Luke Mills returned home from the work that paid to the work that did not. After turning onto his property, he down-shifted and took slowly the ascending curves of the long gravel driveway, inspecting the orchard. One winter when he was a boy, his father pointed to a stand of apple trees and told him they looked like the hands of the dead, grown giant through their passing, reaching back through the surface of the earth for the life that had been taken from them.
At ten, Luke had not seen the ominous skinned phalanges his father conjured. To Luke, the slender branches, even stark and leafless, promised a spring of blossoms and a summer of fruit. He’d taken his father’s description into his mind, though, and held it there long enough to paint an entry for the library’s contest for the best painting of Polk County. The piece had been a good one for his age — good enough to make the final show — though to Luke the hinged claws reaching toward a withered core of winter sun did not look like real trees. In the final judging, he’d been bumped from the runner-up prize by a crisp painting of the historic courthouse in Columbus. One of the judges, a local artist who left the area soon after, left him a note. “You have made a beautiful thing, but it is seeped in darkness. This is not the Polk County that the people want represented.”
Luke held no artistic aspirations, so he’d mourned only the free family meal at the Tryon Diner — he and his parents never ate out from home — and not the red ribbon that went with second place nor the right to compete in the statewide “painting the counties” contest. Looking now at his own apple trees, he saw beauty in their lines. Yet he knew that any promise held there was contingent on the coming month’s nightly temperatures, a force as greedy and out of his control as the huge hands of the jealous dead in his father’s vision.
He heated a can of chili on the stove’s working burner and broiled cheese over spinach leaves onto two slices of bread, eating the meal with a cold bottle of sweet tea in his quiet house. It was a rare evening in the orchard’s year that did not demand his labor. He knew he should be glad of it, for he had worked hard all day, installing low-end mahogany cabinets in the new places going up around Lake Adger: big-roomed houses whose cheap materials did nothing to stall the county’s ever-rising property taxes. “I’m working for the enemy,” he told Kristen all the time.
It was because of Kristen that he wished his apples called for him to stay home, and he rehearsed the short, dishonest phone call that would allow him to remain put for the night, keeping company with the bloodhound and the speckle-eyed shepherd who watched his every bite, rapt. As he thought of Kristen’s loud television set and her endless chatter about her day’s worth of clients, he reminded himself of why he was with her in the first place.
In school she’d been a girl too young for him to notice — a freshman when he was a senior. He knew her older brother, though. A common type, with a confederate-flag sticker on his truck bumper, Tommy often bragged about how his granddaddy had been a bootlegger and weren’t bootleggers the original Nascar racers, outrunning the sheriff to deliver their liquor. By the time Luke had come back to town and Kristen had cut his hair in the barber/salon housed in the trailer in the McGuinn Market parking lot, Tommy was in jail for meth. Kristen wasn’t at all the scrubbed-faced, spindly girl Luke had gone for in college, but she was pretty underneath the lightened hair and beige make-up, and Luke didn’t really care so much about looks, anyway. Kristen seemed decent in the way she brought Tommy care packages and helped his girlfriend care for their little boy. She was always trying to get better for herself, too, making extra money with a pet-sitting service and getting licensed as an esthetician so she could work at the new day spa in town instead of just cutting locals’ hair.
“You work for the enemy, too,” he teased her.
When Luke told Kristen over that first haircut that he had thought about studying classics all the way to graduate school, she’d rented a movie version of “The Iliad” and called to tell him how horrible it was that the old men got to send the young men off to die for them. When he told her his favorite book was “Jude the Obscure,” she checked it out of the branch library, and cried when Jude mailed away to learn a foreign language only to realize there was no secret key, just a long list of words and rules that had to be memorized one at a time. “That’s what I feel like sometimes.” she’d whispered damp into his neck, and later that same night they’d made love for the first time.
