Sophie’s going to do that, too, she said. She’s already doing it. She’s waiting for the moment when things get hard enough that you leave. I’m not going to leave. I know, Victoria said. But she doesn’t. Not yet. She looked at him. So, just keep being here. That’s all you can do. Keep being here when things are hard.
Eventually, she’ll start to believe it. He didn’t have a response that was adequate. He just nodded. She pushed off from the doorframe, turning to go back into the cold. Victoria, he said. She stopped. Your father didn’t deserve you, he said. Whatever version of you he got. She was still for a moment, facing the dark yard, the cold air between them.
No, she said quietly. He didn’t. She went back inside. Ethan stood in the barn for a while longer in the cold, in the quiet, while the December night settled over the orchard and the farm and the household that none of them had planned, but all of them were building one clumsy, honest, imperfect day at a time.
The snow came to Dunore on the 3rd Saturday of December, which was unusual enough that Ethan stood at the kitchen window for a full minute just watching it happen. Snow wasn’t common in the Willilamett Valley. Rain was common. Rain was practically structural, the way it underpinned the whole season from October through April.
But actual snow, the kind that stuck and accumulated and changed the look of everything. That maybe happened twice a winter if you were lucky or unlucky depending on how you felt about it. This was early for it. The flakes came down fat and slow, the kind of snow that meant business, and within an hour the orchard rows were white between the trees, and the barn roof had gone from dark cedar to clean pale, and the whole farm looked like something someone had erased and started over on.
Sophie pressed her forehead against the glass of the living room window and watched it the way she watched things she hadn’t seen before, with a focused, proprietary attention, like she was taking inventory. Did you have snow in Eugene? Why? Ethan asked from behind her. Sometimes, she said without moving from the glass.
Not like this. It won’t last long. Usually, day or two. Can we go outside? He looked at her. She was still in her pajamas. After breakfast, she turned from the window and went to get dressed with a speed that he had not previously observed in the morning routine, which typically moved at the pace of continental drift.
Victoria appeared on the stairs, looked at the window, looked at Ethan. How’s the road? Passable, probably. He poured her coffee. I’m going to check the orchard after breakfast. Make sure the drainage is We’re going outside, Sophie announced, reappearing from upstairs in approximately 4 minutes, fully dressed with her jacket already on and zipped to the chin.
Victoria looked at her over the coffee mug. You have egg on your,” she pointed to her own chin. “I haven’t eaten yet,” Sophie said. “Right, eat first, then outside.” Sophie sat down at the table with the energized impatience of someone for whom breakfast had become an obstacle, and ate her cereal faster than Ethan had ever seen her eat anything.
The morning that followed was the best one they’d had, not because anything significant happened. It was just the three of them outside in the snow, which was 8 in deep by midm morning and still coming down. Ethan had legitimate farm work to do, checking that the young trees in the new section weren’t being damaged by the weight of the accumulation, and he did it, moving through the rows with a brush to knock snow off the more vulnerable branches.
Sophie followed him for a while, doing her own version of the same thing with a stick she’d found, whacking the snow off lower branches with considerable enthusiasm and somewhat less agricultural precision. Victoria stood at the edge of the orchard and took a phone call for 20 minutes, pacing in the snow in her boots with the kind of focused intensity that made the snow in the trees and the whole pastoral scene irrelevant to whatever was happening on the other end of the line.
Then she hung up and walked into the orchard and without preamble threw a snowball that hit Ethan squarely in the shoulder. He turned around. She was already walking away with an expression of absolute innocence. Sophie had seen it. She clapped both hands over her mouth. “Victoria,” Ethan said. “Hm,” she said without turning around.
He bent down, packed a snowball with more deliberation than was strictly necessary, and threw it. It caught her on the back of the coat. She stopped walking. Sophie made a sound that he’d never heard from her before. A real laugh, unguarded, the laugh of someone who’d been surprised out of composure. She laughed hard enough that she doubled forward slightly, holding her stomach, and then looked up at both of them with her cheeks pink from cold and her eyes bright and that laughter still on her face. And Ethan thought, “There she is.
There’s the person she would have been if things had gone differently.” And then he thought, “This is who she still can be.” Victoria got him three more times on the way back to the house. He got her twice. Sophie, who turned out to have remarkable aim for someone who’d never thrown a snowball before, got them both once each and then ran shrieking toward the porch, which was a sound the farmhouse had probably never heard in all its years.
They came inside covered in wet snow and dripping on the kitchen floor. And the kitchen filled with the sounds of three people shedding wet coats and stomping boots and complaining about cold fingers. And it was loud and damp and inconvenient and the most alive the house had felt since Ethan had lived in it alone.
Sophie peeled off her wet socks, looked at her feet, and said, “My toes are numb.” “Sit by the heater,” Ethan said. “Can we have hot chocolate?” We don’t have hot chocolate powder. She looked at him with the specific expression of someone who has just identified a correctable problem. Victoria has hot chocolate in her room. Both of them looked at Victoria.
