Laugh Page 6
“Holy shit.”
“Do you even know how big an acre is, Opie?”
“No fucking clue, but it’s big enough we can’t see everything that’s yours standing in one place.”
She looked at him, and felt her middle bottom out at the expression on his face.
Grinning like a kid, reverent.
She couldn’t help it. “What do you think?”
He looked at her and laughed. “It’s fucking amazing, is what I think. I mean, I’m a bad one to even ask, I think I’ve been out in the country, I mean actually standing in it, not just watching it roll by from a car window, maybe twice in my whole life, and both times were for school. I can’t get my head around this. How much is yours, how much you’re responsible for, but goddamn, Nina.” He looked away again. “Jesus.”
His open appreciation of what this meant was more than she bargained for.
She had just wanted him to see something, something that eased up that tension in his hard body, and then he had to go and see a little of her, too.
“You put on that sunscreen?”
“Hell yes. I don’t fuck around when it comes to cancer. Plus, I’m protecting my assets.”
“Your freckles?”
He flicked her off with an ease that spoke of practice. “No, my pretty face.”
“I don’t know if you’re the Burnside with the pretty face. I’ve seen your brother.”
Sam made a dismissive noise and bumped her shoulder with his. “Bet he’ll lose those Byronic curls by forty.”
“Yeah, what’s that, in twenty years? Enough time for me.”
“Why wait around for the kid to lose his looks when you have something time-tested and perfectly fucking swag right here? You wanna see my abs again?”
“Swag? Joder.”
She looked at her fields again so she wouldn’t smile at him too much and jumped when she felt his hand close over hers. “Thanks for taking me out here. It’s amazing. I look at this, all this, and it’s so big and I don’t know, green. Everything is perfectly alive, I guess. It just seems like something so much more than regular life, like everything could be okay out here. Which probably sounds asinine to you, because you see this all the time, it’s your work.”
“It doesn’t,” she said, her nose burning, a sudden prickle in the corners of her eyes.
“It doesn’t what?”
“Sound asinine.”
“No?”
“I love my city plots, and my café, my farm store. But out here feels like home. Like where I’m supposed to be.”
“So why don’t you live in that big house?” He pointed to the pretty farmhouse behind them, across the irrigation culvert.
“I own most of the acreage, and then lease another couple of plots, the ones across the irrigation line that the house sits on. John Lake lives there. I lease from him.”
“The musician?” Sam whistled and looked at the house with renewed interest.
“You a fan? He’s a really nice guy, actually.”
“I met him once. When he played with the Lakefield Symphony. PJ got me backstage after the performance and I watched PJ and John Lake and a couple of other guys jam for a while. He is a good guy.”
“Next time I settle up with him, I’ll take you along.”
Sam grinned. “You do that. Lacey told me you were from the West Coast originally?”
“When I was three my mom and dad migrated from Mexico to pick apples in eastern Washington state. I had an aunt with papers in Roslyn, Washington, until my parents could manage papers for themselves. I was actually born in the U.S., in Oregon, during an earlier agricultural work trip they took.”
“I don’t know a lot about migrant workers, I admit.”
“Some farms are good, keep good records, pay fair, have good conditions for work. Those places make it easier for migrant workers who are interested in living in the U.S. permanently, actually. Any kind of legit record or paperwork helps. Other places are awful, of course, poor conditions, uneven or nonexistent pay, fear and abuse.”
“Were you guys okay?”
“My parents were lucky. After they established permanent residency, they met a farmer from the north coast of the state, on the Olympic Peninsula, who was hiring a farm manager for his organic mixed-crop operation. He liked my dad. We moved to Sequim just as I was entering second grade. I don’t even remember most of the Spanish I learned when I was little. Just swears. My parents were proud of the English they’d learned and spoke it at home.”
“They still there?”
“Yeah. My dad owns shares in the operation now. My mom and I started a café and catering business there, actually, which she runs with Russ’s mom. I did that as part of my senior thesis project. I have a BS in agriculture from Eastern Washington University.”
“How long you been here?”
“Ten years.”
Sam caught her eye at that, clearly surprised. “I mean, I guess that makes sense, you have all this”—he gestured at her fields—“and your business and everything in the city, but I guess. Well. You must be wearing your sunscreen.”
She smiled. “Good genes, too. I’m thirty-eight.”
“I mean yeah, everything you’ve done. You said your husband was in Afghanistan. I guess I should just say things like ‘You’re beautiful,’ not you know, ‘Hey, you don’t look old.’ ”
She laughed. “You don’t look old, either.”
“No, I don’t. I look awesome.”
This man. Even softened up by her cornfield, she liked him. “You’ve never married.” She didn’t ask, Lacey had already told her.
“No. I mean, the easy answer is medical school, residency, working my first job.”
“Is that the answer, the easy one? Or you got something else?”
“I’ve wanted to. I’m not against marriage. I want what my parents had, I guess.”
Nina tried to think if Lacey had told her anything about them, other than that they’d passed, and his dad only recently. “Yeah?”
