Epilogue
Harper
The wildflower path was the part I had not been expecting.
I had been expecting a lot of things, by the time the late-spring picnic rolled around in May the following year.
I had been expecting to be living, by then, in the small farmhouse seven miles outside Clover Ridge that I had moved into at Christmas with my whole life packed into eleven banker's boxes and one dog crate for the kitten Everett had found in the barn that fall, a little gray thing with a torn ear who had decided, on her own and without anyone asking her, that she belonged in our kitchen and slept in the basket on top of the fridge.
I had been expecting Kneaded to be running smooth a year in, because it had been my full intention to make it run smooth, and I had been expecting to have a steady contract by then with Pearl's diner for breakfast pastries and another with Briar for the flower shop and another with the clubhouse and another, as of March, with the new bookstore Elara had opened on the corner of Magnolia and Third that needed a small selection of cookies for the front counter.
I had been expecting my brother to come around to my counter every Monday morning for a cinnamon roll, because he had, every Monday morning since the second Monday morning after Wednesday morning, come around for a cinnamon roll, and the first three Mondays of that had been hard, and the fourth Monday had been a little easier, and by the third month of Mondays he and Everett had been laughing on the front bench outside the shop again the way they had been laughing in those rockers for twenty-seven years, and I had been expecting that.
I had been expecting to be happy. I had been expecting to be loved.
I had been expecting all of it, in a way I had never, in any year of my twenties, allowed myself to expect anything, and the expecting had been one of the slow lessons of my thirtieth year, which was to let yourself expect.
I had not been expecting the path.
He had built it without telling me. He had built it the second week of April, when the wildflowers in the back five-acre stretch of his land — our land, I was still learning to say our — had been just starting to come up out of the wet grass, and he had told me he was working on the back fence line, and I had believed him, the way I believed Everett Dalton about most things, because Everett Dalton was the most honest man I had ever met and was also, I had been learning, occasionally the sneakiest. He had been working the back fence line for nine days.
He had been coming in for supper with his arms tired and a small private smile on his face that I had thought was the smile of a man who liked his work, and which I now understood, in retrospect, was the smile of a man who was building a thing for his wife and was very pleased with himself about it.
The wife part was new too. The wife part was as of November.
We had not had a big wedding. We had stood on the porch of his — our — farmhouse in the first snow of the year in front of fourteen people and Cade had walked me out from the kitchen door and given me away, and Briar had been my maid of honor and Knox had been Everett's best man, and Wren had played her grandmother's fiddle while we said the vows.
I had worn a cream-colored sweater dress because that is what I wanted to wear, and Everett had worn his good flannel because that was what I had wanted him to wear, and Mama had cried, and Daddy had cried, and at the end of the ceremony when Everett had kissed me on the porch in the snow Cade had whooped from the front row the way he had whooped at football games when we were children, and I had laughed into Everett's mouth.
But the path.
The path he showed me the first Saturday in May, after he had finished it.
He took me by the hand at supper-time and walked me out the back door of the farmhouse, and he walked me around the side of the chicken coop and past the toolshed and out toward the back fence line, and there — cut into the long stretch of wildflowers and grass between our house and the property line that ran along the road to town — was a path.
A mown path. Eighteen inches wide. Mown clean through the wildflowers — the wild bergamot just coming up purple, the black-eyed Susans about to open, the late primrose still in pink — running straight across the back five acres to a gap in the fence I had not noticed before.
He had taken the post out of the back corner and built a little gate.
A gate of cedar, sanded smooth, with a small iron latch.
The gate opened onto a strip of grass that ran along the county road.
The county road that, if you walked it three quarters of a mile to the east, brought you out at the back alley behind the bakery.
He said, "I built you a way to walk to work, Harp."
I stood there.
I want to put down — I had been a married woman five months by then.
I had been a woman in love with this man six years and ten months.
I had been a woman with this man one full year, give or take a few weeks, by that Saturday in May.
I thought I was through with the part of being loved where it surprised you.
I thought I had gotten to the steady part, the after-part, the part where you stopped being startled by it.
I had not.
I cried for twenty straight minutes.
I cried standing at the head of the path with his arm around my shoulders, and I cried sitting down in the grass at the side of it because my legs went weak, and I cried with my face in his shoulder, and I cried the kind of long good cry I had not, in fact, ever cried in any year of my life until I had let myself be loved properly by the right man, which was the kind of cry that came out of you because for once it was not grief or loss or worry or shame, it was just the small overflow of being held up under by more than you knew how to hold.
I cried because he had spent nine days, in the part of the year where the farm was busy and the chickens were laying and the south field needed plowing, building me a path through wildflowers so I would not have to drive seven miles to my own bakery if the morning was pretty.
He had built me a road, made of grass and bergamot and primrose, between where I lived and where I worked, because he had thought of it and he had wanted me to have it.
I sat in the grass at the head of his path and I cried, and Everett Dalton sat down beside me in the grass, and he did not say anything, he just put his arm around me and let me cry, and when I was done I wiped my face with the corner of my apron and I looked at him and I said —
"You are going to be the death of me, Boone Dalton."
He said, "Not for a long time, I hope, Mrs. Dalton."
He had been calling me Mrs. Dalton for six months and it still made my chest do a thing.
We sat in the grass another twenty minutes.
I made him take me down the whole path, and I walked it from one end to the other in his old work boots that were two sizes too big for me, and we went through the gate at the back, and we stood on the strip of grass at the side of the county road, and I turned around and looked back through the wildflowers and saw, in the distance, the back porch of our farmhouse with the chickens scratching around under the steps and the kitten asleep on the railing, and I knew, with the kind of clean clarity you do not get often in a life — I knew that this was the road of the rest of my life.
This was it. This was the walk I was going to walk till I was eighty.
To my bakery. From my home. Through wildflowers. Beside this man.
I leaned my head against his shoulder.
He said, "Picnic's tomorrow."
I said, "I know it is."
He said, "You ready."
I said, "I am ready."
Everett
The Clover Ridge Spring Picnic was the second Sunday in May every year, and it had been the second Sunday in May every year since 1956, and my mama had told me once that she and my daddy had had their first proper date at the Spring Picnic in 1972 when she was eighteen and he was twenty, and that he had won her a stuffed bear at the ring toss and she had won him at the supper table, and I had thought about that story a lot in the year that Harper and I had been together.
I had thought about my mama and my daddy, who had been gone a long time now, and about what they would have made of Harper.
My daddy would have liked her. He had been a quiet man who liked loud women, and Harper would have made him laugh.
My mama would have loved her. My mama would have taken her into the kitchen the first time I brought her home and they would have made a pie together, and that would have been the end of it.
I sat with my parents in my head a lot, that year.
I had set them down at the kitchen table with us on most Sunday mornings, in my head, and I had told them about Harper.
I had told them about her bakery, and the lavender shortbread, and the wildflower path, and Cade.
I had told them about Cade especially. Mama, I had said, in my head, more than once, I was wrong to keep it from him for six years.
You would have told me I was wrong. You did tell me I was wrong, probably, in my head, every Christmas.
I should have listened to you sooner. My mama in my head had not said anything when I had said that.
She had just patted my arm and gone back to her coffee.
My mama in my head was forgiving in a way she had not, when she had been alive, always been forgiving in life, and I had decided that meant she had ascended.