Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
The address Marge had given her led inland, away from the salt air and the endless blue, through streets that traded beach houses for gas stations and shopping plazas before opening into something else entirely.
Farmland. Actual farmland, twenty minutes from the ocean, stretching flat and green under the morning sky.
Saltmeadow Farm announced itself with a hand-painted sign at the entrance and rows of vegetables running in long parallel lines toward a red barn in the distance. An old split-rail fence marked the boundary between the dirt road and the fields beyond.
Carrie turned off the engine and sat for a moment, wondering what she was doing here.
The girls hadn't wanted to come. Brittany had an afternoon shift at the beach club and was using the morning to sleep in.
Ava had barely looked up from the book she'd been reading on the deck—some fantasy novel with a cracked spine that she'd already made it halfway through, her camera resting on the chair beside her.
"I'm good," she'd said, and that had been that. Carrie had learned not to push.
So she'd come alone. Which was maybe the point.
Inside the farm's entrance, a wooden stand displayed jars of honey and bundles of herbs tied with twine. A mutt lifted its head from a patch of shade, assessed Carrie as non-threatening, and lowered it again.
Beyond the stand, the farm opened up. Rows and rows of vegetables stretched toward the tree line—leafy greens in one section, tomato plants staked and heavy with fruit in another, squash vines sprawling across the soil.
A pair of white hoop houses stood to the left, their plastic sides rolled up to let the breeze through, and beyond them a greenhouse with fogged glass caught the morning light.
To the right, a red barn anchored the property, its doors thrown open to reveal stacked crates and the organized chaos of a working farm.
A chicken coop sat beside it, and a dozen hens pecked at the dirt nearby, unbothered by anything.
The whole place smelled like soil and growth, and Carrie couldn't remember the last time she'd slowed down enough to notice.
Near the greenhouse, a woman in rubber boots and a straw hat was loading crates onto a flatbed cart.
"Carrie?" The woman straightened, tipped back her hat. It was Marge, braid tucked over one shoulder, dirt on her knees. "You came."
"I came." Carrie was still taking it in—the scope of it, the life everywhere she looked. "This is incredible."
"Still surprises me some days." Marge wiped her hands on her jeans and gestured for Carrie to follow. "Let me show you around."
They walked the perimeter first. Up close, the farm revealed itself in layers.
Marge pointed out the shaded beds where lettuce and arugula thrived in the cooler soil, the drip lines running between pepper plants, the marigolds planted at the end of each row to keep the pests away.
She explained the rotation schedule, the irrigation system her husband Frank had rigged up thirty years ago that still worked better than anything modern, the way certain plants protected others when you put them side by side.
Companion planting, she called it. Carrie liked the sound of that.
"Most people think farming is about putting seeds in the ground and waiting," Marge said, stopping beside a row of pepper plants heavy with fruit.
"It's not. It's about paying attention. Reading what the soil tells you, what the leaves tell you.
The plants will show you what they need if you know how to look. "
Carrie crouched down and touched one of the pepper leaves. It was smooth and firm, almost waxy. "How do you learn that? To read them?"
"Time. Patience. Getting it wrong and trying again." Marge plucked a pepper—deep red, perfect—and handed it to Carrie. "You married?"
The question landed without warning. Carrie turned the pepper over in her hands. "I was. Divorced. Six months ago."
"Ah." Marge nodded like this explained something. "That's the look, then."
"What look?"
"The one where you're working out who you are now that you're not who you were." She started walking again, and Carrie fell into step beside her. "I've seen it before. People come to the farm when they're untethered. Dirt and growing things—they help."
They reached the greenhouse, and Marge pulled open the door. Inside, the air was thick and humid, carrying the green smell of things pushing toward life. Seedling trays lined metal shelving units, each one labeled in Marge's handwriting—Sunflowers, 6/10. Fall kale, 6/15. Zinnias—farmers market.
"This is where it starts," Marge said. "Everything out there began in here. Little plastic cells, handful of soil, one seed at a time."
