10. Mel
— ? —
Mel
Two Years Later
“Leo, we don’t eat dirt.”
I scoop my son up before he can shove another fistful of orchard soil into his mouth, and he gives me a look of pure betrayal. Those eyes, his father’s exact eyes, ice blue and devastating, stare up at me like I’ve personally ruined his entire existence.
“Mama,” he says, pointing at the ground. “Dirty.”
“Yes. Dirty. That’s why we don’t eat it.”
“Eat dirty?”
“No. No eat dirty.”
His face crumples, and I brace myself for the wail that’s coming, but then a butterfly drifts past and his whole expression shifts to wonder. He lunges toward it, almost toppling us both, and I catch him just in time.
“You’re going to give me a heart attack,” I tell him. “You know that?”
He grins at me, all dimples and mischief.
Exactly like his father.
I set him back in the double stroller next to his sister, who watches the whole production with her usual careful assessment.
Junie has my eyes, green and thoughtful, and my tendency to analyze everything before committing to it.
Where Leo throws himself at the world headfirst, Junie studies it first. Weighs the risks.
Decides if participating is worth her time.
Right now, she’s decided it’s not.
“Buh-fly,” Leo announces, pointing.
Junie looks at the butterfly, looks at her brother, and goes back to the cracker she’s been methodically dismantling for the past ten minutes.
“Fair enough,” I tell her. “Butterflies are overrated anyway.”
She gives me a look that says she doesn’t believe me but appreciates the solidarity.
“Mel!” Hattie’s voice carries across the orchard. “You heading to town?”
“Just going to grab some lunch things!” I call back. “Need anything?”
“More of that jalape?o cheese from Peterson’s!”
“Got it!”
I push the stroller up the path toward the house, and Hattie meets me halfway, wiping her hands on the front of her overalls, a smear of engine grease along one cheekbone from whatever she’s been fighting with in the cider shed since dawn.
“Books balanced?” she asks. It’s a joke between us now. Two years ago the orchard’s accounts lived in a coffee can and a shoebox and Hattie’s frankly criminal memory. The first month I worked here I found pesticide filed under “miscellaneous snacks” and nearly wept.
“Balanced, reconciled, and I found money you’ve been overpaying the feed supplier since the Obama administration.”
“Huh.” She squints at me, which is Hattie for thank you. “Knew there was a reason I kept you.”
“You kept me because I showed up crying and you’re a soft touch under all that plaid.”
“Slander.” She crouches to Junie’s level, and my careful daughter, who takes weeks to warm to anyone, immediately holds up her half-destroyed cracker like an offering.
Hattie accepts it with total gravity, pretends to eat it, hands it back.
Junie beams. It undoes me a little, every time, how completely these two women who share no blood adopted each other on sight.
“This one’s going to run the world,” Hattie says.
“That one-” she nods at Leo, who is now trying to eat the stroller strap “-is going to be a cautionary tale.”
“He’s aspirational about it.”
It’s an ordinary Tuesday and I’m so full of it I could burst. Two years ago I got off a plane with one suitcase and a heartbeat I hadn’t confirmed yet, and now I have this: a job I’m good at, a town that waves at me on Main Street, a woman who calls me family and means it as a schedule, and two children who are the entire reason the sun bothers coming up.
It is nothing like the marble villa in Tuscany, nothing like the life I pictured saying yes to Santino Bianchi.
It’s better. It’s mine, down to the grease on Hattie’s face and the dirt in Leo’s fist.
Which is the only thing that makes the newspaper feel like a splinter I can’t dig out.
“You still fretting about that article?” Hattie asks, reading me the way she does.
“No.”
“Liar.”
Three days ago the Wisteria Gazette ran a piece about the orchard, one of the old trees produced a record-breaking monster of an apple that sold for stupid money at the county fair.
A feel-good, tiny-town story, circulation maybe three hundred people, all of them within a twenty-mile radius.
Nobody outside this county will ever read it.
Except it printed my name. Not Melanie Bianchi. Just “Mel Jordan, the orchard’s office manager.” But my name, in ink, tied to a place a person could find.
“Nobody reads the Gazette but us and the Lord,” Hattie says. “And He already knows where you are.”
“That’s comforting.”
“I’m a comforting woman.” She straightens, knees popping. “Go get my cheese before I have to eat a sandwich dry like an animal.”
And she’s right. She’s right and I know she’s right, the divorce must have gone through in absentia by now, I’m as good as free, the twins are mine, father listed as unknown on both certificates.
No one is looking for me. No one is coming.