Because of those things, he’d been able to overlook others. He understood, too, that Polk County was a place that not many people managed to leave, not unless they had the money to go and the kind of imagination that money can grant. He’d done well to get as far away as Charlotte. When people in Polk County talk about going to college, they usually mean the community college, or over to Brevard, or maybe even up to Asheville, but he’d gone over an hour’s drive away. Teachers who saw him that summer before he left shook his hand, patted him on the back a little too hard. “We won’t be seeing you around here again,” they’d said, voices full of pride and envy.
He washed the pan, dish, and fork he’d used, tossing the toast crusts to the eager dogs. Outside the wind was warm, and he prayed — mostly just to fate — that the air would stay warm through April, until his apples set. The minister at his boyhood church had one time brought into Sunday school a box of old guns and knives, preaching: “You don’t need this kind of protection when you have God’s protection, which is far more powerful.” Now Luke squinted at his orchard until didn’t look quite real and imagined God’s protection knitting a thousand apple-shaped sweaters. Last year he’d lost his whole crop.
He drove west, passing the squalid operations that Polk County’s residents use to patch through — small plots of used cars, leased fields, half-hearted quarries cut from the red dirt. He continued on through Columbus, then along the stretched expanses of white-fenced horse farms, and looped around the double traffic circles that crossed the interstate before Tryon. Everyone he knew still complained about the circles, but Luke kind of liked them — no stopping, no overgrown cloverleaves — and sometimes he took an extra loop around one or even both and imagined he was driving in some European capital, maybe Rome. At least someone had given some thought to it, had worked with a design.
At the supermarket, he bought a six-pack of beer and a large bar of chocolate, since he could never be sure which Kristen would want. The teenage checker gestured halfheartedly at two collection boxes vying for shoppers’ spare change. One was to send the Polk High School band to a festival in China, and Luke thought it was both comical and a sign of progress that kids from Polk High might be taking their tubas and trombones to Shanghai. The other box was collecting coins to return the body of a local picker to Mexico. Luke had read about the murder in Tryon’s pamphlet-sized daily. The crime had been drug-related, but a case of mistaken identity. The dead man had done nothing wrong but look too much like someone. Luke dropped a dime in the band’s box and a quarter in the other.
As he hooked through town toward Kristen’s, he noted a banner draped across a commercial-converted colonial promising a new restaurant, this one called, in fancy script, SONS. New restaurants often needed carpentry work done and sometimes the owners, if they were from away, would overpay. His work at Lake Adger was coming to an end, and the housing slump from the news had finally found Polk County, where many of the new homes were second homes.
Pausing outside Kristen’s door, he heard the television but not so loud as usual. She let him in, index finger over her lips, shushing him. Asleep on her couch was Tommy’s kid, his small face glowing in the shifting blue and gray light and far-away voices of an old movie. Luke followed Kristen back to her room, where they sat on the queen-sized bed that took up the whole of it and sipped beers while she told him about the ins and outs of her day.
“Two facials, one full leg wax, two eyebrows, three bikinis, one lip,” she said. “Oh, this is kinds of news: Allison Henderson came in today. She’s back in town.”
“I guess she comes to visit her folks sometimes. I haven’t seen her since tenth grade.”
“She’s moved back,” Kristen said. “I know because she scheduled with me again for four weeks. I heard she’s opening a restaurant with her new husband. They’re calling it SONS because she’s Alli-son and he’s Ja-son. Plus she was a Hender-son. I don’t know what his last name is.”
Part Two
Allison Henderson had grown up on the largest horse farm around and had been in Luke’s class from kindergarten forward. She’d been the first girl he’d really kissed — in a neighbor’s orchard, and only because school was out, its social rules on hold. They made out in the shade of a tree, and they’d met like that a few more times across July and August, him finally working up the courage to touch her breasts under her shirt and the backside of her jeans. Once he’d traced the thin line of pale blond fuzz over her top lip and told her it highlighted how pretty she was. Nothing about her beauty was flawed, he’d told her.
When ninth grade started that September, Luke knew to pretend that nothing had been exchanged between them, but still he watched her and sometimes when no one was looking she smiled at him. After that they each dated within their own set, and she left junior year for prep school. He didn’t want to ask Allison Henderson for carpentry work, but in the order of the world it really didn’t matter.
