What he wanted her to feel was pregnant. He had brought up the subject two months before, pointing out that they had been married five years, and he was coming into some money from his father, and they had savings. Why wait? Cecilia couldn’t think of any reason, and she was happy to throw away the condoms and tubes of Conceptrol that slid around in their bedside drawer. But she hadn’t been prepared for David’s enthusiasm. Not only did he initiate sex every night, until Cecilia heard herself sighing as soon as the dinner dishes were done, but he turned nosy, asking when exactly her latest period had started and marking the kitchen calendar with a black dot that she could see from across the room. He talked about cervical mucus. Sharply, and more than once, she warned him that he’d better calm down. He brushed his hands across her breasts and said he hadn’t been so excited since she’d let him court her, a pretty piece of talking that made her blush and relent.

David, she reminded herself, was a good-hearted man, as uncomplicated as water. His round, soft body cushioned her knobby joints, his beard scrubbed genially at her face, and his gentle nature soothed her daily onslaught of worries, her sense that she had never quite done enough. Cecilia knew she had fallen in love with him in large part for his ability to ease her fretful soul. “Everything will be all right. Shh, now,” he said night after night. Although she never believed him, she knew he believed himself, which sometimes was enough to make her relax.

But lately his easy faith only made her nervous. She felt like a high-strung dog, alert to every sound or shift in the wind, while cheerful, oblivious David strode beside her. When he talked about fitting a crib into the bedroom with them or thought up baby names—“Wolfgang,” he suggested, trying to please her, “Wolfgang Ludwig Johann Sebastian”—she answered by not answering, chattering about the store, asking him about his tomato plants, complaining, like everybody, about the heat. He looked at her with a puzzled disappointment that made her heart hurt. Now of all times they should be sharing a dreamy, sweet dialogue. But she couldn’t control her edgy spirit. She wanted a baby well enough; she just didn’t want it as much as he did. She had never wanted anything as much as he, so very suddenly, wanted this baby.

Sandy finished her étude—half whisper, half hee-haw. “Again,” Cecilia said.

“I bet you don’t really want to listen to this.”

“Keep playing the notes. It’s always hard at first to find the music.”

“This”—Sandy held the violin by the neck and wagged it in front of her—“isn’t music. When is it going to get better?”

“Sandy, I don’t know. There’s no timetable. You do your best and keep trying. Or else just quit and go watch TV.”

“You’re not very encouraging.”

“You’re not the first one to tell me,” Cecilia said, surprised when she got a grin out of the girl. It was Sandy’s bad luck to catch Cecilia when she was worrying about her husband, a man who would have cheerfully told Sandy to play what she was good at, not what she loved. Trained as a botanist, he believed in practical goals: If corn didn’t thrive, plant beans. If tobacco failed, try berries. So Cecilia studied her husband and tried to figure out what harvest he had missed, that he was so ready to plant a baby in its place.

She had come up with no answer yet. She should, she knew, bring the issue up at Life Ties, but every time the thought occurred she let it slide away again. She wasn’t ready for the glare of interest, the advice on everything from baby-raising methods to her and David’s sexual positions, the frank stares that would fix, week after week, on her meager belly. The group’s basic rule was members could bring their problems to meetings, not that they had to. Cecilia clung to the distinction.

Normally, so long as she stayed safely out of the fray, Cecilia liked Life Ties. The group was loosely allied with a Unitarian church that half of El Campo more or less attended for its good youth group and monthly wine-and-soup suppers. One of the church’s many outreach organizations, Life Ties was a support group for married couples, meeting weekly in the church’s fellowship hall and using the church’s Xerox machine for its mailings. Dimly based on AA, the group had rules and goals and slogans, but mostly the meetings were just talk: disappointments, surprises, betrayals, the occasional triumph. People talked, and then the others gave feedback. Somehow, amazingly, the talking helped. Husbands and wives discussed and revised and recommitted themselves to their marriages. They explored their difficulties. They found new solutions. “Cheaper than divorce,” somebody always said. “The weekly news,” somebody else would add.

The group met on Sunday nights, sometimes twenty people or more, sometimes only six. All the Natural High partners came at least sometimes. Vivy and Sam often slid in late. Other couples showed up with a rough regularity, new members appearing when old ones decided they’d had enough.

The couples Cecilia liked best had been long married. They told stories of domestic savagery both ornate and inventive. By their standards Cecilia and David’s five years of marriage, so considerate, so mannerly, hardly constituted a marriage at all. In five years Cecilia had never had an affair, never squirreled away money from the checking account or hit David, never—to take a recent example from a doctor’s wife—spread resonant rumors about his personal hygiene until patients refused to shake his hand.

