Chapter 6
CHAPTER 6
LIAM
A fter Olive leaves, I find my sister in the kitchen, eating a slab of pumpkin bar.
When she meets my eyes, there is guilt in her expression. “What? It needed to be evened out,” nodding at the pan, half gone now.
I chuckle to myself. Lacey eats like someone is going to take away her food.
“I think I’m in love with her,” she says, mouth full. “These are so good .” She pushes the pan toward me. “You know you want more.”
She’s not wrong. Olive’s pumpkin bars might be the best thing I’ve ever had, and I’m not sad she didn’t take the leftovers with her. I get a plate and fork and cut myself an equally giant piece, then sit down next to Lacey.
“Great, now you’ve made it uneven again,” she says, knifing another thin slice and scooping it onto her plate.
“You okay?” I ask between bites, because while I have strong negative feelings about this place, I know Lacey doesn’t.
She slowly shakes her head no, still chewing. “No. I’m not.”
Lacey and I don’t see each other often, but when we do, the instant connection comes back. We were siblings who grew up getting along. Maybe that’s rare, but I consider my sister a friend. Though I realize in this moment, I have no idea what she’s thinking or feeling, because Lacey romanticizes life at Pine Creek the same way Olive does. Same way my mom does.
“I guess . . .” She takes a drink from her water bottle, draws in a deep breath, then looks at me. “I just can’t imagine not being here at Christmas.” A pause. “Did they ask you to come back and run it?”
“Shockingly, no.” I have to give them credit for that. Maybe they finally accepted my decision to do something completely different with my life. Or maybe this is all a power play to try and guilt me into doing exactly what they want. Reverse psychology or something. “You?”
She tilts her head at me and makes a face. “No one is delusional enough to think I could handle it.”
There’s something under the way she says it. Like people don’t think she’s capable.
“I’m sure they just don’t think you’d have any interest. You travel, it’s not like you want to be tied down. Especially not here. And maybe dealing with me showed them that shoving it down our throats is a bad idea.”
“No, they just think I’m a mess,” she muses, shoveling another bite into her mouth. “I gave up my scholarship, quit school, bought a van, and went on the road. They don’t get my life.”
“Lacey, nobody gets your life,” I say.
“Mmm. Fair.” She takes another bite, but it doesn’t stop her from talking. “It’s a little unconventional, I’ll give you that. Mom always asks me when I’m going to settle down.”
“What do you tell her?” I’ve wondered that myself. What is her plan—to drive around forever? And is she running away from something?
“I’m not sure.” She takes another drink. “I mean, this is years and years—” she looks at me— “and years away, but I do want to have a family one day.” She goes quiet. “And I always pictured them growing up here. Like we did.”
I half-laugh. My experience with Pine Creek was vastly different than hers. She was free to pick and choose what she did or didn’t do while Dad gave me work gloves and made me part of the crew. After we moved out here, it was a healthy dose of reality—it was clear I needed to do my part to keep this place afloat.
But I wasn’t a part of it—not really. My ideas weren’t welcome. My suggestions were met with “Ah, we tried that already,” or flat dismissed.
I was just hired help.
Inwardly, I bristle. I should be over this. It’s not like Dad and I haven’t already had it out. More than once, in fact. When he and Mom found out I changed my major from agriculture to game design, he went through the roof.
“Ken Mariani told me his son is in a computer science class with you,” he’d said. “I told him he must be mistaken, because Liam isn’t in computer science. And Ken said it’s required for the game design degree. I said maybe he had you confused with someone else, but he called his kid up right there and got the confirmation that it was Liam Fisher from Loveland High School. The one whose parents own the Christmas tree farm.”
At that moment I wished I’d told him everything. I wished I’d spoken up and said exactly how I felt, exactly where I wanted to go, and exactly what I did—and didn’t—want.
But I didn’t.
“Liam, what have we been working toward all this time if you’re going to throw it all away?” he’d asked. “This place, it’s supposed to be yours. All you have to do is walk into it, and you’ll have a great life.” He scrubbed a hand down his face. “I can’t believe you’d do this without talking to me about it first.”
The look on my dad’s face told me more than his tone of voice or his body language ever could. He was enraged. Not only because I’d made this life-altering decision, but that he’d been blindsided by the news.
Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20.
