He hadn’t meant to overhehere. He’d come down for water and stood in the hallway long enough to understand the general shape of the problem before backing upstairs. She came down to breakfast the next morning looking like she’d slept 4 hours, which she probably had, but she made coffee and sat at the table and did not make it anyone else’s problem.
He thought about not saying anything. He’d gotten better at reading when she wanted the room to carry on as normal. But something in the set of her face, not fragile, Victoria was never fragile, but tighter than usual, a kind of contained difficulty, made him put his coffee down and say, “I heard some of your call last night. I wasn’t trying to listen.
” She looked at him. The Harmon contract fell apart. I gathered. Is it bad? It’s bad. She turned her coffee mug in her hands. It’s manageable, but it’s going to require rebuilding a significant amount of work, and I don’t have I need to be in Portland for most of the next 2 weeks, maybe three. He nodded.
Sophie’s hearing is April 18th, she said. I’ll be back before that. I know you will be. She looked at him with an expression he’d seen before, but couldn’t fully read. Something evaluating, something almost uncertain, which was unusual for her. You’re not going to ask me what it means for She gestured vaguely at the household at the arrangement.
I know what it means, he said. It means you have a business to run and you’re going to go run it. Sophie and I will be fine. She was quiet for a moment. I don’t want her to think I’m talk to her, he said. Same way you always do. Before you leave, specifics where you’re going, when you’ll be back. She’ll be fine. Victoria looked at him.
You’ve gotten better at that, she said. At what? At knowing what she needs. A pause. You started out guessing. Now you usually know. He didn’t have a response for that that didn’t veer into territory he wasn’t ready to look at directly. She left on Thursday. She talked to Sophie on Wednesday evening, pulled her away from the drawing pad long enough to sit with her on the porch in the cold evening air.
And Ethan could see them through the kitchen window, both of them facing the orchard, Victoria talking and Sophie listening with her hands in her pocket, and then saying something back that made Victoria look at her for a moment before nodding. He didn’t ask what was said. Sophie came back inside and went upstairs and 15 minutes later appeared in the kitchen doorway.
She said 3 weeks and she’d be back before the hearing. Sophie said, “That’s right. I know.” She stood there for a moment. She’s not leaving. She’s going to work. “Yeah, I know the difference,” Sophie said slightly defensively, as if she was correcting a misperception he hadn’t had.
“Then I made her a drawing for the hotel. She said she’d put it up.” He thought about Victoria in a Portland hotel room, pinning up one of Sophie’s drawings on the wall above the desk. The image was small and specific, and somehow it landed in him strangely, warmly, in a way that sat next to the other feeling he’d been carefully not examining for the past several weeks.
“What did you draw?” he said. “The orchard in the morning when the light comes sideways through the trees.” Sophie leaned against the doorframe. I’ve been trying to get the light right. It’s hard. Light is the hardest thing to draw. Did you get it? She considered close, she said, which from Sophie was high praise of her own work.
Men, the three weeks without Victoria were not easy, but they were good in a way that mattered. It was Ethan and Sophie alone on the farm for the first time without the triangulation of a third presence. No one to defer to, no one to share the weight, no buffer for the moments when the two of them ran out of things to say or bumped up against the still rough edges of their relationship.
Just a man and his daughter and 47 acres and the long Oregon march unspooling toward April. They developed by accident and necessity their own routines. Tuesday evening, Sophie had discovered a cooking show on television that she watched with a focus that suggested she was taking notes. and Ethan watched it with her, mostly because there was nowhere else he wanted to be.
Saturday mornings they went to the hardware store in town, which had become mysteriously something Sophie enjoyed. She liked the organized chaos of it, the bins of small hardware, and the smell of cut wood and the way Ethan talked to the people there, easy and familiar, in a way she was still learning to be in new places. They cooked dinner together on Wednesdays and Fridays, which had started as Ethan trying to involve her in something and had become a genuine shared project that produced mixed results.
Sophie had very specific opinions about food that she’d never volunteered before and was now, in the absence of other conversation, beginning to share. She felt that rosemary was overused in American cooking. She had a theory that most soups would be improved by being slightly spicier than most recipes recommended.
She told him that her mother had made exactly one dish from scratch regularly, a pork and rice dish she’d learned from a friend whose family was Filipino, and that she could remember every step of it if he wanted to try. He did. They looked up something similar online and spent a Friday evening mostly getting it wrong and ending up with something that was not what Sophie remembered, but was independently pretty good.
“It’s not right,” Sophie said, eating it anyway. “Close?” No, she paused. But it’s good. Maybe you’ll remember more of it over time, he said. The exact thing she did. Sophie looked at her bowl. She used to sing while she cooked, she said quietly. Not to me, just to herself. I don’t remember the song. He waited.