Other people stole, they whispered, they destroyed. Their lives struck Cecilia as remarkably full of options. Sometimes, after hearing about slashed upholstery and mangled hard drives, Cecilia felt abashed at the puniness of her own actions. Then David would speak up with reassuring clarity about sharing, communication, and the importance of a united effort, and Cecilia would sit up straight again. The meetings renewed her pride in him, an emotion she suspected would slip away if she didn’t have Life Ties to remind her of it.

Lately, he had been listening to the happy couples, the joyful ones who sailed together through tribulations. At home he quoted them, his face alight with glaring hope. Cecilia couldn’t help herself—the more David talked about uplift, the harder she listened to the squabbling couples, the ones going over and over some worn-out patch of discord. She liked the peculiar self-possession of people who could quarrel weekly and with heat about who deserved the good parking space beside the house. The night a couple married twenty years came into the meeting already growling, Cecilia made sure to sit close, so she could hear.

“You want that boat,” said the man. “Don’t say you don’t.”

“I want a life,” snapped the woman. “I want to come home at six o’clock and take off my shoes.”

“You have to sacrifice a little to get the life you want.”

But do you have to sacrifice bare feet? Cecilia wondered. And who gets to decide?

“You get paid for overtime. I don’t,” the man said. “And you like to fish. You like it more than I do. You have to look ahead.”

“Do I? Thank you for telling me. What else, if you don’t mind saying so, do I have to do?”

“You’d cut off your own arm to spite me, wouldn’t you?”

The woman paused. “No,” she finally said. “I like my arm.”

When the laughter—nervous, short-lived—sputtered out, that week’s group leader stepped forward to make the speech about conflict’s deep roots, and asked the man and woman to come back next week with new plans for their future. “Who else?” he asked, and Cecilia kept her eyes on the soft blue linoleum until a pair of newcomers, married not quite a year, came to their feet, the man pulling the woman up beside him. “He,” the woman said, jerking her chin at her scowling, straw-haired husband, “he thinks coming here is a good idea.”

“What ideas do you have?” the husband asked. “Buy some cocaine, go out to a club, buy some more cocaine?”

“He thinks I’m his problem. He’s his own problem. A big one.”

“You don’t want a husband. You want a playmate. Somebody to sit in the sandbox with you.”

The woman—short, broad, her forehead high under a helmet of shiny black hair—laughed, a sound like tearing cloth. “You’re right. I’d like a playmate. But instead I’ve got the goddamn nursery school teacher checking to make sure I pooped on time.”

Even Nancy, two seats down from Cecilia, looked uneasy, although she usually welcomed confrontation and stout talk. David was the one who said, “Come on, you two. The fact that you’re here together means you’re willing to find some common ground.”

The man said, “The fact that we’re here together means I forced her into the car.”

“He shoved me into the front seat,” the woman said. “I could get him for assault.”

“You can start this if you want,” the man said, his voice winched tight. “There are lots of crimes we can talk about.”

“He loves to threaten me,” the woman said. “He loves to tell people that I’m a whore and a jailbird. Like he’s the angel Gabriel. Where do you think I met him?”

“Where?” Nancy asked.

“In detox.” When the woman smoothed back her ridge of glossy hair, Cecilia could see the fan of acne over her temple. “But I don’t tell people that.”

“Why not?” the group leader asked.

“Look at him. Isn’t he better than God? Nobody would ever believe he was hopping around a room, clawing at his T-shirt.”

“I believe you,” David said. So did Cecilia. The man’s face, which had been bright with anger, had gone chalky, his lips gray. Cecilia thought he might claw at his T-shirt any second.

“He doesn’t like me to tell people,” the woman said. In the room’s hush she sat quietly, then rested her hand on her husband’s arm. He looked at her hand until she moved it away again.

David said, “The important thing is to finish what you start. Once you make a decision, stay with it. Even if you find out it isn’t turning out the way you expected. Keep going anyway.”

Cecilia nodded. The next day she would realize David’s words weren’t quite in line with the Life Ties philosophy, but for now the man and the woman nodded too, and the group leader proposed they all take a break. Vivy headed for the parking lot, Sam stayed for tea, and David hastened to the new couple to give them his phone number.

Sandy McGee squealed up three more notes, then lifted her bow from the strings. Cecilia glanced at her watch: ten minutes left.

“Can I play my second piece now?” Sandy asked.

“Good idea.” Cecilia cranked her smile back into place. “Think for a second before you begin. Remember: you want to sound like trickling water.”

The girl obediently paused, then dragged her bow across the strings, smearing the opening four notes.

“Lightly.”

