Chapter 3 #4
Inside the house, Angelina was starting dinner, the familiar sounds of a kitchen in motion carrying through the screen door.
Gabriella was on the porch swing with a book open in her lap, though I suspected she’d been watching the orchard light more than the pages.
Valen whinnied from the stable, the sound that meant his dinner was approximately three minutes late according to his internal clock, which had never in its existence been synchronized with actual time.
I sat on the step with cider warming my palms and the ache in my shoulders and the quiet happiness of a day that had asked nothing of me except to be present.
I had missed everything. The knowledge sat in my chest like it had carved out a space and settled in for the long term. Every birthday. Every harvest. Every small victory and quiet defeat. Every morning they’d gotten up and looked at the work ahead and done it anyway because someone had to.
But I was here now. And the work, the ordinary impossible work of keeping a farm and a family intact, was work I could share. As a man who had finally come home to the place that had been waiting for him.
The cider was sweet and sharp on my tongue. The light turned the orchard trees to gold, then amber, then the deep honey-color that means evening is coming in earnest, and I sat on the step and let it happen, minute by minute, breath by breath, the way you’re supposed to.
* * *
Angelina insisted on dinner outside. Not on the porch, where we usually ate when the weather was good, but beneath the old oak at the western edge of the yard, where the ground sloped gently toward the island’s rim and the view opened across the clouds to the floating islands beyond.
She laid a quilt on the grass and set out plates and cups and a basket of bread still warm from the oven, and by the time the sun began its descent toward the horizon, we were arranged around the makeshift table like pieces on a board that had been waiting six years for all its players to return.
The food was simple and perfect. Roasted chicken from one of our own birds, herbs from the garden, potatoes boiled in their skins and split open steaming, the sharp goat cheese Angelina had made last month, and apples from the orchard sliced thin and arranged on a wooden plate.
We ate, and the conversation moved the way family conversation moves when everyone is relaxed and nobody is performing, skipping from subject to subject without bothering with transitions.
Sabrina told us about the merchant captain who’d tried to shortchange her on a cider delivery and had left with both the full price and an invitation to the summer festival that he apparently couldn’t refuse despite looking like he very much wanted to.
Gabriella described the village schoolteacher’s attempts to teach mathematics to a classroom of children who were significantly more interested in the fact that a skybird had nested on the schoolhouse roof.
Angelina listened to both of them with a smile.
I mostly listened. It was enough. The sound of them, the rhythm of three people who had shared a house and a life for six years without me in it, falling back into the older rhythm that included me as if the gap had been nothing more consequential than a long afternoon nap.
The light turned the oak’s leaves to copper, then to a deep burnished gold that made Sabrina’s hair look like it had been dipped in honey, and beyond the island’s edge, the floating platforms caught the last of the sun and held it, their gardens and towers glowing against the darkening sky.
As the plates emptied and the conversation settled into the comfortable lull that comes after good food and better company, Angelina set her cup down on the grass and looked at her hands for a moment. When she looked up, something had changed in her face, a decision made.
“I wasn’t entirely honest in my letters,” she said.
The yard went quiet. Sabrina stopped mid-sentence about a skybird race she’d apparently won last spring. Gabriella’s fingers stilled on the apple slice she’d been turning between them.
“The farm,” Angelina continued. Her voice was steady, measured, the way it always was when she was saying something difficult. “It was harder than I let on. Much harder.”
She looked out at the farm, her profile sharp against the fading light.
“When the men left, the work didn’t halve itself.
It stayed exactly the same amount of work, and there were three of us to do it instead of …
” She paused. “Well, you know. We managed the essentials. The orchard. The garden. The animals we could keep. But the south field went fallow because we couldn’t irrigate it.
The fences rotted in places and we propped them with stones because replacing posts cost coin we didn’t have.
The barn roof leaked for two winters before we could patch it properly, and by then the beams had started to go.
” She turned her cup slowly between her palms. “We sold the dairy cow in the third year. The sheep after that. And some of the tools.”
She said it all matter-of-factly, without self-pity, the way she’d always delivered hard truths, and the matter-of-factness made it worse. This wasn’t a story crafted for sympathy. This was a ledger, plain and unadorned.