2. Sadie
SADIE
It was a weeknight, the first free evening I'd had in a week. I spent it walking down to the cidery in the last of the light, to get a bottle I'd been saving for three years.
Harvest was coming. Once the fruit started, I wouldn't have an evening to spare until the trees were bare, so if I was going to do this, it had to be now.
I found the bottle in the back row of cold storage, wiped the dust off the label with my thumb, and carried it out to the truck like it might break.
In the kitchen I set out two glasses on the counter by the sink. Roland wasn't home yet. That was fine. That gave me time.
I called Ilse while I was drying the glasses a second time, for no reason except that my hands needed something to do.
"You're not still at the barn," she said, instead of hello.
"I'm home. I brought up the reserve bottle. The one from the old block."
A pause, and then a laugh, short and disbelieving. "The one you've been hiding since your father was alive?"
"Since three years ago. Don't make it sound like a shrine."
"You're opening it on a Tuesday."
"I'm opening it tonight because Roland's going to taste it tonight," I said. "I asked him this morning. He said yes."
Ilse went quiet in a way I knew well, the quiet she does instead of asking a question she thinks I won't like.
"Nine years," she said finally. "He's never once."
"I know."
"He tastes other people's vintage for a living and he's never had a glass of his own wife's."
"I know, Ilse."
"Must be a big night."
"It's just cider." I set the second glass down harder than I meant to.
"Sadie."
"No, I know, Ilse. You don't have to say it."
She didn't say anything else for a second. I stood there in the stove light with the bottle sweating a little onto the counter, and the two empty glasses waiting, and I gave up trying to sound like it was nothing.
"It matters to me," I said. "More than it should. I know how that sounds."
I looked at the glasses again and didn't move them.
Headlights swept the kitchen window a few minutes later, gravel crunching under tires as his car climbed the last stretch of driveway. I heard the engine cut, the door close soft the way he always closed it, like the car cost too much to slam. I stood up straighter without deciding to.
The porch light was on. It's always on for him.
He came in still in his suit jacket, tie loosened, a folder of papers under one arm. He set his keys in the bowl by the door and looked tired in that particular way he gets during tasting season, like the color had gone out from behind his eyes.
"Hey," he said, and kissed the top of my head on his way past.
"Hey yourself." I nodded at the counter. "It's open."
He glanced over. Bottle, two glasses, one already poured, sitting gold and still under the stove light.
"Smells good in here," he said, which wasn't an answer.
"I poured you a glass."
"I saw." He set the folder down on the table and rubbed the back of his neck. "Leave it out. I'll have it later."
"Later tonight?"
"Later." He was already moving toward the stairs, jacket half off one shoulder.
"You said this morning you would," I said. I kept my voice even. "I brought it up special. It's from the old block. I've been saving it three years."
He stopped on the third step and turned back, and I could see him working to be patient with me, which somehow made it worse.
"I'm not saying no, Sadie," he said. "I'm just saying not right now. I've been tasting since seven o'clock in the morning. I can't do this right now."
"Okay," I said.
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"That voice." He came back down one step. "I want to taste it. I do. Just not tonight, when my mouth's been through a dozen wines already and I couldn't tell you good from bad if you paid me."
I nodded and picked up a dish towel I didn't need and folded it in half, then in half again, my knuckles catching on the fabric.
"That's fine," I said. "It'll keep."
He looked relieved, like I'd let him off something, and I hated that I had.
He came down and pulled the folder toward him.
"Roland."
He looked up, one hand flat on the folder.
"The pump on the press is going," I said. "I can hear it. And the housing's cast and nobody's made that housing since seventy-something, so when it goes there's nothing to put in it."
"Mm," he said.
He opened the folder. I stood at the counter with the bottle open and his glass full and untouched, and I put the towel down and didn't fold it again.
Headlights swept the window again. A second engine, climbing the gravel slower than his had, like whoever was driving didn't know the ruts by heart the way he did.
"Are you expecting someone?" I asked.
"Hm? Oh." Roland didn't look up from the folder. "Margo and Hollis. We've got the Hendry numbers to finish before Sunday."
