Chapter 24
The farmhouse porch faced west, and the light coming through the fir tops had turned the color of warm honey. Claire sat cross-legged in the wooden chair beside me, her plate balanced on her lap. She worked her spoon through a slice of yellow cake with vanilla ice cream melting against its side.
Two mugs of milky tea sat on the table between us, steam curling in the still air. Claire's tea, from her own rows. She'd steeped it strong and splashed in honey and whole milk from the Hendersons' dairy down the road. It tasted like nothing I'd ever had before.
Wendell lay at the top of the porch steps, chin on his paws, eyes half-closed.
"My mother always makes two cakes," Claire said. "One for our family and one to take to her bingo night. She's very popular at the senior center."
"Sounds like a great time for her."
"She never wanted to go when my father was alive. Now it's the highlight of her week. She won't be back before eleven."
"Late-night fun at the senior center. I'll be joining them soon."
"You're not that old."
"Maybe. But it's something to look forward to."
"Silly." Claire gave me a teasing look. "He sleeps with it on his nightstand, you know."
I looked up from my cake. "What?"
"DJ. The ball." Claire shook her head, the red of her hair catching the late light.
"First night, he carried it up to bed like it was made of glass.
Set it right next to his lamp. I came in to check on him and he had one hand hanging off the mattress, fingers touching it. He must have fallen asleep like that."
"It was a good day."
"It was a great day. You should have seen him telling my mother about the firehose. He reenacted the whole thing. The hose, the water, the target, how you held it steady and he aimed. Complete play-by-play. Mom heard it three times before dinner."
"He earned it. Kid's got good aim."
"DJ is probably reenacting it for his friends right now. His first sleepover of the summer. They set up a tent in his friend's backyard. Sleeping bags and comics and scary stories by flashlight."
"Now that's an adventure. Little boys love that stuff. I wish I could have had sleepovers like that."
"I'm just happy to see him smiling again."
Claire set her plate on the table and picked up her tea. She held it in both hands, close to her face, breathing in the steam.
"You know... DJ was slowly disappearing," she said quietly.
"After my dad died. Not in a dramatic way, not throwing tantrums or acting out.
Just... retreating. Getting quieter. Getting smaller.
His world kept shrinking. He'd come home from school and go straight to his room and close the door.
When I'd check on him, he'd be sitting on his bed with his dinosaur books open, but not reading. Just sitting."
Wendell's tail thumped once against the porch boards, his paws twitching as he chased something in a dream.
"This summer turned him around. Working the fence with you. The Mariners game. Now the firehose contest. He's finally come out of the shell he was hiding in. I... I got my boy back." She met my eyes over the rim of her cup. "You did that, Thomas."
"Claire..." I paused, trying to find an adequate response. "He's brought a lot of joy into my life too. Your whole family has. DJ and Bessie Anne. And you. Especially you."
The color started at her throat and climbed. She didn't look away. Neither did I. I thought of what happened at the firehouse, her mouth against mine, the taste of her, the way her fingers had gripped the front of my shirt like she was anchoring herself to something solid.
She looked like she was thinking about it too.
The moment stretched, our eyes locked. Claire finally lowered her gaze and set her tea down.
"Walk with me," she said. "I want to show you the fresh growth."
She was off the porch before I could answer, her boots hitting the packed earth of the yard, her stride long and loose. I set my plate on the table and followed.
The tea rows ran in well-spaced parallels, ten acres of Camellia sinensis that Mark James had planted years ago.
The bushes stood waist-high, dark green and dense, their leaves glossy in the fading light.
Claire walked between the rows and I followed, Wendell trotting alongside us with his nose working the ground.
Claire stopped, her fingers finding a branch tip. She held it up so I could see.
"Look at this."
Fresh growth. Pale green against the darker mature leaves, tender shoots pushing out from the flush points where we'd harvested weeks ago. The leaves were small and tight, curled slightly, with a brightness that made the older foliage look almost black by comparison.
"Coming back fast," I said.
"Faster than I expected." She crushed a leaf and held it to her nose, breathing in the scent.
"My father believed the coastal conditions here, the moisture, the soil pH and the temperature range, meant that he could get four flushes a year instead of three.