He set down his bottle and turned to Kristen, gripping her hips, kissing her neck and then her lips. “We can’t wake up little Tommy,” she whispered, but she relaxed into him and soon they were undressed. First Luke hovered over her, holding open his eyes so he couldn’t pretend he was with someone else and his life was something other than what it was. Then he climbed behind her so he could see her long hair draping over her arched back.
Two days later, Luke stepped into the high-ceilinged room where Allison Henderson sat at one of two dozen bare tables, blond hair pinned in a loose twist, tapping the eraser of a pencil against her teeth. She looked up from the notebook she was writing in, startling him with her sky-blue eyes, beautiful in a plain white t-shirt.
“You probably don’t remember me,” he started, but she cut him off with his name, adding, “I’m surprised to see you still in Polk County.”
“It seems this place has a way of reclaiming its own.” he said.
She laughed and said that it did.
But he hadn’t come to catch up, and he stated his business as soon as he could, so it wouldn’t be an embarrassment later.
She nodded, “As a matter of fact, we need some shelving in the kitchen before we can open, which we hope to do next week. I’ll introduce you to Jason and maybe you can get started pretty quick? Your coming in like this is really lucky for us.”
“It’s nice of you to say that, but you wouldn’t have had any trouble finding someone,” he said. “There’s more people than work around here these days.”
Jason emerged from the kitchen. He was thin and bearded and good looking in a way that said city, though maybe just because his neck was pale, his cheeks a little hollow. He smiled and shook Luke’s hand.
“Luke and I go way back,” Allison told him. “He can do those shelves for us.”
Jason’s enthusiastic “fantastic!” seemed disproportioned, but Luke was glad for the work and returned that afternoon with his tools. The fine pear wood felt smooth and warm, and the work was straightforward yet with small, pleasant challenges. The kitchen was airy, all stainless steel and the pretty light wood, and Jason put on music that Luke didn’t know but liked. What Jason cooked smelled good — perfecting the menu, he said — and once in awhile he interrupted Luke for him to taste a piece of seared tuna layered with anchovy and pimiento or a toasted baguette slice topped with goat cheese and burned walnuts, the first time Luke had eaten these foods prepared this way.
“Our idea is to use as many local foods as possible, so of course there will be a fair amount of apple on the menu — an apple chutney for the pork loin, a cobbler with cinnamon ice cream. The goat cheese is local, and I’ve got a local supplier for pork. The guy feeds one group of pigs nothing but peaches and pecans. Chefs has flown him to New York trying to get a monopoly on those chops, but we worked out a deal.”
“I’d love to sell you some apples in a few months,” Luke said, like it was a joke. He asked Jason if he’d gone to school for cooking, and Jason told him about the culinary institute in New York, where he’d met Allison. “She was decorating a cake with whip cream in a pastry tube. Absolutely irresistible.”
At five, Jason tapped him on the shoulder. “Why don’t you knock off until tomorrow and come have a glass of wine with us. What’s five o’clock mean if you don’t pop a cork?”
Luke sat with Allison and Jason in the future dining room, sipping red wine from large-bowled glasses with no stems. He stayed out of the conversation about the wine, which they seemed pleased with, yet he found it surprisingly easy to talk to them about hiking trails around Saluda and Asheville, about the Lake Lure development, and some about sports and politics and even books they’d read. Sometimes they talked outside of his world, referencing magazines he didn’t know, but he could follow what was being said and was proud to be author of his own opinions.
“You were always so smart, Luke, and always reading. I always figured you’d be off to college and then out of here.”
“Best laid plans,” he said, smiling.
Maybe because of the wine — they were each on a second glass and Jason had opened another bottle — or maybe just because he liked talking to them, he told them more than he meant to. He had gone off to college, he explained, where he was supposed to study business but found himself taking literature and history courses. His scholarship paid tuition and a little more, and he worked part-time for a contractor to make the rest of what he needed, which is where he learned woodworking. He was doing well, even turning over the idea of graduate school.
“Classics,” he told them. “I loved the stories of the ancient cities and their emperors, and I was good at the Greek and Latin.”
