Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
And then nothing happened. Well, not nothing exactly. The fourth of July happened. Big whoop. The Cherry Festival happened over in Traverse City. Another big whoop. I mean, we didn’t go. Nana Cole was doing well with her cane but was nowhere near ready for crowds. And I had very little interest.
She did talk a lot about the festival, telling me all about the first one she went to when she was a child sometime in the Jurassic age. Then she dropped a bombshell.
“My mother was Cherry Queen?”
“Yes. I was so proud of her. She was so pretty. I really thought she was going places in life.”
“She’s on a yacht as we speak.”
“It’s not her yacht though, is it?”
That was true.
It rained most of the weekend after the fourth, so by Monday I guess it was a real disaster. My grandmother woke me up before seven. “Get up. You have to come help.”
“Whaaa?”
“It’s starting to rain. We could lose most of our cherries.”
“What do you mean, lose? Are they going to run away?”
“They’ll take up too much water and split. We have to pick them now.”
“Does it really matter?”
“There won’t be any money if we don’t do it.”
That got my attention. “What do you mean there won’t be any money? I thought you were rich?”
“I’m rich because of the cherries. We can’t let them get ruined.”
Well, that was eye-opening.
“I’m going out there. You come as soon as you can.”
A half an hour later, when I walked outside it was still barely raining. It would pick up soon, though. Soon. You could smell it in the air. The sky hung low and gray, with clouds that looked bloated and heavy. The wind was strong and turned them into a swirl. I hurried out to the orchard.
Nana Cole was already there with Jasper and a small crew of migrants. Bev and Jan were there as well. They all wore rough, cotton aprons that went over their heads and created a deep pouch over their bellies. Everyone reached up into the trees and pulled cherries down into their pouches.
Seeing me, my grandmother lurched over and handed me an apron.
Honestly, even as I was getting ready and walking out, I hadn’t fully connected with the idea that I would have to actually pick cherries.
Oversee, observe, make suggestions those were all things I was prepared to do, things I was good at, but actually picking fruit? That just seemed wrong.
And then, as I snatched the first handfuls of cherries out of a tree it began to really come down. A half an hour later I was drenched, and my hands looked like Lady Macbeth’s. I’d squeezed a little too hard and burst a cherry or two or twenty.
Of course I had to eat some—I hadn’t had any breakfast—and the first thing you notice about eating cherries, in addition to the blood red juice all over your hands, is that they don’t actually taste like cherries.
Or rather, they don’t taste like anything ‘cherry-flavored’ you’ve ever had. This was definitely a new experience.
Nana Cole was flitting about on her four-pronged cane. One moment she’d be picking cherries herself, next she’d be handing out aprons, offering encouragement, thanking people for coming.
Jasper would go around and take a full apron away from a worker and give them another. Then he’d take the cherries over to a large wooden box and dump them in. I kept picking. The stems kept poking my palm.
It seemed like a lot of fuss over a bunch of cherries. Yeah, I guess it meant more than that to Nana Cole. It wasn’t just about the cherries, or the money. It was like her life. It was the life of her parents. And their parents. And…
And then I felt something—not the pricks in my palm, and not a big something.
But something. A connection? This is what my family had done for generations.
Farmed this land, pulled a living out of this soil, for a very long time.
And it was something I was a part of. I’d never thought about it that way before.
Now, I wasn’t kidding myself. If I were able to meet my relatives, I don’t know that I’d even have liked them; nor they me.
But that didn’t change the fact that we were part of each other. That had to mean something—didn’t it?
My bag was very nearly full when I heard my grandmother saying my name, “Henry. Henry.”
“What?”
God, she was annoying.
She nodded her head and looked behind me.
I turned around and there was Opal getting drenched.
It was a total romantic comedy moment. You know, where someone is so in love they don’t notice the weather.
But one look at Opal’s face told me that was not what was happening. She was anything but in love.
“What are you doing here?”
“Ivy and Carl have been arrested.”
“Finally,” I couldn’t help saying.
“I knew it! I knew you had something to do with it.” She stepped forward and slapped me on the chest. Cherries bounced out of my apron.
“Hey. Don’t do that.”
“You idiot. Carl didn’t do it,” she said stridently. “He couldn’t have. He was with me.”
“His alibi was faked. Hessel could have died hours earlier.”