“I guess I was just thinking—” Lacey sets her fork down and turns toward me. “What if we did take it over?”
“Lacey, we can’t.” I cut her off before she starts dreaming. “You can’t do it alone, and I?—”
“You what?”
“I don’t want to.” I push the plate away, thinking about the courage it took to finally tell my parents this wasn’t the life I wanted. Because once they found out about my decision, there was a conversation, and they forced me to explain myself. It was hard and uncomfortable, and the truth is, I don’t think my relationship with my dad has really recovered. But I felt better once it was over.
I’m not going back on that decision now.
“You really don’t?” Lacey asks. “Even if we’re in charge? I mean, we would make the decisions for this place. I know you had ideas—we would be the ones who got to choose what we did with it.”
I glance at her.
“I know it’s not the farm you resent.”
And I hear what she isn’t saying. I hear a truth I’m not willing to entertain.
She presses her lips together. “This place is our legacy, Bill. Shouldn’t we at least try?”
“Lacey. It’s a ton of work.” I stand, needing some space from Lacey and her sentimentality. “And Mom and Dad need the money from the sale.”
“Did they tell you that?”
“Not in so many words, but yeah. How else are they going to travel and start a new life somewhere else?” I look at her. “I think they’ve put everything they had into this place.” I rinse my plate in the sink.
She raises her eyebrows. “Maybe they could draw a salary from the farm. Or we could buy it? We could take out a loan?—”
“Lacey,” I cut her off. “I have a job.”
“Which you don’t like.”
I frown. “What? I like my job fine.”
“Don’t pretend you’re okay with what they did to you,” she says. “You could go out on your own. You don’t need them, not really?—”
If her words were fingers, they’d be pressing against a bruise.
I picture myself back in my cubicle, working through code, dying on the inside. I think about my boss, Aaron, and how unsupportive he’s been of my most recent ideas. He wants five new pitches each week, and so far, he’s yet to pick any of mine.
“Aren’t you like, The Boy Wonder of video games?” he’d asked, irritated that my ideas weren’t exciting him. “I’m not seeing it.”
Then he stuck me and my team on a game with an impossible deadline. When I tried to explain this to him, he told me I was being difficult, then threw in a “Bring me solutions, Fisher, not problems,” which I’m sure he read on the back cover of some business book.
Our team worked around the clock for a solid month, and we still had to cut corners. It looked horrible and the controls were clunky, so I wasn’t remotely surprised when it tanked.
And to make it all worse, our team was completely disregarded and given another impossible deadline.
Lacey interrupts my spiraling thoughts. “We could keep the staff and hire a?—”
“I can’t,” I cut her off. “I know how things work around here. It’s not a part-time job. It’s a lifestyle. I’m not a tree farmer. I’m a game developer.” And even if things are rough right now, I have a good job. A dream job. A job people in my field would kill for at a company that’s as exclusive and pedestaled as they get. I’d be crazy to give it up.
It wouldn’t make sense to walk away.
Especially to take on this mess.
“We can do this, Liam.” She sounds almost convincing. “We grew up here. We know what we’re doing because it’s in our blood.”
But that’s not a reason to uproot my life and plant it back here.
“Just think about it, okay?” Lacey asks.
I don’t answer because I know my sister. This is the shiny new thing. The second she gets bored, she’ll be back on the road, and I’d be stuck running this place by myself. Contrary to what most people think, a tree farm is a year-round operation.
But without a year-round income.
“Say you’ll think about it,” she says, her eyes pleading.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” I say, softening.
“Liam.” She levels my gaze. “This is our home. We can’t let someone else take it over.” Lacey stands and takes her plate to the sink. She rinses it, then turns back to me. “You know I’m right.”
She walks out, leaving me standing in the dim kitchen, feeling guilty and a little like a jerk. Still, my sister is not a realist.
She lives in a van, for Pete’s sake.
She has no clue what it would take to make a go of this farm. But I get why she’s sentimental. I get why she wants to try.
As I fall asleep that night, my thoughts turn from Lacey’s insistence to Olive’s certainty. She sees something in Pine Creek that I don’t. Or won’t.
Either way, she’s convinced she’s going to convince me, which only proves how little she knows me now. Which only reminds me what an idiot I was for not figuring out a way to keep her in my life.