He put it on the table after the cake. Sophie opened the lid. Inside he’d put a small drawing, not his, he couldn’t draw, but a print he’d found online of a pear orchard in bloom, which he’d had printed at the Dunore coffee shop and matted in a simple frame that fit exactly in the box. He’d also put in a card, handwritten, which he was less confident about than the box.
Sophie read the card. She read it once, then she read it again. The card said, “You came here without choosing to. You didn’t pick this farm or this town or me, but I hope you’ll decide to stay anyway. Not because you have to, but because it’s yours as much as it’s mine. Happy birthday, Ethan. She set the card down.
She looked at the box. She ran her thumb along the carved initials the same way she’d run it along the pencil case. SB, she said. Yeah, he said. She looked up at him. Is that my name now, Brooks? It can be, he said carefully. If you want it to be, it doesn’t have to be. You can keep Whitmore. Your mom’s name is a good name to keep.
Sophie thought about this with the seriousness she brought to everything. Can I have both? She said. Whitmore Brooks. He blinked. He hadn’t considered that. I think so. We’d have to do some paperwork, but but yeah, I think so. She nodded once as if something had been settled. Then she looked at Victoria. “Can I have cake now?” “It’s your birthday,” Victoria said.
“You can have cake whenever you want.” January came in cold and quiet, and the farm settled into its deepest winter mode, and the three of them settled into something that was starting to look from the inside like a life. Not a simple life, not a life without friction. Ethan and Victoria had friction. It came from specific places.
From his tendency to make decisions about the farm and the household without consulting her, from her tendency to expect things to be done in ways she hadn’t communicated and then be short about it when they weren’t. One evening in late January, they had their first real argument, which started about the state of the kitchen and became about something larger and older and harder to name, the way the real arguments always do.
I’m not asking you to run things the way I run them, Victoria said. She wasn’t yelling, but her voice had gone to that particular flat register that was worse than yelling. I’m asking you to tell me when you changed something, the school pickup schedule, the supplier. I found out from the delivery guy that you’d changed the supplier, not from you.
I didn’t think it mattered, Ethan said. It’s a farm thing, business thing. I live here, Victoria said. I’m supposed to be your partner in this household. If I find out basic information from delivery drivers, what does that tell Sophie about how this family works? He stopped. That was the thing about Victoria.
She had a way of saying the real thing, the thing underneath the surface argument with a clarity that cut through his defenses because he didn’t see it coming. It tells her that communication is optional, she said quieter now. That’s not what we’re teaching her. He was quiet for a moment. You’re right, he said. I know I’m right.
She picked up her coffee mug, set it down. I’m not trying to be in charge of your farm. I’m trying to be part of this, and that requires you to let me in. I know, he said. I’m not. I’m used to doing everything myself. It’s not an excuse. No, she said. It’s not. They were quiet for a moment. From upstairs came the faint sound of pencil on paper.
Sophie drawing before bed as she did most nights. I changed the Apple supplier because Hagerty recommended a new one who does better volume pricing, Ethan said. I’ll tell you next time there’s a change. Thank you, Victoria said simply. It wasn’t a clean resolution. It wasn’t forgiveness so much as a door opened and walked through, and they both understood there would be other arguments, other doors, but they had walked through this one without slamming it, and that was something.
What Ethan did not know through all of January and into February was that Sophie was having bad nights. He found out by accident, the way you find out about the things that are happening quietly in a household, by waking up at 3:00 a.m. to the sound of something, a sound too small and too regular to be the house, and following it.
She was in the kitchen, sitting at the table in the dark in her pajamas with Humphrey, not crying, not doing anything particularly alarming, just sitting. She’d gotten herself a glass of water and she was sitting there in the dark holding it. He stood in the doorway for a moment. Sophie. She looked up, not startled. She’d heard him on the stairs.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. He came in, turned on the light above the stove. “Not the main overhead, just the small warm light above the stove, which was enough. He put the kettle on and got out two mugs.” “Does this happen a lot?” he said. She considered sometimes. She turned the glass of water in her hands.
I think about things. What kind of things? A pause. What it was like at the end with mom? She set the glass down. She was really sick the last few weeks. She was in a lot of pain and I didn’t know how to help. I just sat with her mostly and sometimes she didn’t know where she was. She’d say things that didn’t make sense and I’d talk to her so she knew I was there.
Her voice was level, matter of fact, which was somehow harder to hear than crying. I think about that sometimes at night. I think about whether I did enough. Ethan sat down across from her. The kettle was beginning to murmur. You were seven, he said. I know how old I was. I mean, you were 7 years old. You sat with your mother.