After two more attempts, Cecilia stood and said, “I think that’s enough for today,” taking the sheet music from the stand. Sandy looked up with her brackish green eyes, then took her time unlatching the violin case and nestling her violin back into its velvet.

While she was still loosening the strings of the bow, a knock came at the door, and Cecilia sighed. A part of her was always waiting for some neighbor, perhaps the woman two apartments down, so edematous that her ankles looked like quivering bags of fluid, to complain about the noise. Feeling Sandy’s interested gaze, Cecilia went to the door, searching for words of appeasement that dissolved when she found Sam, with his shaggy, exuberant curls, grinning at her.

“Hey,” he said. “How’s that design coming? I’m on my way downtown. If you want, I’ll take them right now and swing by the copy shop. Save you a trip.”

“Oh Sam—I forgot all about it. Darn it. I’m in the doghouse now.” She’d meant to design the new ad last night, something Paul could post to the website and they could use for new flyers. But Cecilia had spent last night brooding about David, and the design was nothing but a stack of rough sketches on the kitchen table. “I’ll get them in by this afternoon.”

“We can do them right now, if you want,” he said, shrugging. “Take a half hour. I can still drop them off for you.”

“You’re a lifesaver,” she said, then stepped back to let him into the apartment and put her arm around Sandy. “This is my new Paganini,” she said.

“I heard her,” Sam said, and turned to the girl. “Do you like playing the violin?”

“Not exactly,” Sandy said, wiggling with embarrassment. “Do you like listening?”

“Not exactly,” Sam said, and Sandy let out a bray of laughter.

Cecilia gave the girl’s shoulders a squeeze and turned toward the kitchen. “What kind of ice cream today?”

“Mocha Crunch.” Sandy looked back at Sam as they followed Cecilia. “This is the best part of the lesson,” she said.

“I believe it.”

“Hard work deserves a reward,” Cecilia said, scooping out a generous cone for the girl. “Now, remember: move your arm from the elbow. You want a touch that’s light, but firm.”

“A feather on the strings.” Sandy’s smile was ironic, older than her years, already defeated.

Cecilia matched her smile. “That’s right.” A tan dot of melted Mocha Crunch shone on Sandy’s violin case as she threaded her way back to the front door and left it half open behind her.

“Am I wrong, or is that girl’s heart breaking?” Sam asked.

“Every day a little more. It’s killing me. Want some Mocha Crunch?”

“I’d think you got enough of this at the store,” Sam said, nodding at the freezer stocked with brown and beige Natural High cartons.

“This is how I keep violin students: bribery. Believe me, Sandy McGee doesn’t leave here feeling uplifted.”

“I listened for a few minutes. You have amazing tolerance,” Sam said.

Cecilia winced. “Was it too awful? The poor girl tries, but I think she’s working off sins from some other life.”

“I did wonder what the song was supposed to sound like.”

Cecilia walked into the living room and fetched her violin from the top of the piano, where it had lain untouched for days. “Something like this,” she said, returning to the kitchen and swinging the violin onto her shoulder. She skimmed her bow over the easy notes, the baby tune. Sam clapped in time, so she played another chorus, nudging the sequence, speeding up the tempo, turning and working the melody a little. The lighthearted music chimed in the space between her and Sam. Attentive now, Sam really clapped, and Cecilia showed off, adding the first six measures of a Bach partita before putting down the violin. “It starts that way, anyway.”

“Speaking of Paganini.”

“BA in music.” She made a mocking face.

Sam shook his head, setting his curls bouncing. “You should be giving concerts, not lessons.”

“And who’s going to come hear me, my mother? I haven’t noticed a big call in El Campo for violin concerts.”

Sam leaned back and stretched out his hairy legs. They reached halfway across the kitchen. “Take it from an old promoter: people don’t know what they want until you give it to them. ‘Imagination Is the Mother of Desire,’ or whatever the hell it is we say on the napkin.”

“‘Right Imagination Is the Parent of Right Desire,’” Cecilia said, laughing. Sam had a knack for making things easier; he found ways to soften corners. With his sloping grin and his ambly-shambly grace he reminded her of a clown. David said that even in college Sam had been the jester, the one who could break up tension in a room. Cecilia could well see why Vivy, that coiled spring, had married him. What she had never been able to see was why Sam had married Vivy. Now she said, “You’ve got to keep your eye on the details.”

“There’s your slogan for the new design: ‘Natural High Ice Cream: Keeping Our Eyes On the Details.’”

“‘Keeping Our Eyes On You,’” Cecilia said, grinning to match his sloping, goofy grin.

“‘We Know What’s Good For You: Natural High.’”

