It wasn’t a promise you made once and filed away. It was the kind you remade every morning you got up and made breakfast and drove to school pickup and sat in the kitchen at 3:00 a.m. with tea. He thought about this on a Tuesday in late February while he was in the barn repairing the fence post for the south orchard.
The work was cold and repetitive and gave his hands something to do while his head ran. The thing about farm work, about the particular rhythms of physical labor in a cold field, was that it didn’t allow for the distractions that let a person avoid their own thoughts. There was just the work and whatever you were carrying. He was carrying quite a bit.
Some of it was Sophie. Some of it increasingly was Victoria. Then March came. The valley started waking up. It happened the way spring always happened in Oregon. Not all at once, not cleanly, but in the gradual accumulation of small signs, the ground losing its iron quality underfoot. The earliest bulbs forcing themselves up in the vegetable beds.
The quality of afternoon light changing just enough to notice. The birds changing their behavior in ways that Ethan registered unconsciously after a lifetime of watching this land cycle through its seasons. The apple trees showed the first bud break on the second Tuesday of March, which was early. And Ethan walked the orchard rose the way he did every spring, checking each tree, reading the season in the particulars, the way you read anything you’ve spent years learning to read.
He was on the east side of the orchard, the older section where his grandfather’s trees were, when he heard footsteps in the dry grass behind him. Sophie was in her jacket and her school shoes, which were wrong for an orchard, and she was carrying her drawing pad. Mrs. Pollson had a staff meeting, she said.
Victoria picked me up early. She tell you where I was. I could see you from the house. She fell into step beside him, looking at the trees. What are you doing? Checking the bud break, making sure the frost last week didn’t damage things. He stopped at a tree and showed her where the buds were swelling on the tip of a branch.
Small, tight, the green just beginning to push through. See how the tip is starting to open? That means the tree is coming out of dormcancy. If we get another hard frost now, it can damage the new growth. Sophie leaned in to look. She reached up and touched the bud lightly with one finger.
“It’s soft,” she said, sounding slightly surprised. “Yeah, when they’re dormant, they’re hard. When they’re waking up, they go soft before they harden into leaves. You move to the next tree. You can actually tell a lot about how a tree is going to do this year by how the bud break looks. If it’s uneven, some branches coming out way ahead of others, that might mean there’s something going on with the root system or the water distribution.
Sophie was walking beside him, looking at the trees the way she looked at things she wanted to draw with that slow scanning attention. Can I ask you something without you getting weird about it? He glanced at her probably. What’s going to happen with the guardianship thing? The permanent one. He kept walking. The hearing’s in April.
I think it’ll go well. He paused. Karen Reeves seems positive about it. Dr. Hail submitted a good report. What happens if it doesn’t go well? It’ll go well. But if it doesn’t, Sophie. He stopped walking and looked at her. She was looking at him with those direct dark eyes. And he understood that she wasn’t asking because she was afraid it would go badly.
She was asking because she needed to understand the full shape of the situation the way she always needed to understand the full shape of things. If it doesn’t go well, which it will, I’d appeal. And keep appealing. You’re not going back into foster care. That’s not a possibility. I’m entertaining. She absorbed this. Then she nodded once, satisfied.
I want to plant something, she said. You You said in the spring. Yeah. What do you want to plant? My mom liked lavender. She had a plant on the window sill of our apartment. She kept it alive for years, which she said was basically a miracle because she killed everything else. She paused. I want to plant lavender by the porch.
We can do that, he said. Lavender does well here. She looked back at the orchard rose. Can I draw the trees? The buds. Go ahead. She found a spot near one of the older trees, sat down in the dry grass with her legs crossed, opened her drawing pad, and began. He watched her for a moment, the way she looked at the tree, then at the paper, then at the tree again, the deliberate alternation of looking and making before going back to his work.
He moved through the orchard in the afternoon light, checking trees, and Sophie sat with her drawing pad in the cool March air, and the farm moved around them both in its slow seasonal way. And it occurred to Ethan somewhere in the middle of that afternoon, that this this exact thing, the work, and the child, and the particular quality of light on the old orchard, was something he hadn’t known he was missing until it was here.
Victoria had a crisis in March. Not a personal one, professional. One of the distribution contracts that her company had been building toward for 8 months collapsed without warning when the other party’s parent company was acquired overnight, and the new owners pulled out of the arrangement.
It was a significant amount of revenue, and more than the revenue, a year of positioning work that now had to be rebuilt. Ethan knew about it because he heard her on the phone at 11:30 at night, standing in the kitchen, speaking in the careful, even voice she used when she was very angry or very worried and was controlling both.
