7. Sadie
SADIE
I made it through both switchbacks before my vision started to blur.
Not crying. Just the edges going soft, like I'd been staring at something too bright for too long. I blinked hard and kept my hands steady on the wheel. They were still steady. They'd been steady for an hour now and they hadn't started up again.
The road dropped down through the trees and I followed it because the road required it.
My chest went tight somewhere past the second turn. Not enough air getting in, or too much, I couldn't tell. I rolled the window down and the cold came in sharp and clean, October at dusk, and I still couldn't get a full breath.
I kept driving.
The lake road was empty. No headlights coming up, nobody behind me. Just the gray light fading over the water and the sound of my own breathing too loud in the cab.
My hands didn't shake.
That was wrong. That was the wrongest thing yet.
I turned off before the town, up onto the gravel track that led to Ilse's place. The truck knew the ruts. I'd been here a hundred times to drop off schedules, pick up equipment, leave keys when the season started.
I pulled in beside her porch and cut the engine.
For a second I just sat there. My hands were still on the wheel. Still steady.
Then I got out and walked to her door.
The door opened before I knocked.
Ilse stood there in a cardigan that had lost its buttons years ago, holding a dish towel. She looked at me for maybe three seconds. Took in the dress I'd worn down to his place, and the truck sitting dark behind me with the keys still in it.
She didn't ask.
She stepped back instead, pushing the screen door wide with her hip.
"Come in out of it."
No sympathy in it. Just fact. It was cold, I was standing in it, and her kitchen was warm.
I came in.
The light over her table was the kind that had been there for forty years, yellow and dim enough that you didn't notice the dust. The floor creaked under my boots.
There was a pot of something on the stove, steam curling up toward the ceiling.
The whole place smelled like onions and old wood and dish soap that didn't pretend to be lavender or mint.
Nothing matched. The chairs were from four different decades. The walls needed paint.
It was the most honest room I'd been in all day.
Ilse went back to the counter. She picked up the knife she'd set down and went back to chopping. She didn't turn around.
She didn't ask what happened. She didn't ask if I was all right. She didn't ask me to explain myself.
I stood there with my hands at my sides, still steady, and felt something in my chest start to unlock.
The door was still open behind me.
I turned. The screen door had swung shut on its own, but the inner door stood wide, letting the cold in.
I crossed back to it. Caught the edge and pushed.
It stuck.
I pushed harder. Didn't budge.
I put my shoulder against the wood and leaned my weight in.
It scraped home.
The latch clicked.
I went back out to the truck.
The bed was still half-full. I'd loaded it in a blur—keys on their ring, the clipboard with the crew's hours, the harvest binder with tomorrow's assignments and the equipment checklist. Everything the picking needed in the morning.
Twenty people coming at first light and not one of them could start without what was in this truck.
I grabbed the binder first. Carried it into the kitchen and set it on the table.
I went back out. The keys next—gate, barn, the padlock on the press shed. Then the clipboard. Then the canvas bag with the headlamps and the spare batteries and the first aid kit that lived in the barn all season.
Four trips. My hands stayed steady every time.
The last thing in the bed was shoved up against the wheel well, half-buried under a tarp I'd thrown in last spring. I pulled the tarp back.
A hat.
Canvas, faded to no particular color. Sweat-stained around the band. The brim bent on one side where it had been sat on or stepped on or left too long in the sun.
Roland's.
He'd left it in the truck years ago. Early on. Back when he still came up to the orchard sometimes. I'd found it on the passenger seat one morning and tossed it in the back, meaning to give it to him later.
I never had.
Neither of us had ever mentioned it.
I reached in and picked it up.
I brought it with me.
Didn't think about it. Just closed my hand around the brim and headed back inside with the hat in my fist.
The kitchen was exactly as I'd left it. Ilse still at the counter with her back turned. The work spread across the table under that dim yellow light.
I made it three steps in before the smell hit me.
Canvas and old sweat and something under that I couldn't name. Something that was just him.
My legs went.