“So what happened?” Jason asked. “I mean, why didn’t you?”
Luke gave them the simplest version: “I lost my folks.”
His parents had died during the first semester of his senior year–his father going to a fast-moving cancer and his mother some weeks after, when her car failed to grip a curve during a morning rainstorm. He’d sold their little house to cover the remaining rent on the field they leased, together with their other debts, and taken the small remaining sum back to Charlotte, accepting his boss’s offer of full-time work, adding every payday to the little bank account, deciding what to do with it. “And I kept thinking about what I was always thinking about as a little kid watching my parents plant beans and squash on a rented field, that I wanted my own land and I wanted apples. So I came back and bought a place, and it’s gone pretty well so far, but not so well I don’t still do carpentry.”
He didn’t tell them all the rest of it, and he didn’t tell them about the rocketing property taxes and late frost last spring, already known as the year the North Carolina Apple Festival had to beg fruit from Virginia.
Allison and Jason exchanged a nod, and then Allison spoke. “Luke, I don’t want to insult you, but you clean up pretty good as I recall, and what we really need to open is a good waiter.”
Luke shook his head, for a moment unable to swallow his mouthful of wine without laughing.
“We’re serious,” Allison said. “You can make a couple a hundred a night if business is as good as we hope. All you’d need are black pants, shirt, shoes, and to slick your hair back. Memorize the menu, and make people feel special. It’s easy for someone like you, but we haven’t come across anyone we can trust to speak correctly and not be a meth-head. Trust me, there’s a reason some of these people around here are out of work.”
“Can I ask you why you picked Tryon instead of a big city somewhere? Or there’s a lot of bistro places opening up in Hendersonville, even just up in Saluda.”
“Exactly. There isn’t a place like this here, despite the population influx and it’s new, well, appetites,” Allison said. “Plus, you know, my parents. We’re staying with them while we make a go of it, helping them out some with the horses. You heard about Joe, right?” She paused for Luke to say he hadn’t.
“My dear older brother has converted to Catholicism, renounced his worldly goods, and he’s living in a shelter in New York and pouring out his poverty-enriched soul on the pages of The Catholic Worker. He’s grown to hate my parents, you see. Anyway, it’s nice to be riding again. I’d all but given that up. But, enough of that, what do you say?”
Luke shook his head again, but he was thinking about how bad he needed money and what he said was this: “Maybe I could just fill in for the first week while you find someone better.”
“Temporarily, then.” Allison raised her glass, clinked it against Luke’s, and smiled with purple lips that made her teeth seem whiter.
Part Three
Though he was embarrassed to tell Kristen, she liked the idea of him joining what she called the new economy, and she grinned wide when he let her streak gel into his hair. She told him he looked like he could be on television.
It felt deeply strange, those first few nights, walking up to couples and groups of women and asking them what they wanted to drink and telling them what they might want to eat. But Luke had always considered people, and it was easy enough to see if someone wanted more water or a clean knife. He imitated Allison’s descriptions of the desserts, making them sound like heaven or sex, depending on the table, and as often as not he got takers and a higher tip.
One night a woman eating alone flirted with him. She was maybe ten years older, but self-contained and polished in a way that made Kristen seem flaccid and unkempt. “Tell me what kind of wine you recommend,” she said to him. “I bet you go in for something bold and spicy.” She left her phone number and an imprint of her lipstick with her bill, and Allison laughed hard when she saw it. “Wasn’t I right about how you clean up?” She laughed some more, crumpled the paper, and made a jump shot into the trashcan. She put her hands on her hips and tilted her head. “But she’s too old for you, so don’t even think about it.”
Mostly, though, he did not like SONS’ customers: assorted types of recent arrivals. There were the military retirees who’d settled around the county and seemed convinced that Luke was trying to sneak extra charges on their bill. There were the newest horse people, who treated him like a servant and wanted to smoke their cigars and talk on cell phones, though Jason had put it on the menu that neither was allowed. Worst of all was another class of newcomer, which Luke had no name for. These people wore casual but well-made clothes, beseeched his approval for their orders, and, as best as Luke could tell, talked about nothing other than the meal they were eating or the house they were decorating. They had money that seemed to come from nowhere at all.
