Epilogue Sadie
Mud season had the driveway soft enough that I left my boots on the mat by the door, the laces still crusted at the toe.
Through the kitchen window the orchard was a gray smear of bare branches, no leaf on any of them yet.
The sky over the ridge was flat white, the kind that couldn't decide if it wanted to rain.
I hung my coat on the hook by the door, the one that used to sit empty because I never stayed long enough to need it.
The gloves went in the pocket where they always went.
I pulled the pencil out from behind my ear and set it on the counter without thinking about it, the way you set down a thing you'll want again in ten minutes.
The wall past the stairs used to hold a piece of glass art some decorator had picked out years before I ever came into this house. It was blue and twisted and cold-looking, the kind of thing you admired and never touched. It wasn't there anymore.
In its place was a framed page from my grading log. It was the one from the fall we lost half the Ashmeads to frost and saved the rest, my own handwriting crossed out and rewritten twice down the margin.
On the long table under the window, where nothing used to sit but a bowl nobody used, there was a spread of grafting tape. Next to it sat a coffee can of cuttings I'd brought in to keep from freezing, three kinds bundled with twine and labeled in pencil.
Roland stood at the stove with his sleeves shoved up, turning bacon in the same pan he always used, not looking over to see if I'd noticed any of it. He'd been doing that most mornings for months now, long enough that I didn't think to watch him do it anymore.
Down the hall his phone buzzed once against the table and he let it go. Trask could handle whatever it was. Roland didn't check on things at night anymore.
I came up behind him and put my hand flat on his back, between his shoulder blades, and he leaned into it without turning around.
That was when I noticed my hand, flat against the blue cotton of his shirt.
The ring was on it. Plain gold, sitting low on my finger, catching the gray light from the window.
The yard outside had turned to soup with the last of the melt, and everyone who came through my tasting room dragged half of it in on their boots. I'd given up sweeping by ten that morning.
Warren, from the restaurant group out of Ithaca, was working through four glasses lined up on the counter while Ilse poured. I stood behind the register doing math I didn't need a register for. Trask leaned in the doorway with a hose coupling in one hand.
"This won't fit the intake till we swap the elbow," he said. "Want me to run to Geneva for one, or order it?"
"Order it," I said. "We've got time before the trees leaf out."
Roland stood by the window with a glass he wasn't drinking, turning it once in his hand. Deb stacked empty cases against the far wall, not looking up from the count.
"You're at Stockton," Warren said to Roland. "What do you make of all this? Competitor's eye."
"I don't think about it as competition," Roland said, looking past me at the trees, bare and black with wet. "These trees are pushing a hundred and forty years old. Three varieties on this hill you won't find anywhere else on the lake."
"She stockpiles the early ones in cold storage, staggers the late ones against them, and buys herself about two weeks that way. Every morning she makes a full pot of coffee and forgets to drink it until it's stone cold."
Ilse poured the fourth glass and didn't look up.
"Come October," he went on, "half the county brings their fruit up that road. It all goes through one press. Five weeks. Twenty people running it around the clock."
Warren whistled low and looked at me like I'd done something.
"It's ten acres," I said.
"It's ten acres of hundred-and-forty-year-old trees in three kinds nobody else on this lake grows, and half the county's fruit goes through one press up here in five weeks with twenty people running it. Don't do that."
I was at the kitchen table, sanding a rough spot on the handle of an old apple crate, the one my father used to store his cuttings in.
The shavings kept catching on the sleeve of my sweater.
The window over the sink had gone dark an hour before.
Outside, the mud along the fence line hadn't firmed up yet, and I could hear runoff ticking down the drainpipe.
Roland came through from the hall in sock feet and went to the door that led down to the cellar. I heard the light switch. I heard him on the stairs, slower going down than he ever was coming up, the way he always was with a full hand.
When he came back he had a bottle I knew without needing to look twice. Dust sat along the shoulder of it. The label had gone soft at the corners from all the time it had spent lying on its side. The year we were married was stamped right there on the label.
He set it on the counter and worked the cork loose with the opener from the drawer by the stove, not hurrying, not fumbling either. It came free with a sound so small I almost missed it under the drip of the tap I hadn't gotten around to fixing.
I set the sandpaper down and brushed the dust off my palms onto my jeans. My knuckles had split open again in the cold that week, two thin lines across the left one, and I pressed my thumb against it out of habit more than anything else.
He took two glasses down from the cabinet, the good ones, not the everyday ones, and poured them both at the counter with his back half to me.
He carried them over and set one in front of me on the table, next to the crate and the pile of shavings, and kept the other for himself.
"I'm not saving anything else," he said.
He pulled out the chair across from me and sat down, turning his glass a quarter turn on the table without lifting it.
I went back to the sandpaper. The crate needed another pass along the bottom edge where the wood had split. I worked at it slow, in long strokes, the way my father taught me before I was tall enough to see over the table in his kitchen.
Outside, something dropped off the roofline, ice or rain, I couldn't tell which. The kitchen smelled of the open bottle and the cedar dust off the crate.
My glass stayed full on the table, between the shavings and the saltshaker, and neither of us said anything else.
He drank his in one long swallow, all the way to the bottom, and set the empty glass down next to the crate.
I watched him look at mine. It sat exactly where he'd set it down, the wine dark and untouched, shavings drifted up against the base of it.
He was quiet for a long moment. Then he lifted his head.
His chair scraped back from the table and his knees went out from under him on the way down. He caught the table edge with one hand and stayed there, kneeling on the floor in front of my chair, not saying anything at all.
I set the sandpaper down.
"Roland," I said. "You're going to feel that floor tomorrow."
He put his hand flat on my leg, just above the knee, like he needed something solid to hold onto.
"I'm not going to plan for another time. Not with you. Not ever again."
I put my hand over his.
He said, "I kept everything for later. I didn't know later was something a person could run out of."
Outside, the drip off the roofline had gone quiet. I stood up, and he stood with me, and we left the crate and the glasses and the open bottle right where they were and walked down the hall to the bedroom.
THE END