Everyone told him he was dreaming. The conventional wisdom is three harvests at this latitude, and even that's ambitious. "
I touched one of the new shoots. The leaf was soft as velvet between my fingers.
"Looking at this, I think he might have been right," I said. "Are you planning an early harvest?"
"End of July," Claire nodded, moving down the row, trailing her hand along the tops of the bushes. "Then a final one in late August before the plants go dormant for fall. If I can get four flushes consistently, that changes the economics of this whole operation."
"That's fantastic. And you can count on me for the next harvest. Whenever it comes."
"I know I can."
We walked in silence for a while, the tea rows stretching ahead of us in their orderly lines, the last of the day's heat rising from the soil. Overhead, several birds swept across the pale sky in a jagged, swooping path, wings bent at sharp angles.
"I see those ones all the time," Claire said. "They come out right around this hour. DJ would know exactly what they are, thanks to you and that bird app."
I pulled my phone from my pocket and opened Merlin. Held it up toward the sky and waited. The birds swooped again, their white wing patches flashing as they banked. A sharp buzz of sound. The app pinged.
"Common Nighthawk," I said.
"A hawk?"
"Not actually a hawk." I scrolled through the entry and grinned. "It's part of the goatsucker family."
"The what?"
"Goatsucker. Caprimulgidae. Named because people used to believe they snuck into barns at night and drank milk from goat udders.
" I scrolled further. "Listen to this. It's from someone named Pliny.
'They bee night-theeves; for all the day long they see not.
Their manner is to come into the sheepeheards coats and goat-pens, and to the goats udders presently they goe, and suck the milke at their teats. '"
Claire stared at me. "You sound exactly like Abner."
"I'll share this with him. Though I suspect he already knows it."
"He absolutely already knows it. He probably knows it in the original Latin."
We watched the nighthawks make their passes, their flight erratic and darting as they scooped insects from the cooling air. Wendell sat between us, unbothered, his attention fixed on something in the grass.
"You've gotten close to them," Claire said. "Abner and Scout."
"I have."
"I've known Scout since she was a little girl roaming these woods half-wild. Barefoot, carrying a knife her father made for her, talking to herself in sentences that sounded like they came from books written a hundred years ago."
Claire smiled at me. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
"Everyone called her Liberty. Her father insisted on it. That was her name and no one thought otherwise. Then you came along and called her Scout, and everyone just... fell in line. Like it had always been her name. Like they'd been waiting for someone to say it."
"Not everyone. Abner still calls her Liberty."
"Abner would. He's a good father."
Claire went quiet. The nighthawks wheeled overhead one more time, then banked hard and disappeared beyond the treeline. The sky had deepened from honey to rose. Somewhere in the distance, a frog started up.
"DJ was four when his father left me for that woman in the Philippines."
The words came out flat, the way you'd state the weather or the time of day.
"He met her online. Some dating site. They'd been talking for months before I found out, and by the time I did, he'd already bought the plane ticket.
" She kept her eyes on the place where the nighthawks had vanished.
"The humiliation was the worst part. Not the betrayal itself.
The humiliation. Knowing that everyone in Port Chasten knew.
Knowing they watched me at the grocery store and the post office and thought, That's the woman whose husband left her for someone he met on the internet.
Someone he'd never touched. Never smelled.
Never sat across a table from. He left his wife and son for a fantasy. "
Wendell pressed his head against Claire's leg. She dropped a hand to his ear, rubbing it absently.
"DJ was just four. He didn't understand where his father went. He just knew the apartment got quieter. He'd stand at the front window and watch the parking lot." Her jaw worked. "For months. Every day. Watching the parking lot."
I didn't speak. This was not a silence that needed filling.
"I made a vow after that. That I would never let another man close enough to hurt us again. Not close enough to matter, at least. Not close enough that his leaving would send my son back to that window."
She turned to face me, and her green eyes were bright.
"But seeing you with DJ makes me weak, Thomas. Weak enough to give in to what I feel for you. Weak enough to make me want to break that vow."
She reached up and put her hand on my jaw. Her palm was warm and rough from work, and her fingers curved around the back of my neck.