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  In prison Tay started reading about small-scale agriculture and heirloom varieties, and got a community college extension degree in management.

  For two years, the conditions of her parole were that she couldn’t grow anything, not even a houseplant, and Tay stayed straight, because she had already found Nina on the internet, printed out the Paz Farms home page, and thumbtacked it over her kitchen sink.

  The day after Tay was released from her parole, Nina got her letter, all six pages of it plus a résumé.

  “Where’s Rach? I didn’t see her in the kitchen.”

  “She went to run the new menu copy to that letterpress I checked out. The one where Sam’s sister works.”

  Tay waited, her blue eyes bright.

  Nina just raised an eyebrow.

  “You like him.”

  “I’ve worked with him twice.” Nina had to look away. Tay was too open, too accepting. She was always wanting things for people, the people she loved. Wanting their happiness. Their success. She tended to people like she did her fields, and people and plants grew for her.

  Tay always claimed she owed Nina her happiness, her livelihood, her life, but the truth was, without Tay, Nina’s business would still just be a muddy cooperative with barely enough left over to plant seeds in leased fields.

  And without Tay, there’d be barely enough left over of Nina Paz to grow another season.

  Tay had served time, worked her way out of parole and into another life, but Tay sprung Nina from her prison, let her escape when she felt like she didn’t deserve it.

  She couldn’t think about Sam and what she might want from him and look into the eyes of the woman who had given Nina everything she cared for in life.

  Not yet.

  “You spent two whole days with him, nearly.” Tay’s voice was patient. Tay knew Nina.

  “Working. He’d never even been in a field before.”

  “You hired his sister for the menus?”

  “Rachel checked her out, I just mentioned Sarah’s press—you know Rachel’s been wanting letterpress menus.”

  “He’s on my hand list for the rest of the season.”

  “He wants to. He likes it. He’s under a lot of stress opening that clinic and trying to make some neighborhood partnerships.”

  “With a farmer?”

  “With Paz Farms. We have three community lots on the southside. And you know—vegetables. Healthy living. Health clinic.”

  “He’s really hot.” Tay leaned forward and put her chin in her hand. “Like a young Robert Redford.”

  “Knows it, too.”

  “Isn’t that kind of your thing?”

  Nina closed her eyes. “Kind of.”

  “But you’ve hung out with him twice. You’re sending his sister business. You’ve made plans that will keep putting him in your path.” Tay said all this slowly, like she was trying to figure it out. It made Nina nervous.

  “Kind of.”

  “I think this is good, for the record.”

  “For the record, there is no this.”

  Tay wrinkled her red nose. “Why are you lying to me?”

  “I’m not lying, I’m—”

  “But you are lying. You like him, I can tell. You can call it what you want, a professional partnership or whatever, but you’re getting yourself involved with him, so that you’ll see him more. I’m not an idiot.”

  Nina pressed a hand over her belly, looking at Tay, feeling like total shit.

  She was lying, but not exactly to Tay.

  She needed to lie to herself just a little bit more, for just a little while longer.

  She shouldn’t have to, and she almost did it, started with some measure of honesty about who she was and where she was traveling from, but instead of telling Sam that he scared her with that raw way he held her, touched her, told her things, she told him to call her “Boss” and got his sister a job.

  “You’re not an idiot, Tay. I’m sorry.”

  Tay’s eyes were bright, shiny, and Nina pressed her hand to her stomach tighter. “I know I’m not,” Tay said. “I know you’re kind of fucked up, too. It’s okay, Neens. That’s the thing. It’s okay. Just say, ‘I’m fucked up and don’t know what I’m doing.’ It’s me. Lie to someone else. Lie to yourself. But you can tell me anything.”

  Nina covered her face then, pushed her fingers into her eyes.

  Then she felt Tay’s hands over hers, pulling her hands away. “Come on.”

  Nina looked right at Tay. “I’m fucked up and don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “There you go, baby.”

  The back door beeped as someone came in and silenced the alarm.

