Chapter 24
Elizabeth
Idrove home taking time to enjoy that stretch of ridge road where the orchard runs out and the whole farm opens up below with the maze standing gold and the pumpkin rows blazing away to the tree line—with the windows cracked to the cold on purpose, wearing Matt’s gray henley under my coat, singing along to a sappy love song I would deny I knew the words of under oath.
I did not get the eggs. I have stocked that dairy case more times than any woman alive; I could find the eggs blindfolded in a power outage—and not one single egg crossed my mind the entire drive home, because I was busy. Remembering things.
The kitchen smelled like coffee when I came in, and it was occupied. My mother at the table with the crossword. My grandmother beside her with her hands wrapped around her favorite cup and her reading glasses pushed up into her white hair, both of them arranged just a little too casually.
And I clocked the whole tableau in one step and thought, with real dread, they know.
Of course they knew. I’d driven off to dinner at Matt Hartford’s the evening before, and here I was strolling in at almost noon the next day, glowing like a lit candle, wearing yesterday’s clothes and a full night of him all over my face—and my face has never kept a secret in its life.
Two of the most observant women in Sweetbriar were sitting at that table pretending to do a crossword, and I had walked in with zero defenses and a heart still floating somewhere above the tree line.
There was no version of this where I got away clean.
I busied myself with my coat and tried, uselessly, to arrange my features into those of a woman who had spent a perfectly ordinary night doing perfectly ordinary things.
Grandma looked at me for a long moment over the rim of her cup. “Finally,” she said, with the satisfaction of a woman watching a crop come in, and went back to her coffee.
“Good morning to you too, Grandma.” It came out about two shades too bright.
“It’s nearly noon, sweet pea.”
“Good nearly-noon.” I gave the coat hook my complete and undivided attention, because if I looked either of them in the eye I was going to grin, and if I grinned it was over.
“Mm.” My mother filled in a word without looking up. “Eggs?”
I stopped with one arm still in my coat, heat climbing my neck.
She turned the crossword a quarter turn, serene as pond water. “Eggs, Elizabeth. Small, oval. I texted you about them. You, a woman who sells eggs at the Stop the grin got loose. “Grandma, he canned his own tomatoes. He made the best spaghetti in the history of the world.”
Iris looked at my mother. My mother looked at Iris. Something extremely rapid passed between them in the language they’ve spoken over my head my whole life.
“You’re going to marry that man,” said Iris, with finality, and drank her coffee. “I see good things.”
“The eggs,” I said, standing, desperate to change the subject before my face caught fire again. “I’ll go get the eggs—”
“Sit down.” My mother turned the crossword another quarter turn. “Donna can send some with the propane delivery.”
“Okay.” I sat. “You know what this farm needs?” I said, mostly to the ceiling. “Chickens. We are an actual farm, and we buy our eggs retail like townies. We could be selling eggs. I could be selling our own eggs to myself at a margin.”
“Put it on the spring list,” my mother said, filling in a word. “Good idea.”
“We’ll put them behind the barn,” Iris agreed, “and you’re not naming them. You name them, you can’t cull them, and I am not running a hen retirement on my land.”
“I would obviously name them, Grandma.”
“I know you would, honey. That’s why it’s going on your mother’s side of the list.”
“Yeah,” my mother agreed. “I’ll name them Chicken Stew. Or Pot Pie, or perhaps Cacciatore. Egg laying hens are tough.”
“Yuck, no. They’ll just retire and be cute,” I insisted. “Live out their best old lady chicken life in an alternate henhouse.”
She peered at me over the rim of her reading glasses. “Whatever you want, sweetie,” she said, knowing there was no way I’d take care of chickens and then eat them.
And that was the morning. The three of us around that table in the warm yellow kitchen with the coffee and the teasing and my grandmother planning my wedding out loud over her third cup, fall sitting golden in every window, all of it so easy and loud and mine that I forgot, for an hour, to be careful about anything at all.
It was Iris who broke it up, levering herself off the chair for her morning circuit of the farm.
“Sweet pea, fetch my glasses out of my bag, please.”—and I dug through the great floral suitcase she calls a purse, past the peppermints and the seed packets, and came up with the reading glasses, and if my fingers brushed the corner of an envelope down at the bottom, I didn’t think one thing about it.
She took the glasses, pointed them at me like a gavel, and delivered her exit line from the door.
“Bring him Sunday. I’ll make the good roast and vet him proper.
” And she was gone, her netted bee hat under her arm, and my mother gathered the cups, and I shed my coat at last and dug the day’s list out of my bag.
My phone buzzed against my hip.
Matt: Home safe?
Two words. I stood there in my mother’s kitchen grinning at two words like a teenager.
Me: Home safe. Grandma has now watched the pumpkin video eleven times and has opinions about our future. Casualties minimal.
Matt: Good. Drink some water. You had a long night.
Me: Officer. Are you checking on my hydration?
Matt: I’m checking on all of you. When do I get to see you again?
And there it was, easy as breathing, no games anywhere in the man.
I leaned against the counter and ran the calendar in my head—his shifts, my shifts at the Stop & Go, the festival grinding toward its last big weekend—and we landed on tomorrow, the maze gate, him off duty at six and me on till close.
Cider and cold hands and the gate. A plan so small and so certain it felt like riches.
Me: And Sunday you’re summoned, I typed. Roast at the farmhouse. My Grandmother intends to vet you properly.
Matt: I’ll bring flowers. Should I be scared?
Me: Yes. Bring the flowers. And compliment the bees. She can be bought.
Matt: Noted. Tomorrow, Elizabeth.
Mom had gone upstairs after ordering me to take the day off.
So I started clearing the table. Grandma had gone out without her purse, of course—a woman doesn’t take her handbag to talk to bees—and it sat gaping on her chair where she’d left it, one strap down, contents on display to anybody clearing the table, and I picked it up to set it safe on the sideboard the way I have a hundred times.
An envelope had worked its way up between the peppermints.
The bank’s logo in the corner. My grandmother’s name through the window—her full name, her legal name, the one that only shows up on documents and headstones—and stamped across the face of it in red, in that courteous language banks use when they are done being courteous, SECOND NOTICE.
I stood in the kitchen with the water running and my mother humming upstairs and every good golden inch of the morning still hanging in the air, and I did not put it back. I am not proud of that. I slid the papers out where I stood, and I read them fast.
A loan. A second one.
Not the equipment loan—that one we all knew about, behind since spring, the number we’d been staring down all season.
This was another loan entirely. In my grandmother’s name alone, secured against the east bee field, her favorite parcel on the whole property, the one Grandpa proposed to her in.
Taken out in the spring, right after the storm, right after the insurance came back with its insulting little number for the barn roof.