Evenfall (16 page)

“What’s the matter with you?” she says, grabbing a tree branch to avoid falling on her face. The branch is loaded with green fruit, but there are spots on many of the apples.

Nina barks once, then curls up in the grass, her nose on her paws. Andie’s about to leave her there when something long and black slithers just beyond her foot. She screams and jumps back. Nina races past her. The dog is a blur of flying fur and white teeth, and the snake doesn’t stand a chance. When it rears to strike, Nina darts in, grabs it by the neck, and shakes her head with joyful savageness. Even after the
snake stops writhing and goes limp she keeps shaking it, a low growl emitting from between her powerful jaws.

“Good girl. Good girl. Drop it now,” Andie says. She realizes she’s been holding her breath, and she lets it out in one long exhale. Nina gives the snake one last shake and then lets it go, tossing it in the air. It lands with a soft thud in the grass, and Andie takes a step back. It has to be at least three feet long.

“Good girl,” she says again, and Nina trots over, tail high in the air. Andie crouches and runs her hands over the dog’s muzzle, neck and body, checking for puncture wounds. To her relief, she finds none. She gives the dog a pat before standing up.

“Aren’t you the brave one,” she says, and Nina wriggles with pleasure. “I’ll have to find a special treat for you when we get home.”

She finds a long branch under one of the apple trees and gives the snake a poke to make sure it’s really dead. It is. Her heart rate slows to near normal.

For the rest of the morning, she keeps Nina in front of her, and the dog’s jaunty tail waves above the grass like a flag promising safe passage. It’s silly, Andie knows. Poisonous snakes in Connecticut are few and far between, but still she shudders at the thought of encountering another.

There are no peach trees in the apple orchard proper, nine acres with hundreds of trees packed together in row upon row. Wooden signs mark the beginning of each section. Some of the signs are leaning and others have fallen over; on all the paint is peeling and fading.

A few of the varieties—Red Delicious, Gala, and Cortland—are familiar, but most—Gravenstein, Ashmeads Kernal, Maiden’s Blush—Andie’s never heard of. She wanders through the orchard of twisted, gnarled trees and wonders how old they are and who planted them. They look ancient, but many are still bearing fruit. A few have split at the trunk, showing rotten wood, and others have lost limbs to disease or storm.

She reaches the end of the orchard and almost passes by the peach trees. It’s the buzzing that stops her, a high, almost constant hum that makes her pause and look around. Off to the side, in an untidy cluster of their own, she finds a dozen peach trees swarming with bees, yellow jackets, and wasps.

Even Nina seems to understand that caution is called for. She flops down on the ground, panting in the tall grass, while Andie carefully approaches the trees. The ground is littered with overripe fruit, and the smell is intoxicating. A little cloud of yellow jackets rises when Andie nears the first tree and she halts, but the insects appear almost drunk on sweetness. Moving slowly, she picks as many peaches as the basket will hold.

When she’s done, she walks back to Nina, checking the grass carefully before sitting down. The first bite of peach is so good she holds it in her mouth for a moment without swallowing, letting its warm liquid sweetness fill her. She eats the whole peach, bending over so the juices drip down her chin and onto the grass, then licks her fingers.

When she’s finished she lies back in the grass for a moment, comfortably warm and full. The sky is so blue it
looks solid, punctuated by only a few white streaks of cloud. The heat, the rich scent of the grass, even the buzzing of the insects soothes her. She breathes deeply, closes her eyes. For this exact moment, she could stay here all day. She could stay here for the rest of her life.

THE tart turns out perfectly. There’s no cinnamon in the house, only nutmeg, so Andie sprinkles a pinch onto the dough. Butter, sugar, flour, and the nutmeg make a shortbread crust, which Andie presses into the pie plate with her fingers. She bakes it for fifteen minutes, then in a flash of inspiration adds a layer of pine nuts, brought back from Italy in her suitcase. She toasts the nuts before sprinkling them over the surface of the still-warm crust. They’ll keep it from getting soggy.

The peaches need almost no help. Andie slips off the skins, slices them, and tosses the slices with nutmeg, a teaspoon of sugar, a little flour, and a dash of cream. She arranges them on top of the crust, and puts the whole thing back in the oven.