“Hey, I can use that one.” Cecilia sat down across from Sam and picked up a fresh piece of paper and a pencil. Sketching fast, she drew a cartoon man with a bulb of a nose and a toothy smile. He wore an old-fashioned body builder’s leotard and stood with his biceps flexed. The muscles popped up round as scoops of ice cream. In each hand Cecilia put a sundae. Then, casting a quick look at Sam, she drew springy curls all over his head and printed “You Know What’s Good For You: Natural High” under the figure’s floppy feet. “There,” she said.

“My feet aren’t that big,” Sam said.

“Artistic liberty.”

“I didn’t know you were an artist. On top of playing the violin.”

“I doodle, that’s all,” she said, reaching for another piece of paper and a ruler. Suddenly she felt self-conscious, as if she should point out how bad she was at math and tennis. His gaze rippled over her like a breeze. “Why don’t you watch some TV or something? You’ll make me nervous if you sit there.”

“Actually, I wouldn’t mind having some ice cream. I skipped breakfast.”

“Help yourself. Don’t eat the Triple Vanilla—it’s old.”

She marked off four straight lines to make a frame, and then started to draw in her cartoon weight lifter, but the easy confidence had gone out of her hand. She kept lifting the pencil, making pointless little lines; she could see already that the new figure lacked the charm of her first sketch. Several times she glanced up to check on Sam, who had heaped a bowl with Almond Carob and now strolled around the small kitchen, spooning ice cream into his mouth and humming. She said, “This is coming out all nervous.”

“Why not just use the one you already drew? It’s perfect,” Sam said.

“It has a smudge. You don’t know the first thing about being a perfectionist.”

“I try not to.” He sucked another lump of Almond Carob from the spoon.

“Easy to see you were never a musician,” she grumbled, glancing at him sideways but pressing down the corners of her mouth. “You front office people never care about the nuances.”

“So I’m the cigar-chomping front man? Thank you very much.”

“And I’m the grubby little fiddler down in the pit with the nervous twitch. Little Miss Pure Art.” She was prattling, she knew. But it was a relief to chatter with Sam Jilet and watch his suntanned toes idly work his flip-flops on and off.

“I can be pure,” Sam said.

“No, you can’t. Only performers are crazy enough to be pure. You, you’ll always have one foot on solid earth.”

“I can be Ivory soap. Ninety-nine and forty-four hundredths percent pure.”

A fat drop of ice cream had fallen onto Sam’s shirt, and a brown ring like a minstrel’s outlined his mouth. “Here,” Cecilia said, handing him a store napkin from the stack she and David kept on the table. This one read, “Responsible Action Is the Gate to Freedom.” She also handed him “The Boat of Commitment Can Sail Over the Waters of Uncertainty” and “The Marriage of Intention and Action Bears the Offspring of Clarity and Joy.” The last one was David’s contribution after a night of brainstorming, and Cecilia thought it was pretty good, even if it did sound like it came from a fortune cookie.

Scrubbing at his shirt, Sam leaned across the table to read the next one: “‘Our Goal Is Not Gold, but Wholeness.’ That had to be Nancy’s. Everybody else’s goal is gold. So is David pure? He’s not a performer.”

“He’s Ivory soap. Like you.” Embarrassed, rushing, she added, “He’s very supportive of my music. It was his idea to have me give lessons.”

“Not exactly performing.”

Cecilia shrugged. “It’s something. And we really do need the money. Not that it’s much.”

“David says you guys are ready to start a family.”

“Did David? I didn’t know we were going public with that piece of information.” Looking back down at her drawing, Cecilia added a tuft of grass under the weight lifter’s feet, then regretted it. Fussy. “David’s full of plans, but they all hinge on me getting pregnant. Which I’m not.”

“Relax. The baby will come, and after the first few sleepless nights you’ll wonder why you wanted it so much.”

“Listen, you don’t need to tell anybody about this,” she said without looking up. “I feel a little vulnerable. I had a dream that Life Tie-ers were hanging over my bed, and Nancy was giving me advice.”

“Vivy’s had that dream too. Then she dreams of bringing an AK-47 to bed with her,” Sam said. “If anybody had told me back in college that Nancy Califfe would turn into the thought police, I would have fallen out of bed laughing.”

“What was she, a flower child?”

“Baby, we were all flower children.” He clattered his bowl into the sink and sat across from Cecilia again, leaning back in his chair, his hands locked loosely behind his head. He was all lines—tendons, bones, as ropy as a boy. “She was strictly long dresses and Birkenstocks. She looked like a cross between a Quaker and Grace Slick.”

“Nancy?”

“She had a German shepherd named Garcia with a bandanna around his neck.”