Sam bent down and picked up a broken-off corn blade as long as his arm and started tearing it into strips. “They were happy.”
“My parents were happy. I think that made it easier for me to have a happy marriage, too. So if you’re not against marriage, and you grew up seeing a good one, why aren’t you fat and happy, Sam Burnside?”
“I had a hard time getting along with my dad. I mean, always. We loved each other, but he didn’t understand me. You know what ADHD is?”
“Yeah, like the kids who have a hard time paying attention? Just go like a little motor?”
“Right, well. I had that. I mean, I still have that. It doesn’t go away. For me, it’s always been this noise, like everything competing for my focus at once. Plus, yeah, it’s hard to stay still. Poor impulse control. I was an angry kid, too. And maybe’s it the fresh air out here fucking with my head, why I’m telling you this, but I still get angry. Right now, I feel like there isn’t anyone I’m not fighting with. My brother. My two sisters. Lacey. Just a goddamned mess.”
She watched him shred the corn blade, one careful strip after another. Thought about how his mind seemed to follow his body, a step behind. His strut when he was trying to appear easygoing. It didn’t take much imagination to see him as a frustrated kid—restless, bright, exasperating.
“Right before I met you here, I was with my brother PJ. At that diner a few blocks from your café?”
“I know it.”
“I hate that place.”
“Why?”
“It’s been there forever. Hasn’t changed at all. I used to have to go there to do homework in high school. I had to get it done before my sisters and brother were done with their after-school stuff so that after my dad picked them up I could take care of them while he drove his limo for second shift. That’s what he did—had a limousine service.”
“Lacey told me one day when your dad’s limo drove by. I guess a family friend drives it for the church now?”
“You get along with him?”
“He was easygoing. Got along with everyone, but that’s what made it hard. He was everyone’s friend but mine, was always the guy who knew what to say, except to me. He never yelled or anything, he’d just get this look like maybe he was sad or disappointed or something.”
He looked up at Nina and his gray eyes were squinting, his mouth sad. “I was the one who yelled. Slammed doors. Kicked walls. Every once in a while, especially when I was in high school, almost always after Mom died, I could get him to yell back.”
“ ‘Get him to’?”
“Fucked up, right? Because yeah, that’s what I was going for. I’d rather get him into a screaming match then get one of his sad-eyed looks before he cracked a beer in front of the game.
“That’s the problem with PJ, now. We met up at that diner before we took care of Kate’s chickens, and I sat there in the old booths, got worked up without meaning to. PJ’s different. Like a genius. Sailed through school double time, ended up on the East Coast at a music conservatory for cello. Plays in the Lakefield Symphony and he’s only twenty-two fucking years old.”
Nina looked at Sam, squinting out over the fields, and guessed. “You and PJ fought? Before we went to Kate’s?”
“Yeah. Sat in that old booth, and I was missing Des, but instead of just saying so, started in on her, how I’m pissed she left, and he rightfully defends her, so I start in on him, teasing him about his crush on Lacey for no fucking reason. He left, and no wonder.”
She stood with him while he sprinkled his leaf shreds over the ground. He’d been worked up, reached for her at Kate’s.
“With the chickens, were you just …?”
“No. I’m trying to … explain. How it is with me. How it is when I want to do something for people. How it is I admire you because it’s hard for me. I love my family. When my mom was around, I tried to be more patient with myself and with everyone else, for my mom. She was like me, but she didn’t really get angry. Sad, sometimes. Maybe she got angry at herself, while I got angry at the world. Get angry at the world. It made her so upset to see me have trouble with Dad so she’d tell me stories about him. About the two of them. How they fell in love, their marriage before they had kids. What she loved about him even after four kids. Those were my bedtime stories, and as far as I know, she only ever really told me.”
“Oh. Wow.”
“Yeah.” He found her gaze, and the slant of the sun highlighted the fine wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, the creases bracketing his mouth, the freckles close and dense as the carrot seeds she liked to scatter over damp filter paper to sprout. He looked good out here, in the sun. Like that surfer boy she saw in him, right from the first.
“You want your own love story, then?”
He looked back into the corn. “I think I do. I mean, so far I keep fucking them up, but that’s what I’m aiming for.”
Oh, Sam.
“So, what do you think, Opie?” Nina kept her tone light, but this was it, a chance to anticipate something more than disaster and grief and failure, and she had to believe there was a reason this restless man, a man who looked so beautiful in the sun, was standing next to her and willing to tell her he wanted a love story.
“What do I think about what? I feel like I’ve pretty much told you all the thoughts I’ve ever had.”
“Are you in?” She turned to him and hooked her thumbs in her shorts.
He looked at her, right at her, for a long moment, and Nina was shocked to feel herself get warm, like maybe she was actually blushing.
He had to know she didn’t mean them, not really, but standing out here in the sun and wind, sharing what brought them there, it almost felt like that could be a newly tilled field. The one to grow something in. Something they planted.
She liked Sam Burnside. She liked his hands on her, his breath against her neck, understood his desperate impulsiveness.
She looked away, let the blush bleed through her face and neck and then fade in the wind.