I didn't choose it. The chair caught me halfway down and I landed hard with the hat still gripped in both hands.
Ilse turned around.
She looked at me. At the hat. At my bare left hand.
Then she pulled the chair out across from me, sat down, and waited.
I opened my mouth. Nothing came. Tried again.
"He didn't notice."
My voice didn't sound like mine.
"His assistant. She drank from his glass. Right off the rim where his mouth had been. And he just took it back and set it down without drinking. Like he always does. Like he's done with every single thing I've ever made him in nine years."
I stopped. My throat had gone tight.
"He's never put anything I made in his mouth. Not once. I've been standing outside his whole life asking him to see me and he doesn't even?—"
"Don't tell me what he meant. I've known what he meant for nine years and so have you."
Ilse's voice was flat and cold and absolutely certain.
I looked down at the hat. The brim was still bent where it had been left too long in the sun.
"I took off my ring," I said. "Set it on his tasting bench and left."
Ilse said nothing.
"Twenty people coming tomorrow," I said. My hands were shaking now. Finally. "First light. Everything's ready. They can start without me if I can't?—"
"They're not starting without you."
Not a question. Her voice had gone sharp. Not at me. Straight through me at something else.
"Nine years he's been married to you," she said. "Your father's land. Your press. Your crew. Nine harvests of it. And he hasn't stood in that yard for a picking since the first year."
She wasn't asking.
"The winery's bigger," I said. It came out automatic. Hollow. "He can't just leave when?—"
"You're his wife."
The words hit like a slap.
I looked up.
Her face was stone. Not kind. Not soft. Just furious.
"I don't want to be rid of him. That's the whole problem."
The words came out quiet. True.
Ilse stared at me for a long moment.
Then she stood up, went to the stove, and came back with a chipped white mug. She set it down in front of me hard enough that the tea inside sloshed.
She sat back down.
"Drink it," she said.
I wrapped both hands around the mug and did what I was told.
I went out to the truck.
The phone was still face down on the passenger seat where I'd left it. I picked it up and held the power button, standing in Ilse's driveway with the cold coming off the lake.
The screen lit up.
Messages loaded in. Growers confirming tomorrow's start time. Two from the crew lead about bin counts. The county extension office asking about press availability through October.
Work. All of it work.
I could answer that.
I scrolled past his name four times without opening anything.
Inside, Ilse was still at the table. She glanced at the phone in my hand, then back at her mug. Didn't ask.
I sat down and set the phone next to the harvest binder.
Pulled up a new message. Typed the first letter of his name and it autofilled the rest.
My thumb hovered.
*You've had a couple. Let's not do this tonight.*
I heard it again. His voice in the car, flat and final, when I'd tried to tell him what was wrong.
I locked the screen.
Set the phone face down.
I picked up my mug and finished the tea.
Ilse was up before me the next morning, coffee already made. She handed me a mug across the counter without saying anything.
I drank it standing.
She watched me for a minute, then said, "You could push it back a day."
I looked at her.
"The crew would understand," she said. "Weather's holding."
I set the mug down.
"Nothing up there stops because of him."
I went.
The yard was already full when I pulled in. Trucks lined up along the fence, headlights still on in the half-dark. Twenty people moving between the barn and the loading dock, voices low and easy.
Ilse came up ten minutes after me and started organizing bins.
I walked the high row first, checking what I'd marked on Saturday. The Wicksons were ready. Clean separation when I twisted one off, sugar coming through when I bit down.
Halfway down the second row I stopped.
One of the Ashmeads looked wrong. Not the fruit—the trunk. A section of bark sat different, softer somehow.
I pressed my thumb against it and it gave.
I pulled my knife out and worked the edge under the bark. It came away in my hand, and the smell hit me first. Wet and sour and years old.
The wood underneath had gone dark and soft in a patch the size of my palm. I couldn't tell how far back it went.
I scraped the blade along the grain. The rotten pieces came off in strips, damp and stringy, and I dropped them in the grass. I kept cutting until the blade hit solid wood.