I’ve said it to myself every day for two years and most days I believe it.
Today, for no reason I can name, I don’t.
“Okay, babies,” I say, unlocking the stroller brake. “Let’s go get Hattie her cheese.”
***
The convenience store is three blocks from the orchard, on Main Street between the diner and the hardware store. It’s run by a woman named Betty who’s been here since before I was born and who knows everything about everyone in this town.
She’s also a terrible gossip.
Which is why I notice immediately that the air is off when I push through the door.
Betty and two of her friends, the aunties, Hattie calls them, because they’re related to approximately half the population of Wisteria, are clustered by the register.
They’re whispering in that particular way that means they’ve got news.
Good news or bad news, it doesn’t matter, they’re vibrating with the need to share it.
They stop when they see me.
“Morning, Mel,” Betty says, her voice pitched just a little too bright. “How are those babies today?”
“Trying to eat dirt.” I steer the stroller toward the refrigerated section. “Leo’s convinced it’s a food group.”
“Boys,” one of the aunties says. “Always putting things in their mouths.”
They laugh, but it’s forced. Nervous.
I grab milk, bread, the jalape?o cheese Hattie wanted. My skin is prickling, that instinct I’ve developed for trouble.
“Everything okay?” I ask, walking toward the register.
Betty and the aunties exchange looks.
“We just had the strangest customer this morning,” Betty says. “Thought you might want to know.”
My stomach drops. “What kind of customer?”
“A foreigner.” Betty’s eyes are bright with gossip. “Big fella. Tattoos all up his arms. An accent straight out of the movies.”
Everything in me goes cold and very quiet.
“He came in asking about Hattie’s orchard,” one of the aunties adds. “Wanted to know who worked there. How to find it.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Nothing!” Betty looks offended. “We don’t just give out information about our people to strangers. I told him if he wanted to visit the orchard, he could find it himself.”
“But he seemed real determined,” the other auntie says. “Wasn’t rude or anything, just… focused. Like he’d come a long way to get here.”
I can’t breathe.
“What did he look like?” My voice sounds strange. Distant. “Exactly.”
“Tall. Dark hair, a bit shaggy. Those tattoos I mentioned - some kind of pattern, like vines or such. And eyes…” Betty pauses, thinking. “Pale eyes. Real intense.”
Ice blue.
His eyes are ice blue.
“Mel?” Betty frowns. “Honey, you’ve gone white as a sheet. You know this person?”
“No.” The lie comes automatically. “No, I don’t. I just… I need to go.”
I fumble for my wallet, throw money on the counter, and grab my groceries without waiting for change.
“Mel, wait-”
I’m already out the door.
The stroller wheels rattle on the sidewalk as I walk too fast, my heart pounding so hard I can feel it in my throat. It’s nothing. It has to be nothing. Lots of people have tattoos. Pale eyes, too. Plenty of foreigners visit small Texas towns for completely innocent reasons.
This doesn’t mean anything.
This can’t mean anything.
I’m being paranoid. I’ve been paranoid for three days, ever since that stupid article, and now my brain is connecting dots that don’t exist.
He’s not here.
He can’t be here.
I’ve been invisible for two years. Careful. Quiet. I’ve built a life that has nothing to do with Santino Bianchi or his family or any of it.
He wouldn’t -
I turn into the orchard’s driveway.
And I see him.
He’s standing in the yard, his back to me, talking to Hattie on the porch.
Bigger than I remember, broader through the shoulders, heavier with muscle.
His hair is longer, messier, curling at his collar.
And the tattoos the aunties mentioned climb up both his arms, ink I don’t recognize, patterns that weren’t there before.
But I know that back.
I know those shoulders.
I know the way he holds himself, the tilt of his head, the exact angle of his spine.
Hattie sees me first.
Her face goes pale. Panicked. She says a word I can’t hear, and the man turns -
And Santino Bianchi is looking at me.
Those eyes, Leo’s eyes, my son’s eyes, staring at me across two years and eight thousand miles of distance. His face is different too, harder and more angular, like part of him has been carved away. But it’s him. It’s undeniably him.
He’s here.
He found me.
And he’s looking at me, and then his gaze drops to the stroller, to Leo and Junie sitting there looking up at him with matching expressions of curiosity.
His face goes absolutely white.
“Mel,” he breathes. Just my name. Just that single syllable, broken in half.
I can’t move. Can’t speak. Can’t do anything but stand there, frozen, while the life I’ve built crumbles around me and my husband, my ex-husband, stares at the children he doesn’t know are his.