He said it the way you'd mention the weather. Like I should've already known, like it had been said out loud somewhere I hadn't been standing.
Two car doors closed, not soft like his. I heard gravel under shoes, voices low, and then a knock that was really more of a courtesy than a question, because the door was already opening under it.
Margo came in first, blazer still buttoned, a leather folio under one arm. Hollis Trask came behind her, raising a hand to me, easy.
"Sorry to descend on you," he said. "Roland said the kitchen table was fair game."
"It is," I said, because what else do you say in your own doorway.
Margo set her folio down across from Roland's and looked around the kitchen once, quick, the way you'd size up a rental car. Her eyes passed over the bottle on the counter, the two glasses, the one still full and gold and untouched, and moved on like none of it registered as anything.
"Sadie, would you mind?" she said. "Something for the three of us — whatever's easiest."
I felt my spine go straight before I decided to let it. I looked at Roland. Waited half a second for him to say he'd get it, or that I'd had a long day too, or anything.
"Thanks, love," he said, already back inside the folder.
To me. For going along with it, before I'd said a word either way.
I stood there a second longer than I needed to. Then I turned to the cabinet and took down four fresh glasses, leaving the one already poured exactly where it sat, and reached for my own bottle.
It was the only thing in that house worth putting in front of anybody. If he wouldn't taste it alone with me, he could taste it in company.
I poured all four glasses full and set his in front of him. He picked it up without looking, swirled it once out of habit, held it to the light over the folder, and set it back down.
Nobody at that table thought a thing of it. That's just what people who taste for a living do with a glass.
I was the only one who knew what I was looking at.
Margo picked up her glass and turned it once under the stove light before she drank, like she was checking it for something.
"This is lovely. Is it sweet? I can never really tell with cider — it all just tastes like apples to me."
I could've let that go. Six months ago I would have.
"It's from the old block," I said instead.
"Trees my great-grandfather planted, a hundred and forty years ago.
Three varieties nobody else around here still grows, because most people ripped them out for ones that yield more.
I keep about twenty people on through October, press for half the county on top of my own fruit, and the place has cleared its costs seven of the last nine years. "
Nobody said anything for a second. Trask had stopped with his glass halfway to his mouth.
"Ten acres doing that," he said. "How do you handle it when everything ripens at once? You can't be pressing all of it the same week."
That was a real question. The kind a person only asks once they've decided you're running something, not playing at it. I felt myself sit up a little straighter. I opened my mouth to answer.
"She stockpiles the early varieties in cold storage and staggers the late ones against them," Roland said, not looking up from his folder. "Buys herself about three weeks that way."
It's two weeks. And I don't buy myself anything — my father built the storage in for exactly that reason, years before I was old enough to press a bushel on my own. A small thing to get wrong. I let it sit in my chest anyway, where it could keep me company.
"You could actually sell this," Margo said, turning her glass again, watching the color move.
I sell it to half the county already. I've sold it out of the back of my truck at four in the morning to men twice my age who know good cider from bad wine and don't say so unless they mean it. I didn't say any of that. I just nodded, like she'd handed me something instead of taken something away.
Roland closed the folder he'd been flipping through and opened it back to a page with a yellow tab.
"Anyway. Page eleven."
That was it. Margo leaned in. Trask pulled his glass closer and reached for a pen. The table turned back to itself, the four of us under one light, and nobody looked up to see if I was still standing there.
I was.
Page eleven had numbers on it, and Roland's pen moved down the column like he was counting under his breath.
Margo smoothed the corner of her folio flat.
"It must be tempting, though. Do you know what ridge land is going for right now? I saw a number last week that I genuinely didn't believe."
I held my glass with both hands. It wasn't an insult. Margo never said anything you could call her on. It was just my father's trees, turned into a figure, the way she'd turned my cider into a color a minute ago.
I waited for Roland to say something. He knew what that land meant to me. He'd been standing in it the day I said yes to him.
He turned the page.