On the night his truck wouldn’t start and he had to ask Kristen for a ride to work, he took his break in the bathroom, staring into the mirror and saying, out loud, “I am waiting on the enemy.” When he came out, Allison walked by and smiled. She turned back to him, lifting her hand to his cheek, and said, “You’re a real lifesaver, Luke Mills. I know this isn’t really you, and I’m going to make it up to you.”
By the time Kristen showed up to give him a ride home, he’d made nearly two hundred dollars, enough to buy a new battery for the truck and put some aside toward the looming tax bill. When Jason invited them to stay for a drink, Luke yawned wide, saying they needed to go, but Kristen said that they had time for one and what were they going to do anyway. She’d heard about the good wine list, she told Jason, and soon enough the four of them were through two bottles and into a third.
They talked some current events and baseball, and Luke noted that Kristen steered away from politics. She grew chatty when Allison asked how she got together with Luke and about her family, telling Allison how she worried for her nephew, how Tommy’s girlfriend had the dark teeth of a meth user, about how lucky she felt to have landed a guy like Luke instead of a loser like her brother.
The slur between her words just perceptible, Allison said, “Luke is a great guy. And a great waiter. You’d think he grew up eating in places like this, the way he understands the narrative of a good meal.”
Luke leaned back in his chair, just a little too far, and had to use the muscles in his back and legs to right himself. They all laughed at the jerk he made to catch his balance.
“Close call,” Jason said.
“Kind of like my waiting career. Like you said, Allison, it’s not really me.”
“Nonsense,” Kristen said. “There’s a reason for and dignity in all kind of work. Take this girl I work with. She became an esthetician because she had a mustache ever since she was a little girl. Her daddy, bless his soul, used to help her bleach it, and that girl spent half of high school in front of the mirror with tweezers. Now she’s learned waxing and believes it’s her calling, her way to help people.” She paused and looked directly at Allison, smiling the fake smile she sometimes used with store clerks. “Waiting tables or anything can be a calling, a way to give people something they need. Think about it the right way and it’s kind of the same as growing food.”
Luke cringed, embarrassed by Kristen even though he knew it was wrong to be. This was the reason he’d wanted to leave; Kristen and Allison were from two worlds not meant to collide. He’d known it in high school, where the few interracial couples had been tolerated but no one he knew dated across the money. That had been his favorite thing about college, those first three years when he felt like everyone was unified by the same clean slate. But there are no clean slates when you live where you’re from and where you’re from is a place like Polk County.
“I’m sorry,” he said carefully, “but I need to get some sleep. I have to work my real job in the morning.”
In the car he said, “Please take me on to my place,” he said. “I really do need some sleep.”
“Then I’ll stay over with you.”
Luke didn’t wait until they got out of the car. He leaned back into the passenger seat and asked, not restraining the harshness in his voice, “Do you really think Allison wanted to talk about that in front of Jason and me?”
“Of course she didn’t,” Kristen said, “which is why I brought it up.”
Luke looked at her in profile, as she set her gaze forward, chin slightly lifted, smug with her small power. He realized that he had done what people always do to people like them: he had underestimated her intelligence. But he had also overestimated something about her; she was smarter but smaller-minded than he’d realized. She made calculations that he did not.
Kristen turned her head slowly, exposing her full face, the tiny dent of a scar under the corner of one eye. “I don’t need anybody looking down on me. Allison Henderson only owns a restaurant because her daddy bankrolled it, and she’s only back because she sees an opportunity now that her brother’s gone commie. You think it’s any coincidence that she calls that place SONS? As in Henderson and Sons? She and Jason are aiming to be her daddy’s new sons, and as soon as he’s in the ground they’ll be cashing out those horses and those acres and taking all that money right back to New York or wherever they feel like going next.”