Careful. Easier to remind herself looking at these fields, thinking of who counted on her fidelity to long seasons, longer years.
“The summer, is what I mean,” she said this to the corn. “You want to be my farmhand, or what?”
She couldn’t see it, but she could feel it, feel his grin as it shone off him, next to her.
“Yeah. Fuck, yeah. Absolutely.”
He was smiling. Broad with plenty of crinkles, his hair so red and shining in the sun as it slanted low from behind them that it seemed magical. Phoenixlike.
“You have to eat, though. It’s hard work, even for a weekend farmhand. Carbs and everything.”
“You want me to eat your pie, Farmer Paz?”
“I do. I’m serious. Pie and whatever else Rachel feeds you at the café.”
He saluted. The wrong way, but it was so cute and boyish she didn’t care.
“And I’m the boss. In fact, you should start calling me ‘Boss’ just so you remember.”
“Got it, Boss.”
“And no kissing, or leg fondling, or groping against chicken houses.”
He narrowed his eyes at her, trying to see if she was serious, and she tried very hard to appear serious but was no doubt failing. Something about his eyes was completely unconvinced. “You know I have to respect that, just because you said it.”
“That’s why I said it.”
“Even though you keep looking me up and down like that when you say it.”
“I’m not blind or without needs but I’m also smarter than you are.”
“No doubt. And I won’t even pull your braids, I promise, but Boss?”
“Yeah, Opie?”
“And I won’t say this again, because it counts as harassment, but my brain’s gonna be fondling your legs basically twenty-four/seven all summer long.”
“You know what?” She put her arm around his waist and tugged him close. Friendly.
Friends.
“What’s that?”
“Every time you think about my legs, kissing me, touching me?”
She felt him grin again. “Yeah?”
“I want you to eat a piece of pie.”
Chapter Six
Nina entered the last row into the spreadsheet template her accountant had shown her how to use this afternoon, and then went back and forth between the handwritten directions she left and the laptop to make the pivot table.
She’d been restless as the weekday began—excited, terrified, confused.
Sam.
“Did I just hear you squeal?” Nina jumped at Tay’s voice behind her.
“Yeah, look!” Nina pointed at the pivot table with its neat data summary.
“Um. Wow. Look at the cool boxes and numbers, I can see why you squealed. Remind me not to show you my browser history.”
“It is cool. This little box is going to save me all kinds of money when I make my seed order for next year.”
Tay sat down across from her, filling the space with the smell of skin hot from the sun and the homemade peppermint soap she washed her pale, honey-colored dreads in. She was wearing a Paz Farms T-shirt and a skirt tie-dyed different shades of blue.
“Your nose is burned.” Nina reached over and touched the hot stripe on the bridge of Tay’s nose. Tay’s skin was a mosaic of tan lines and tattoos, the skin on her face creased with laugh lines and painted over with sun freckles.
She looked liked an earth mother, like she should be dancing naked at a festival, which she was, and did, now and again, but she was also the fiercest farm manager Nina had ever met, and she included her dad in that assessment.
“It got hot in the Jeep so I zipped off the roof, checking on harvesters today, forgot to put on my hat.”
“Get all the cukes in?”
“Yeah,
I think we did great for yield, even with that weird wireworm problem we had earlier. The sizes and uniformity are pretty good, I think Vadnais’ Pickles will be happy. I’m staggering their shipment and held back about ten percent of the yield for the farm share boxes. Plus, we have that whole field of banana peppers, which I know you’re worried about, but I think will be okay for rounding out this contract. Alison has the pickling recipe from Vadnais ready to go for the newsletter.”
“When will the pickles be ready for the farm store?” Nina took careful notes. She was worried about the pepper field. She wanted to bask in Tay’s enthusiasm but felt a blunt nudge from experience that they were going to lose money.
“They’ll be there for Cider Weekend in September. I called Dennis from the field to prep him for the yield and he’s positive the original contracts we put together will totally work.”
“That’s a lot of pickles.”
Tay grinned. “Fucking delicious pickles. People are going to go nuts. I can’t wait to approve that sauerkraut commission, we totally gotta get in on the fermented shit, Neens. Kombucha, sauerkraut, kimchi—it’s like a thing.”
Nina laughed. “Well, you’re never wrong. I trust you.”
Tay grinned. “Seriously. I’m never wrong. These pickles are going to make a pile and you and Dennis will be so happy, then I’ll be happy because I have my eye on this heirloom pickling cuke that all the old-timers tell me stays bright in the brine and I don’t know. Fucking satisfying to bring back varieties like that, you know me.”
“You’re the comeback kid, I do know.” Nina let herself get excited, just a little, about the pickles, even though as a farmer she was categorically suspicious of counting any kind of chicken in advance. But Tay really wasn’t ever wrong and she was the comeback kid.
Tay had been raised on a farm in Iowa and worked her way up to management for a consolidated ag company when her peers were still partying at college.
Then, devastatingly, she was arrested and served eight years in prison on a guilt-by-association charge after her live-in boyfriend got his growing operation noticed, including the kitchen-table dealing and processing.