Nothing changed in his face. His pen didn't stop. Whatever Margo had said had gone right past him, hadn't so much as slowed his reading, because as far as he was concerned nothing had been said that needed him at all.
The stove light hummed in the quiet where his answer should have gone.
"It's her land," Trask said, not looking up from his own page, like it was a fact everybody in the room already had.
Margo turned back to her folder. Roland kept reading.
I looked down at my glass and didn't say anything.
The work went on a long time after that. I stopped waiting for anyone to bring me into it.
Margo found something wrong in the Hendry numbers around nine. Two deliveries had been logged as one, the total doubled straight through the sheet, and nobody had caught it. She walked the pages backward, tapping each line, until she found the exact place it split.
Trask leaned over her shoulder to check it. "You sure?"
"I'm sure," she said, and turned the page so he could see for himself.
He was quiet a second, then nodded and let her keep going. That was the whole exchange, and it told me everything — he trusted her math before his own.
Further down the same column, I caught a weight that didn't match what I remembered moving off my own dock in October.
"That's four hundred bushels, not four-forty," I said. Flat. Once.
Roland didn't look up. Margo made the change without comment. Nobody thanked me and I didn't want them to. I just knew the number.
His second glass sat at his elbow the whole time, cider gone pale where the stove light caught it, right where he'd set it down after swirling it once, hours ago now. He never touched it again.
I went to my own bottle on the counter, the one I'd carried up from the back row myself, and poured mine full. I drank it standing there, alone in my own kitchen, while the three of them worked.
Margo packed up a little after eleven, sliding her folder into a leather bag while Trask stretched and said something about the drive back.
Roland walked them both to the door. I heard gravel under tires, headlights swinging across the kitchen window, and then it was just the two of us and the stove light.
He came back in loosening his tie the rest of the way, like the night had already ended for him.
"Good work tonight," he said, mostly to himself.
I stood at the counter with my empty glass. "She asked me to get her a drink. In my kitchen. And you thanked me for it."
He stopped. "Is this about Margo? She's my assistant, Sadie. She's supposed to know things and do things for me. She's just an employee. The best one I have, in fact, and you've decided to hate her. And for what? For being good at her job?"
I hadn't said her name once. He'd said it twice already.
"I don't hate her," I said, quiet, the way I get when something in me is closing a door. "I stood in my own kitchen for three hours and nobody handed me a pen."
He rubbed his eyes, patient, like I was the one being difficult. "Do you know what I've built for you? The house. The vacations. Every car in that driveway. Every dinner where I put your hand on my arm and told a room full of people that's my wife."
He glanced at the window, toward the dark shape of the ridge, and his voice went softer, like he was giving me a gift.
"And your cidery's still standing after all these years. That's not nothing, Sadie."
I looked at his glass on the counter. Full. Untouched. Nine years of harvests and he'd never once put it to his mouth.
"Is that all you think a marriage is?" I asked.
"That's not a fair question, Sadie."
He said it gently. He believed it.
I set my glass down so it wouldn't shake in my hand.
"Every ask, every apology, and every thing I've asked you for over the years," I said. "You've bottled it up like a vintage and told me that it'll be better later. But when will your later be our now?"
The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere outside, the porch light buzzed against a moth.
He didn't answer. He just stood there in his loosened tie, looking at me like he was waiting for the rest of the sentence, like there had to be more to it than that.
There wasn't.
I stood in my kitchen, between two glasses of my own cider, and watched my husband decide silence was easier than an answer.
I didn't say anything else. I'd already said the biggest thing I'd ever said to him, and he'd let it sit there in the quiet.
I set my glass down and walked past the counter. His was still there, full, catching the last of the stove light, exactly where he'd told me to leave it. I didn't touch it.
The stairs creaked on the fourth step, same as always. I climbed them in the dark, one hand on the rail, not looking back to see if he'd followed.
The bedroom door was heavy old oak, older than our marriage, with a brass knob and a small turn-latch built into the collar below it. I pulled it shut. Then I found the little brass wheel under the knob and turned it until it caught with a solid click.
I kept my hand on it a second longer than I needed to.