  “You still here, Nina?” Rachel called out from the back.

  “Tay and I are up front.” Nina scrubbed away the tears she hadn’t managed to press in at the onslaught of Tay’s relentless love.

  Rachel came up to their table, right out of the hottest part of the day, her skin shining, not sweaty, her sundress perfect and unwrinkled, her short Afro so pretty and cool with her glasses, six feet of unruffled perfection.

  Nina sometimes daydreamed of a café space with one of those glassed-in kitchen areas where the patrons could watch their meals being made, and she bet every table would be full, every minute they were open, to watch Rachel Delassixe cook.

  “What’s this?” Rachel gestured between Tay’s and Nina’s faces, disapproving.

  “You know, Monday afternoon tears is all,” said Tay.

  Rachel made an irritated sound. “Y’all just need to eat. You just come in from the farm, Tay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hmm.” Rachel shook her head. “And you.” She looked at Nina. “You’re still here messin’ with your numbers? You probably did rounds on all your lots this morning, too, just to ‘check on’ the volunteers?”

  “Is this lecture leading to you making us something to eat?” Tay needn’t look so hopeful, Nina thought, because Rachel never resisted a chance to feed her people.

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “If you’re tellin’ me why everyone’s cryin’ on a Monday afternoon. Particularly with all the numbers stuff out. You know how I get with numbers.”

  “Nervous,” Nina said.

  “That’s right. Nervous. I understand food, I don’t understand numbers, except that I know you won’t let me make food unless the numbers are good. So tell me, are you cryin’ about numbers?”

  Nina grabbed Rachel’s hand. “No, chica, your numbers are good. Really good, actually.”

  “Because I just gave that Sarah woman a big order for menus, and she’s not cheap. I want to make those menus.”

  “It’s all good. In fact, sometime, after the quarterly meeting with all the shareholders, we should talk about making this place bigger.”

  Rachel gave Nina a long look and then closed her eyes and crossed herself solemnly. When she opened them, she looked at Nina closer. “So why you cryin’?”

  “She likes Sam.” Tay kicked out a chair for Rachel to sit in, but Rachel just looked closer at Nina.

  “Ay Dios mio.”

  “The doctor?”

  “Yeah,” said Tay. “The doctor. His sister is the letterpress lady and Lacey, that nurse who came in the other day and was so nice? That’s his business partner for that clinic going in where the old high school admin building used to be.”

  Nina didn’t live in this neighborhood, and, even after the two years since she’d put in her lots and the café, she wasn’t used to how freakishly fast news traveled. Sam had lived his entire life here, worked here, was setting up to work here for the indefinite future.

  She made herself take a deep breath.

  That was something to think about.

  “A doctor, huh.” Rachel made one of her noises that could mean she didn’t approve or that she was planning Sam and Nina’s wedding appetizers.

  “Are you feeding us, or what?”

  “Yeah, I have a pan of mac ’n�
�� cheese, some of those beet greens with deep-fried scapes, then those sandhill plum tarts. Sweet tea, maybe, if it hasn’t gone manky.”

  “Jesus, Rach. The café’s not even open today.”

  “Not the first time we’ve cried around this table on a Monday afternoon. I like to be prepared.”

  “Hey, Rach,” Tay pulled her legs up onto the chair and wrapped her arms around her knees. There was a fine spray of dried mud over her shins, mixed with her blond leg hair and the swirls of a sun and moon tattoo on her left leg. Nina felt a sudden surge of affection just looking at Tay’s knees, dirty from working at the goals they shared, together.

  She loved these women.

  She wanted everything for them.

  She wanted everything they wanted.

  “Yeah, Tay.”

  “You still got those whiskey samples from that new distillery?”

  “I got a whole case of the stuff. I added a bread pudding with local whiskey sauce for September. Why?”

  “Bring out a bottle.”

  Nina wouldn’t think anything of Tay’s request to imbibe, but she asked for whiskey like she needed it, not to make their party more interesting.

  “Tay?”

  At Nina’s tone, Rachel sat down.