“Maybe there’s a reason you haven’t thought of about why they named that restaurant what they did, about why they’re here. Maybe she missed her home and her family and all those horses. Maybe she likes it here.” He stopped, knowing that Kristen wasn’t far wrong in what she said. “Even if you are right, there’s no reason to act like you have no class.”
“Just confirming what they already think,” Kristen said. “And what you think, too.” She started crying hard all at once, moving from quiet to full sobbing in one smooth act. The sobs choked her question, which she had to spit out a word at a time. “Do you love me?”
He had been planning for this question, but not delivered angry, not sitting in that car stenciled on both doors with “Kristen for Cats … And Dogs!” Early in the planning, he figured he’d say something about how some people take longer to fall in love than others, that for some it’s a process more than an event.
Of course true isn’t always truth. He’d know that at least since he was six, when the preacher had told his Sunday school group that the president hadn’t called him in two weeks. A kind man, always quick with a card trick or a corny joke, he had slapped his knee three times and told the spell-bound kids that of course the president had never called him in his life. “Just because something’s factual doesn’t mean it’s not a lie.” It had been a childish example, Luke supposed, but because it was told to him as a child by someone he admired it had stuck, catching in his mind every time in his life he’d contemplated a subtle brag or omission or evasion. That simple lesson had made his life more difficult than perhaps it had to be.
Luke hardened his stomach, his chest, his mind, remembering how Kristen had just acted and not about her sweetness when they were first getting together. “I don’t love you and I don’t think I’m ever going to.” He turned to her and saw she had stopped crying nearly as suddenly as she’d started.
She was cursing him when he climbed out of her car, saying how sorry he really was.
Part Four
The wine made him fall asleep deep and fast, but when it wore off in a few hours he was fully awake, the moon bright as a searchlight casting through his window. He sat up on his bed, forehead against the cool windowpane, looking out at his orchard, which shimmered so silver he thought he might be still asleep. He saw movement low to the ground, the collective nocturnal action of Polk County’s true natives.
He fell back asleep at some point, almost oversleeping and upon waking feeling his hours awake like a hole torn from the night. His prayed that his engine would turn over, and it did, as though it knew he had no one to call for a ride up to Lake Adger. He parked in line with the other trucks. Facing away from the new houses and the man-made lake, the view was wide in both directions: the stark curves of mountain ridges to the north and the valleys blooming to the south. Closer in, he spotted his own orchard, as beautiful as all the rest.
When he was close to finishing the cabinet work in the house he was assigned to, the real estate agent who hired him dropped by with his final paycheck. “You do real nice work,” she said.
He nodded in appreciation. “Call me anytime.”
“I really thought we were going to boom here for real and forever,” she said, dropping the reins on her local accent. “But hard times aren’t ever going to skip over us, are they? I should have been surprised they didn’t start here.”
* * *
Back home he walked his twenty-two acres, the dogs ranging but staying fairly close. He always told other people he had twenty acres, and he took pride in the fact that he rounded down. He touched his trees as he walked by them, one at a time, the way his blind history instructor had tapped students shoulders as he paced the aisles. While Luke had never been so crazy as to name his trees, and despite their numbers, he knew each one, knew its slants and gaps and how much fruit it had borne the year before.
He heard Allison’s car before he saw it, and soon he smelled the gravel dust rising because she was driving too fast. The dogs barked, mostly out of interest, and they climbed the hill to meet her.
She held a twelve-pack and leaned against her nice car. “Enough of the goddamn wine list. Let’s drink beer.”
Luke could see by the stitch in her gate and her slightly wide eyes that she’d started elsewhere.
He couldn’t think of what to say, so he just made a fire in the woodstove and left the grate open so they could watch it from his sofa. He sat on one end, and Allison sat in the middle, much closer to him than she had to. She asked him questions about the apples, and he told her the answers. He figured she probably didn’t much care what the answers were, but he liked talking about his place and his trees, even if he wasn’t going to have them for much longer. He unfolded the entire life cycle of the apple, from seed to sapling to tree to fruit to apple butter at the Saluda apple mill to tourist’s car, refrigerator and maybe stomach.