Carrie moved between the rows, brushing her fingers over the trays. So much potential, contained in something so small. "Do they all make it?"
"No. Some don't germinate. Some get too much water or not enough sun. Some just don't take." Marge shrugged. "You plant twice what you need and hope for the best. Can't control everything."
Can't control everything. Carrie thought about the spreadsheet on her laptop, the columns of numbers that never seemed to add up no matter how many times she ran them.
The house she'd shared with Richard for twenty years, the one she couldn't afford to keep on her own.
The settlement negotiations that dragged on while his lawyers found new ways to minimize her contributions to a business she'd helped build from nothing.
Even this vacation—they'd booked it back in January, when she still had access to the joint account and a future that looked different.
She'd spent her whole marriage trying to hold it together. Look where it got her.
"You want to help out while you're here?" Marge was watching her with that knowing look again. "We're potting up sunflower starts for the market today. Extra hands are always welcome."
"I don't know what I'm doing."
"Nobody does at first. That's the whole point of doing."
Carrie looked at her hands—clean, manicured, the nails she'd gotten done before leaving because that's what she did before vacations, before the life she used to have.
She thought about getting dirt under them.
The idea should have seemed beneath her—Richard's voice in her head, always Richard's voice, telling her that physical labor was for people who didn't have better options.
But Richard wasn't here. And his voice could go straight to wherever voices like that belonged.
"Show me what to do," Carrie said.
They spent the next two hours in the greenhouse.
Marge demonstrated the technique first—how to ease the seedlings from their cells without damaging the roots, how to create a small depression in the soil of the pot, how to settle the plant and firm the soil around it without compressing too tightly.
Carrie watched then tried it herself. Her first few attempts were clumsy, the seedlings listing to one side or the soil too loose.
But Marge corrected her, adjusted her grip, showed her again.
By the fifth transplant, Carrie had found a rhythm. By the twentieth, she'd stopped thinking about Richard entirely.
The work was meditative—the repetition, the focus required, the way the world narrowed to this one small task.
Lift, place, settle, firm. Move to the next.
An exhaust fan droned at the far end of the greenhouse, pulling the humid air through but not doing much against the heat.
Her shoulders ached from leaning over the table.
Her fingers were caked with soil, and sweat dampened her hairline.
And for the first time in longer than she could remember, her mind was quiet.
Frank appeared around noon with sandwiches and lemonade.
He was a big man with a farmer's tan that stopped abruptly at his shirt sleeves, a faded Grateful Dead T-shirt stretched across his chest, and dirt permanently embedded in the creases of his knuckles.
He set the tray on an overturned crate and nodded at Carrie like she'd been coming here for years.
"New recruit?" he asked Marge.
"That depends." Marge sat on a stool and reached for a sandwich, looking at Carrie. "You having a good time, or is this torture?"
Carrie laughed. "Honestly? Best morning I've had in months."
"Well then." Marge took a bite. "We hire part-time in the summer. Market setup, harvest days, whatever needs doing. Nothing glamorous. Fifteen dollars an hour plus produce. If you're interested."
"I wasn't—" Carrie started, then stopped. What was she going to say? That she hadn't come here looking for a job? That she was just a divorced woman from the suburbs who'd wandered into a farm because she didn't know what else to do with herself?
Except. Fifteen dollars an hour wouldn't make a dent in her financial problems. But it was something. And more than that—it was purpose. A reason to get up. A place where nobody knew her story, where she was a woman learning something new with soil on her hands.
"I'll think about it," Carrie said.
"Door's open whenever you want it." Marge bit into her sandwich. "We're here every day. Except Sundays. Sundays we rest."
After lunch, Carrie helped carry the potted seedlings to the shade structure where they'd harden off before market day. Then Frank waved her over to the tomato rows. The sun was higher now, the air hazy with June heat, but she didn't mind.
He showed her how to check the plants for signs of stress—yellowing leaves, spots that indicated fungus, fruit that wasn't developing right. He pointed to each problem silently then moved to the next plant. A man of few words, but the lesson was clear.