  Tay squeezed her legs in tighter. “So you know how I thought my period was getting all weird a few months ago?”

  Nina felt her breath go cold in her chest. Her blood slow. “Tay, just say it all. All at once.”

  “It went from weird to bleeding almost all the time, but it wasn’t right. Watery, sometimes. Pain, sometimes. I went in and they did the Pap smear, and it came back abnormal, right away, my doc, she sent it in fast because she didn’t like what she saw just looking. And you know, the end of the week before last? When Adam had to cover because I took those two days? I had a punch biopsy, that’s when they take a few little pieces of my cervix. And then—sorry—” And Tay broke down, and Nina and Rachel were right there, Rachel’s long arms all the way around Tay’s strong body, Nina twisting Tay’s soft dreads away from her face.

  “I tried to say it all at once, but I haven’t really said it. It’s cancer. I’ve got to—Adam’s got to cover again tomorrow. I need an MRI and I’m not supposed to drive because you know how I get claustrophobic? So they’re gonna give me something, I think, so I can’t drive, and I want to know if one of you will come maybe? I just want to ask if one of you, they’ll only let one person to come back with me—”

  “I will be there.” Nina smoothed her rough hands over Tay’s arms, her face. Kissed her temple.

  “We’re here through whatever comes, baby,” said Rachel, and Rachel met Nina’s eyes and that was the worst, what she saw in Rachel’s face that she needed Nina to see and had to hide from Tay.

  Grief and fear, making cracks in all the love.

  “I know, I knew you would be. I just needed to figure out how to tell you guys.”

  “You did perfect,” Rachel whispered.

  “Yeah, okay. It wasn’t going to be easy.”

  “No, honey.”

  And for a while, that’s all they did, exchange praise and reassurance.

  Hold hands.

  Once Tay had unfolded her body and prayed with Rachel, who had asked her to, Nina slipped away and told them she would gather their food and their whiskey.

  First, though, she pressed herself against the freezer door, at the very back of the kitchen, and when he answered, something unbuckled from inside her chest.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” she started with, even though she wasn’t.

  “You couldn’t,” he said, and that sounded so true, his assurance she would never burden him, that she felt her tears start again.

  “I’m calling because I need Dr. Burnside, actually.”

  He was quiet for a heartbeat, just one. And then when he answered he wasn’t that smiling surfer in the sun, he was someone she hadn’t met yet, and wished she didn’t need, but was so glad was there. “Tell me what’s going on, Nina.”

  Then she did. She told him.

  Then she said, “I’m freaking out, Sam. I’m just totally freaking out.”

  “Eat your dinner, be with your friend. Tomorrow, I’ll meet you after her MRI, we’ll talk everything through, okay? You might have more questions then.”

  “Thanks, Sam.”

  “No, don’t thank me, please. I’m sorry. I’m sorry your friend got this news and that you’re so scared. I’ll pull some information for you, too. You should talk to Lacey, maybe connect her with your friend? Most of Lacey’s work has been in women’s health. She knows her stuff.”

  Then he was quiet, and Nina didn’t have anything to say.

  But he stayed on the phone, she could hear him breathing, and so she kept it to her ear while she pulled out their plates, heated their food, wrapped utensils in napkins.

  He stayed right there, and didn’t say good-bye until she did.

  He just stayed right there.

  Chapter Seven

  Nina could hear Sam arguing on his cell phone with Lacey even through the two sets of double doors between this freezing cold room where the MRI was and the waiting room. He wasn’t yelling, not exactly, but his voice was rough and low, and so anxious that it carried to her like a knife whistling through the air, threatening to pierce her body where it was strapped to a spinning wheel.

  She didn’t like that voice, but she was currently grateful for it, because it was the voice that had persuaded the radiologist to order another mild sedative for Tay, even though she’d seemed so calm.

  She’s sweated through her gown, Sam had growled to the other doctor, in the booth. Let her relax through as much of all this bullshit as she can.