She was outpacing him in beer, on a mission that seemed separate from him, but then she pulled him right into it by setting down her bottle and sliding her hands from his knees halfway up his thighs, like she wasn’t going to stop at all.
He swigged his beer and enjoyed the weight of her fingers, considering letting her intent sweep him right up. He tucked her hair behind her ear with his free hand, studying her small features, the rare cheekbone, the curl of smooth lip. “I like Jason,” he said.
“So do I, but this is something different. With him, he’s always intellectualizing everything and planning for the future. There’s no lightness to it, no fun.” She leaned her head into his hand, letting him support some of its weight. “You remember that summer, right? Under the trees? How simple and easy that was.”
“Simple because we were kids, and easier for you than me, especially after the summer was over.”
“You know how it was back then. That was hard for me, too. Just to tell you so you know, but I know I wasn’t a fully likable person yet. I was still figuring things out.”
“I think maybe you still are.” He continued to touch her hair, dusted the cut of her jaw with his thumb. Then he tried to make something lighter of the moment: “Besides we can’t do this, because I work for you.”
She laughed, oddly loud. “Good news there, by the way. We’ve been able to get to full staff. You’re off the hook.”
He took a longer gulp of beer this time, draining it.
She moved all of her hair around to one side of her neck and pulled the back of her shirt down, exposing the skin over her shoulder blade. “Why don’t you give me a little bite, right there? Not too hard, but not too soft either.”
He did what she asked and then she lifted her arm, bent at the elbow, flexing her tricep. “Now here,” she said, pointing, and he bit her a little harder, indenting but not breaking her skin.
“I just want to feel something, Luke. Really feel it, even if it hurts.”
He bit her tricep again, then leaned back. “Remember when y’all asked me about school and I said I’d stopped because my folks died.”
“I was really sorry about that.” Her eyes looked blurry and her hands moved back to his thighs.
“It was that, but it was also something else. There was a teacher who took me under his wing, helping me when he realized my Latin grammar was better than my English because I learned the Latin right in the first place, giving me books he thought I’d like. I changed my major from business to classics because of him.”
Allison stretched out now, laying her head on his lap as if to listen, though turning her face slightly into him, her mouth near his zipper, a warmth he figured was calculated to distract him from his story.
“Well I ran into him one night when he was drunk and he told me I’d never have job like his, not unless I got my PhD at Harvard or Princeton and smart as I was it was already too late for that and was probably too late the day I was born. And there I’d been thinking how proud I was to go off to Charlotte, how much farther I’d go than my parents. I honestly can’t remember if it was before or after my mom died — I should know that — but the next week I went into to withdraw from all my classes, just wrote them off. Another teacher in the department tried to stop me, told me that my mentor was just a bitter old drunk and that I could do anything I wanted, go to any graduate school, whatever I sought. But I looked close at her and really listened and I could see the expensive shoes and hear the Connecticut accent. She was the kind of person things work out for, and I looked on the wall and there was her Yale diploma.”
“And so you quit.” Allison’s voice went soft, maybe just with the beer or maybe with the idea that she what she was going to get wasn’t what she came for.
“And so I believed the bitter guy instead of her.” He paused, feeling the old frustration, thinking that he’d like to bite Allison as hard as he could but not if she’d like it too much. “Where’d you wind up going to college, Allison? Duke? Vanderbilt? Or did daddy send his little girl north?”
She bolted up, though she stayed sitting close. “You’re not even half right about me, you asshole. I didn’t even go to college until I went to be a pastry chef, and I didn’t even finish that because I met Jason and moved back here. It probably doesn’t seem like it now, but I do love Jason, but no way in hell is that restaurant going to make it. Do you even know what the profit margin on a restaurant is? The only way I’ll wind up with anything is to inherit it, and that’s a long shot if I don’t have a son to replace the prodigal one in my daddy’s mind. But of course now that I want one I don’t seem to be able to make one.”
Luke waited, giving her the respect of his attention.