While it’s baking she boils water for the green beans, trimming the ends and adding salt to the pot. She’ll toss them with balsamic vinegar—another item from her personal survival kit—walnuts, and a little blue cheese, and serve them at room temperature.

The timer sounds, and she removes the tart from the oven, placing it on the counter to cool. Nina eyes it hungrily, and Andie nudges her away with her knee.

“Not for you,” she tells the dog. She’ll give the pup a few bites of chicken later.

But when she opens the refrigerator later that evening, the chicken is gone. Andie’s standing there, staring into the shelves, when the phone rings. She reaches for the receiver, stretching the cord so she can talk while continuing her search.

“Hey, it’s me,” Cort’s voice says in her ear, and she glances at the clock. It’s 6 p.m.

“Hey, yourself. What’s up?”

“Looks like I’m not going to be there for a while. One of the damn goats got out of the crate in the back of the truck, and I had to pull over.”

His voice is grim and Andie closes her eyes, picturing goat mayhem on a major highway.

“Where are you?”

“At a rest stop on the Massachusetts border. It’ll be a couple of hours, anyway, and then I have to unload the damn things.”

“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“See you later,” she says, and hangs up. The chicken’s still missing, but since her boyfriend is, too, it doesn’t seem to matter as much. She closes the refrigerator door. Nina catches her eye and slinks out of the room. Andie looks after her for a second, then shakes her head. The dog’s smart, but it’s not as if she has thumbs. Maybe Gert stopped by and decided to rummage in the fridge, Andie tells herself, knowing even as she thinks it how unlikely that is.

The missing chicken doesn’t affect her dinner plans, at least. She fixes herself a plate of green bean salad and good bread spread with tapenade, pours herself a glass of red wine from the bottle she purchased yesterday, and carries her meal out onto the porch.

It’s odd to be eating dinner with the sun still out. In Italy, she and Neal never dined before eight, and almost never alone. But today she skipped lunch, unless you count the peach, and she can’t wait to eat any longer.

When she’s finished, she pours herself another glass of wine. She considers having a piece of tart, but it looks so pretty she decides to wait for Cort. If he’s really late, they can always eat it for breakfast. She places it on top of the refrigerator for safekeeping.

Nina’s stretched under the dining room table and heaves to a stand, brown eyes following Andie.

“Settle down, girl,” she says, but the dog comes over and butts her head into Andie’s thighs. After scratching behind Nina’s ears for a bit, Andie finally goes to her bedroom, drags out Frederick Hartt’s
History of Italian Renaissance Art
, and carries it to the porch.

She’s had the tome since college. It’s battered and worn, the pages curling, with notes written in the margins and occasional stains from coffee, espresso, even butter. In the slowly fading light she leafs through the illustrations, all of which she knows by heart, the way others might say the rosary or play with worry beads. It’s a mindless occupation, a way to calm herself, although why she needs soothing at this moment, she couldn’t say. It could be because her father,
in characteristic Richard style, hasn’t bothered to call back with an exact date for his arrival. Andie refuses to call him, and the result is a low-level continual anxiety, which ratchets into stomach-twisting agitation whenever she hears tires crunching up the gravel drive.

Richard’s unreliability is nothing new. The only schedule he’s ever followed has been those of the ponies, as he calls them, and it’s one that dragged her across the country and back every year, until the aunts finally put their foot down. She’d been in eighth grade when she’d started boarding school, and when Richard had pulled up to the farm to take her away she’d hidden in the safest place she could think of. Nobody ever went up to the attic. She’d lain there, behind an old rolled-up rug that smelled of cedar, and waited for her father to leave. If he left, they’d have to keep her, not just for the summer but for good. She watched the dust motes drift across the air and listened to her father swear outside. She never heard the attic door open. It was Frank, of all people, who found her. She still remembers the sorrow in his blue eyes when she asked him why she couldn’t stay.

It worked out for the best, anyhow. That’s what she tells herself when she looks back. She can’t picture growing up in Hartman, all family dinners and church on Sundays. By her second year of boarding school, even summers were too much here. She’d spend the first month babysitting for pocket cash, then join her friends with their families at the Cape or on Nantucket. She’d get out of town as fast as she could.