  Now Tay was sleeping, and Nina watched the tech carefully cinch a Velcro belt around Tay’s waist. Nina was stroking Tay’s skin—her forehead, her cheek, her arm, even the soft fur of her shin—and worried that Tay was too cool, though she didn’t have goose bumps.

  The room was so cold, but she didn’t have goose bumps on skin that was always so warm, was so tanned from her work, inked from her adventures. She didn’t even have a smell, and Tay was always redolent with the smell of dirt and of a body that worked hard in the sun, and of the herbal oils she used in her soap and in her pale dreads.

  Her eyes were closed, her eyebrows almost white against the reddened skin and freckles of her forehead, the sun crinkles around her eyes slack and smooth.

  She stroked her cool skin and listened to the rise and fall of those verbal knives coming through the door until the tech told her to step back, and the noise of the machine started up and Tay was slid into it.

  The MRI got louder, it banged so loud it sounded like it was broken and there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to its noises.

  Tay kept sleeping all through the terrible noise, and it made Nina wonder if farm equipment and loud festival concerts had damaged her hearing as she and Rachel and Adam suspected. Tay was thirty-eight years old, same as Nina, her hair wild with blond ropes strung with fat wooden beads, her arms and legs swirled with whimsical designs, her work active and outdoors—a woman who has arrived at her middle age—fierce and vital.

  Partly deaf, probably, and her favorite subject besides ideas for the farm and the jam band she and Adam played in was building her retirement accounts.

  Cancer.

  Nina felt the chill of the room all the way through to her bones and hugged her bare arms around herself.

  Most of the time, like Tay, she felt as young as she had as a teenager, an impossibly young woman, walking in the muddy fields with Russ, laughing when he pinned her against something, anything, an equipment shed, an irrigation tank, just to kiss her, or get enough of their clothes off to feel the wind and sun where their bodies glistened wetly and joined.

  She wasn’t that girl anymore. She wasn’t a girl. That girl had ease with her parents, with Russ’s family, but she’d lost Russ, and then she’d taken herself away from them, taken away from
them the baby she and Russ had made so desperately and quickly in some way station of war, and now she was a woman with a farm of her own, and though she didn’t have children, she had these people.

  Her people.

  Her family.

  Hers.

  Exactly who she had gathered to herself, as surely as she had gathered up the land of her farm, parcel by parcel. Her people were more her life and her farm than the land was. They were Nina Paz, they made her as surely as anything she had lived through or done or planted. Without them, she was just a runaway from the last time she’d had a life.

  She stood, right here, and in this freezing cold room with her heart still and strapped to a table, she was standing right in the middle of her life.

  Behind her, the entire life of a girl and a young woman who salted a field to survive.

  In front of her, fields so vast she couldn’t see the ends of them from one place, and friends she loved as her family. Who were her family.

  She pushed her fist against her chest.

  She knew what it was to lose absolutely everything, and here, right in the middle, between loss and everything, exactly one half of her life lived and survived, she’d burn her fields down to infertile crust to salvage this sleeping woman.

  She felt the tears on her face, but really, she was angry. How dare life snarl and threaten her like this. She made the sacrifices, she paid the costs, she tithed and tithed and tithed to keep just a fucking scrap of what she had wanted.

  Tay was hers, just as Russ had been, their families had been, the orchards had been, their baby had been.

  Who did she need to remind of what had been taken and what she had paid?

  Nina felt the burn where her nails had dug into her palms.

  She turned and banged out the double doors.

  She would, at least, silence those knives.

  * * *

  Sam looked up to find a very angry Nina staring at him.

  When he’d met her at the hospital with her friend—who seemed to be a bit of a hippie if hippies had muscles like bantamweight boxers—he’d worked hard to stay friendly and professional, to answer Tay’s questions. He’d had a hard time keeping his eyes off Nina—if she’d been beautiful in utility shorts and mud, he’d nearly died to see her in a tight black T-shirt and a skirt that somehow moved all around her thighs when she walked, with her hair loose from its braids and in blue-black waves almost to her waist.