Her laugh had little knives in it. “I suppose you believed the prep school story, too good to listen to the rumors. You’re like Joe that way, thinking that because you don’t have money you’re better than those who do. Well, my prep school was a big house in Minnesota full of rich girls hanging around to have babies they weren’t supposed to have and didn’t get to keep. After that I told my parents to go to hell, and I didn’t talk to them for years.”
“I didn’t know that. I really didn’t.”
“Joe and I were both there, and working, but it got harder and harder without enough money. Here I’m pretty, but there every girl is pretty. Here I’m smart, but there I was just a girl with an accent that was sexy for one night and hillbilly thereafter. And I missed my parents and I missed the goddamn horses and I missed being Allison Henderson where people knew what that meant.”
Luke thought about all she had said and came up with this: “Are you here tonight to get pregnant?”
“Hell no. I’m not crazy, just unhappy.”
“Then why?” He made his voice gentle. “I mean, why here?”
“Like I said, for something simple. I just wanted something fun and easy and simple. I just wanted a break from being me.”
“There’s nothing simple about anybody, Allison.” He moved her hair again, the way she had at first, a bit her at the first place she’d pointed to, but softly. He moved his lips to her neck and kissed her there and then on the mouth, just the way he remembered from the summer before high school, the sharp cider smell of overripe apples surrounding them.
He lifted her to his bedroom and made love to her, not out of his recent anger and not out of the old desire. Maybe he did it to give some meaning to what they had told each other, to where they’d come from just to get back to this used-up place. He stayed awake when she dozed, so that he could wake her before morning and send her home before she ruined that for herself and found her life even less simple.
Part Five
She didn’t say much when she did leave, other than thank you, and it seemed to him that their silence about what had happened would be a good and mutual thing this time. He slept across the morning before rising to spread leaf mulch around the base of his trees. The work took him into late afternoon, when he cleaned up and drove into Tryon, taking an alternate route that did not pass by the Henderson horse farm. On a whim, he turned not into the strip mall with the supermarket but instead into the parking lot of what had for years been the Lions lodge and was now a Mexican restaurant.
Laboring across a skipped lunch had left him ravenous. He ordered a large plate of enchiladas, tostada, beans, and rice from a young woman who could barely speak English, pointing on the menu to what he wanted. He ate all of it, wiping the plate clean with torn pieces of tortilla.
On the way out, he passed his waitress and paused, wondering how different it must be to work at a place like this instead of SONS. The young woman wiped water rings from an abandoned table, moving the white cloth in expanding circles. When Luke’s gaze followed her arm to her profile, he saw a slow trickle of tears snaking to her collarbone.
He stepped closer, just one step. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing really.” She shook her head in time with her slow cloth. “I’m just very far from home, and I don’t think there will ever be money enough for me to go back.”
“It’s probably not as bad for me, but I have sort of the same problem.”
She halted her circular motion, settling weight onto her hands and looking down at the table she’d just cleaned. “You’re from far away too?”
He nodded.
“Where are you from?” she asked in Spanish, then repeated herself in English.
“I’m from Polk County.”
She looked up then, registering him. “But this is Polk County.”
“That’s the weird thing.” He stuck his hands in his pockets, trying to weave together the words that might explain what he meant. After a moment, he turned and left her to her own work and her own grief.
The wind gusting through the parking lot held a chill, though maybe not enough to bring overnight frost. There was as good a chance as not that it wouldn’t freeze, yet there was no reassurance in that thought. Last April, on a much colder evening, Luke had believed — really believed — that it couldn’t freeze, not with his trees looking so fine and his hopes so high. He was different this year, because this year he knew it could a hard frost could come on any day in any April, no matter how much you need it not to.
If McQuinn’s was still open, he’d buy a for-sale-by-owner sign. He liked the idea of doing this one last thing himself — choosing who would live on the land he had considered his, picking someone who would know one tree from the other. But McQuinn’s was not open and by the time his wheels crunched over his driveway and he saw the apple blossoms lacy against the gloaming, he decided he would just phone the realtor who’d hire him to work up at Lake Adger. He’d tell her to sell the place to whoever would buy it. It didn’t matter, not really, because Polk County was no longer the place he lived but just the place he was from.