“You’re making this up.”

“Swear to God,” he said, holding up his hand. “She used to come by everybody’s apartments with loaves of whole wheat bread she’d made. You could build a wall with that bread. And she was slow. We used to tell her movies started an hour earlier than they really did so we could get to the theater on time.”

“I can’t even begin to imagine this,” Cecilia said. “What happened to that person?”

“Beats me. She and Paul got caught up in some guns-and-sombreros group that was ready to bring on the revolution. By the time she gave up on Che Guevara, she had turned into the Nancy you know and love.”

“This is amazing. David hasn’t told me any of this stuff.”

“He may have forgotten. He’s changed too.”

“If you tell me that he used to wear tie-dyed T-shirts I’ll know you’re lying.” Even to her own ears her voice seemed round with suppressed laughter.

“Naw. David’s always been a white T-shirt guy. But he was the Plant Man. He liked plants better than food. He liked plants better than girls. None of us ever figured him to work behind a counter.”

“Ice cream wasn’t exactly a career choice, you know. He got his PhD in botany, but by the time he came back home every job was agribusiness. If he’d had an MBA people might have been interested. When Paul and Nancy offered him partnership, it looked pretty good.”

“And now you get to live a life filled with Natural High napkins,” Sam said.

Cecilia plucked “Our Goal Is Not Gold” from the pile, stared at it a second, then folded it into a small square. “You want to know the worst? We liked the napkins. We were all set to live lives full of intention and action.”

“‘Were.’”

Cecilia unfolded the napkin, then folded it again, lining up the edges more precisely. “I’m just a little sick of it all, you know? Most times I can think of something better to do on a Sunday night than go to Life Ties. Last week K-Camp broadcasted Joshua Bell and the Berlin Philharmonic. There are days when I look at my life and I don’t recognize one thing about it.”

“What do you want to do?” Sam asked. “Would you rather be playing in an orchestra?”

“Let’s not talk about heaven,” Cecilia said, making herself meet his gaze and smile. “Sorry to get so worked up. I’m just frustrated. I won’t mean half of this tomorrow.”

“And half of it you will.”

“Pretty self-indulgent, huh?”

“Are you kidding?” He leaned forward and looked at her steadily until she began to tremble, and looked down. He said, “I wish I had anything I wanted to do as much as you want to play your violin.”

“Don’t even say it.” She reached for another napkin to fold. “Don’t—talk.”

Sam didn’t. Instead he watched her fold, and the silence between them thinned like high-altitude air.

When Cecilia spoke her voice was very tight. “You know what David likes? Leaf texture, quality of the soil, humidity. The little balcony outside our bedroom is so jammed with tomato plants we can’t even walk out there. Every year he goes out to the community plots and helps people with their peppers.”

“Would he leave Natural High for a plant job?”

“He would have at first.” She studied the napkin, compressed into a square the size of her thumbnail. “Now he’s settled in. I think he’d rather not know.” Instantly, Cecilia felt like a traitor, although she hadn’t said a word that wasn’t true.

“Maybe I’m going to be out of line here,” Sam said. His voice sounded strange too, or maybe Cecilia’s alarmed brain was distorting things. “Maybe this is information you don’t want. But there’s a walnut orchard over toward Mineville that’s looking for a part-time guy. Half farmer, half overseer. New people bought the property as a tax shelter, but now that they’ve laid eyes on the place they’re hot to get production up. It would mean a chunk of time out of town every week, but I thought about David as soon as I heard.”

“How would he square it with Natural High?”

“Long-term investment. We have to buy our walnuts someplace, and we like to support local growers. Besides, there’s no actual rule against outside work, even though Nancy acts like there is. Head, heart, and soul to Natural High.”

Cecilia was shaking her head, although she was already envisioning David striding among his trees, his fingers stained from the walnut juice, his voice lifted in song. Giving in, she imagined herself joining him, strolling under the canopy of branches while he pointed out new grafting techniques. And then—why stop now?—she imagined them at home together with their milk-faced children, smiling, hand in hand, any flutter of unease pushed aside by David’s hearty farmer’s joy.

She said, “Don’t say anything to him; let me think about it.”

“I don’t know how long the job will be open. It’s not like David’s the only underutilized gardener in El Campo.”

“Let me think.” She stood and moved to the kitchen window, away from Sam. The job would fulfill David’s deepest self, remind him of his truest desires. It would give him an outlet for all his hope and good cheer. It would take his eyes off of the kitchen calendar and direct them back to the sky and horizon, where they belonged. Therefore, her job, the job any Life Ties member would declare her obligation, was to make him take it, whether he wanted to or not.