Still, it annoys her how much Richard can affect her
mood. She thought she’d left that behind a long time ago. She takes her wineglass and wanders through the rooms. Outside, the crickets are chirping, and the trees at the edge of the pasture slide into darkness, their leaves whispering secrets in the warm evening wind.

The house itself unsettles her tonight. It’s so full, stuffed with the accumulations of the people who lived and married and died here. Most of what Andie owns fits in the single suitcase she brought with her when she’d left Italy. She’s grown used to a lifetime of traveling light, of never living long enough in one place to get attached or weighed down. Except in Italy, and even then most of it belonged to Neal.

She looks out at the blackness and sees instead her old apartment. That first time he’d come for dinner, he’d looked around, at the card table she’d covered with a thrift store cloth, at the mismatched chairs and the wine bottles with candles in them, and his eyes had crinkled in amusement.

“I’ve never known anyone who actually was a starving artist,” he’d said. She’d been mortified, but when he picked her up and spun her around the room, she’d felt giddy and safe at the same time. It was Neal who introduced her to comfort: to down pillows and high thread count sheets, to heavy silverware and beautifully embroidered tablecloths and a constantly changing selection of artwork, of etchings and sculptures and paintings. She’d learned not to grow too attached to any one object, because when she’d returned home from class, it might be gone, sold to the highest bidder to finance the next beautiful thing.

When she’d moved in with him, she’d taken almost nothing with her, leaving the bargain furniture and dented pans for the next grad student. She’d known without thinking about it that they had no place in his carefully composed world.

Now she looks around the house, with its overstuffed chairs, fading carpets, and ancient wallpaper, and wonders idly what he’d think of the mishmash. She’s lost her place here, too, if she ever had one, and the silence that once seemed so welcoming is oppressive. She returns to the porch and picks up the book, straining to see the illustrations in the fading light.

Whatever the reason for her restlessness, Hartt does his work. One moment she’s gazing at her favorite illustration, the tiny Apollo and Daphne, and the next she’s blinking, bleary-eyed in the dark, up at Cort.

“Sorry,” he says, brushing the hair off her forehead. “Didn’t mean to wake you up. I was afraid you’d brain me with that thing.” He points to the book, lying next to Andie on the swing.

“S’okay,” she mumbles. She pulls herself to a sitting position and yawns. “What time is it?”

“About ten. Unloading the little buggers took longer than I thought,” he says. A sudden breeze blows past them, and upstairs the attic door bangs shut. Nina sits up and cocks her head, whines once, then settles down again.

“Yeah, well, just so long as they don’t bother Aunt Gert.” Andie yawns again, stretching. “God, it feels like midnight.”

“That’s ’cause you’re old.”

She swats him.

“Ow.”

“That’s what you get for disrespecting your elders.”

“Well, Granny, any chance of getting those old bones up? I want to show you something.”

She lets him tug her off the swing and to the door. Nina tries to come with them, but Cort gently holds her back by the collar and shuts her in.

“Don’t want her making the goats any more crazy than they are,” he says in response to Andie’s questioning look.

They hold hands to the truck. The passenger-side door creaks when Cort opens it. Andie’s ready to get in, but he shakes his head and pulls out a large brown paper bag. He tucks the bag under one arm, takes her hand, and leads her toward the meadow.

In the dark the path is almost invisible. Andie’s eyes take a few moments to adjust, and she stumbles a few times, leaning on Cort for support.

“I’ve got a flashlight, but I’d rather not use it yet,” he says. “Give it a second and you’ll be able to see just fine.”

Andie stubs her toe on something and bites back a comment, but already she understands what he means. To the east there’s a faint line of light, diffusing into the black sky like milk into chocolate. The west, over the woods, is dark and the stars above are radiant.

They walk slowly, bushes and rocks assuming odd shapes until they come close. The family cemetery looms out at them, white stones glinting in the moonlight.

They’re going downhill now. Over the loud chirps of
crickets Andie hears something rustling. She freezes, refusing to move when Cort tugs her on.