“I don’t believe Carl could kill his stepfather then just come over to hang out with me. That would be heartless. He’s not heartless.”
“I don’t know what you want me to do. Detective Lehmann would have figured it out eventually.”
“No, he wouldn’t have. This is all your fault.”
“Did you know? Did you think—wait, you sent me to get my haircut, you wanted me to think Denny did it.”
“I think Denny did do it.”
“Why would Denny do it?”
Nana Cole came over holding a picking apron in one hand. “Hello Opal. Thank you—”
“She’s not here to pick cherries,” I said. “Ivy and Carl were arrested.”
“Finally!” she said, surprising both Opal and me.
For a moment, I thought Opal might pound my grandmother’s chest like she had mine, but she didn’t. Instead, she turned and stormed off.
“Hey, don’t just leave.”
Without turning around, she lifted one hand and gave me the finger. It stung. Not being flipped off, but what it probably meant. Losing her friendship, I guess. She was the closest thing to a friend I had in Michigan. Or maybe anywhere.
I mean, Vinnie wasn’t really talking to me. Sometimes I got calls from guys who wanted to go bar-hopping or come over and have sex. But once they found out I was in Michigan, well, I didn’t hear from them again. As though whatever purpose I’d served in their lives had ended.
But Opal… Well, yes, she was snarky and obnoxious and had an annoying habit of disagreeing with me, and all that. On the other hand, she showed up. She was there.
And now she wasn’t. I was pretty sure she’d never talk to me again. Unexpectedly, that mattered.
“Henry,” Nana Cole called out. “Get back to work.”
About an hour later, a friend of Jasper’s came by with a one-man shaker.
You have seriously never seen anything like this.
It’s kind of like a forklift, except instead of a lift it has an upside-down canvas umbrella attached to the front.
You drive it up to a cherry tree, it wraps the canvas umbrella around the tree, and then shakes all the cherries off.
Everything was going to be fine. We’d done it. We’d saved the farm—or whatever.
“So, can I have the money you promised me?” I asked Nana Cole that evening.
“Well, no.”
“What do you mean no? You wanted me to ask a few questions, which I did, a long time ago. And now people have been arrested for your preacher’s murder. I think you owe me.”
“Who killed him? Was it Ivy or Carl?”
“They’ve both been arrested, so I’d guess they’re in it together.”
“Really? Your friend Amber seemed to think Carl is innocent.”
“Her name is Opal. And just because she thinks that doesn’t mean it’s true. I think you need to pay me.”
“And just because you think that doesn’t mean I’m going to.”
And then, to really spite me, she announced her intention to sit down and watch Seventh Heaven.
That was a hard no for me, so I went upstairs.
Before I did though, I snagged the most recent copy of the Eagle so I could look for a car and get the heck out of there.
Of course, that was hopeless. I now had just a little more than five thousand—if Nana ever gave me the money she owed me. That wouldn’t buy me much.
My phone rang. I flipped it open. It was Edward.
“Hey,” I said in what I hoped was a sultry voice.
“Hey. I just got back from my trip. I mean, I got back a couple days ago, but I had to work. Did you have a nice holiday?”
I wanted to say I’d solved a murder but couldn’t figure out if that was sexy or not. Not to mention I didn’t actually know who did it, yet. All I knew was who’d been arrested, which didn’t sound like me solving anything.
“Yeah, I did have a nice holiday. We watched the fireworks.”
This was not a big deal since we could see them from the front porch.
“I thought about you a lot while I was gone.”
“I thought about you, too.” I mean, it’s what I was supposed to say, right? And I did think about him. In between thinking about a whole lot of other things.
“I know it’s late notice, but if you wanted to come over for a glass of wine.”
Oh my God! This was a booty call. Perfect! My plan was to buy a car and drive away, so if all he wanted was to have sex, well, great! I didn’t have to feel guilty that he might want to get all romantic and live happily ever after and all that.
I ran into the bathroom to take a shower, thinking, On the other hand, maybe we will live happily ever after. Which led to ten minutes of Oh my God, oh my God. I’m going to marry a doctor.
Not that we could legally get married. Well, in Hawaii, I think. And Vermont, sort of. I mean, a civil union was the same thing, right? Of course, they just legalized gay marriage in Canada a few weeks ago. Canada was closest. We’d probably go there.