Laugh (24 page)

She had to refocus, back off and kiss him, soft, while he found a rhythm.

Already feeling close, now she could use a hand to jerk him at the base and take him a little deeper.

It was so sexy and easy. Her whole body was a warm pulse of energy, slack and horny. He never stopped the pressure, his finger sliding inside just right, and it was so good, felt even better as he pushed just a little into her mouth, showing her how worked up he was.

She opened her eyes, and he was looking at her. He pushed at her clit harder, fucked his finger in deeper, and then she had to close her leg on his hand to help everything feel tighter, to have some way to squeeze while she rode his hand and came all over it, while he looked at her and came, hot, into her mouth. He was breathing so fast, still looking at her, that all the bones and muscles in his body stood out and his skin went rosy, blotched.

She licked him one last time, slow, then he tried to get her to sit up, but she had to help him.

He got her back in his lap, everything sticky, and kissed her everywhere their faces and mouths connected. It was lazy, sloppy.

They kissed like that until their bodies cooled, and Nina was both kissing and trying to find a position to let herself doze against him while he kissed and nuzzled her neck and played with her braids.

Then he stood up, picking her up, too, even though she wasn’t a small woman, really.

He took her to his bedroom, which was already dark, and they slid under his sheets, which smelled like old school, perfumy detergent, something familiar from when she was a kid, and they tangled their legs together, face to face.

“Nina,” he said.

“Goodnight, Sam,” she answered, and he held her tighter.

This was not going well.

She should have more than enough people.

If more of them had ever done any kind of a vegetable harvest or harvested by hand, she would.

The packing was set up to go well from the back of the trailer.

If the tractor wasn’t having such a hard time with these narrower, curved rows that she had worried about when Adam had planned them with the GPS last winter.

Vadnais should have been happy with the long neon-green-and-yellow variety of these banana peppers for a spicy mix they were canning for Paz Farms.

If there weren’t fucking corn borers, every fucking where, laying waste to a third of this harvest.

She had always felt uneasy about this pepper field, about the risk of it. It had nagged her, at the back of her mind. Everything going on with Tay had distracted her from that intuition and Tay’s enthusiasm had distracted her.

Sam had distracted her.

She didn’t know exactly what she might have done to plan for disaster, but she never got a chance to
plan.

All this living in the right-now had meant the future had gotten away from her and been eaten alive by corn borers.

She felt the sharp edge of intuition about everything else, all at once. Wondered what else in the future she had put at risk by slowing down time in the right-now.

It was blisteringly hot. Humid. Even this early in the morning.

These peppers had been fussy from the beginning, pest-prone and greedy for fertilizer. The regular dressings of compost and manure teas to their rows meant the soil was mucked, smelly. She had her most experienced hands on the trailer, re-sorting everything that was picked, and she wondered if she’d be better served putting them in the field to harvest, and training the noobs to spot wormy peppers.

She had no fucking idea.

She knew if she got in the tractor to reposition it down the field one more time, she was going to lose it, actually lose it, and drive back and forth over these rows until there was nothing but bright green–freckled mud.

The worst was, she couldn’t stop doing the math.

This had been an expensive crop from the moment the seed order was placed. Adam had experience with peppers, years ago, but Nina didn’t. Tay was snuggled deep into bed with Vadnais pickles and so had been enthusiastic. Nina had felt like Adam had fussed in this field, and she didn’t like fussing.

Saturday he had taken a couple of bushels to the farmer’s market, for variety and color, and they hadn’t sold well. People were used to seeing the long, waxy yellow peppers already pickled and on sandwiches and in salads. Raw, they didn’t offer an immediate use to the average vegetable buyer, their flesh thin compared to sweet peppers, their skin a little tough.

They’d put a few in each CSA box, destined to rot in shareholders’ crispers.

So the peppers had to be pickled if she wanted to break even.

There was no way there would be a good enough harvest from this worm-riddled field to do anything but rob Peter to pay Paul to cover the Vadnais bill.

She was pissed, then she would feel guilty she was pissed because this was an Adam and Tay project, and they had bigger concerns, and then she would just end up feeling like a bad farmer who had no idea what was happening in one of her fields.

She slopped back to the trailer.

“Colby, Madeline, Susan, Steven, and Rose. Stop sorting and go out and grab five or six hands to quickly train to sort. Then, stay out and harvest, with your group, sending one back here to the trailer. Let’s see if that picks things up.”

They spread out and Nina hiked herself up onto the trailer to reorganize. Looking at the field, it was depressing how little they had gotten done. She had planned to bring these in today, and instead, Adam would have to come back and finish, she’d have to pay at least a couple of the senior hands overtime she hadn’t authorized yet, and he’d be behind on potatoes, which were a big moneymaker.

Joder.

She stood on the trailer and suddenly, desperately, did not want to be in charge.

She wanted to be in some Zenlike zone, harvesting, while her dad stomped around, or Russ, or her father-in-law. She didn’t want to go from here to her books and worry over them, call the accountant to watch for the overtime on the payroll, have him
tsk
about the taxes. She didn’t want to call Dennis Vadnais, pickle king, and explain about corn borers and farm managers recovering from cancer surgery.

Just right now, in this moment, in the sun, dried mud drying in itchy patches on her arms, her own body odor radiating from her armpits, the sound of money dropping from the holes in her overalls, she did not want to be a farmer.

Her eyes landed on Sam, who was listening very seriously to Colby about peppers.

He had a sweatband on, arranged over the tops of his sunburned ears to protect them, and an
unselfconscious and liberal application of thick, white zinc oxide over his nose and cheeks.

He was wearing his usual cargo shorts and T-shirt, a Paz Farms T-shirt, she noticed, but sometime recently he had bought a pair of work boots. His arms and neck, his legs, were greased with sunscreen, which he applied religiously every two hours, lecturing the rest of the hands that they should do the same when they teased him.

How had he managed to find a way in?

After a long stretch of work, and working more, and needing everything to work, and working for these people who depended on her as much as she depended on them, she had let herself feel a little—wise. The experience of making something from the land and from a community was finally soaking in, to the very middle of herself.

She had drawn on the experiences that had healed her and settled down her grief, she thought. She had grown past her mindless impulses to soothe herself, she had really
believed.

Ever since she had met Sam, she had felt, all over again, the complexity of her grief, how keeping her family at arm’s length had prolonged it, how much of her life was to show Russ that she could be happy without him, and now she wondered if she knew what made her happy,
her.

All this since Sam had walked into her plot and made her laugh.

It was easy enough to believe, last night, so sated, sleeping so well next to him all tangled up, that Sam would make her happy.

Here, in this trashed pepper field, Tay hurting in the hospital and facing the worst kind of uncertainty, all Nina could think about was how quiet it used to get around the house when she was a new bride, when nothing was breaking even. Russ wouldn’t talk, unless it was to fight with his dad, he’d stay out too late for such early mornings, he’d look out into the farmyard and tell her how much he hated it, and all the things he’d rather be doing.

She felt that.

She felt the shout in her mouth that would tell these people to pack it in, go home, felt the edge of relief at leaving these plants to the deer and birds, to till them under when they were finished off.

Failure was often so much easier to bear than frustration, this gnawing impatience with tedious labor and expense that would yield almost nothing.

She got off the trailer and found a row.

The sun would move whether she did, or not.

* * *

Something was wrong with Nina.

Sam had an idea that it had something to do with the harvest today. The farmhand he had worked with the most, Colby, said that the harvest wasn’t a good one because of all of the damage caused by the corn borers. They hadn’t finished, and finishing hadn’t seemed remotely possible; there had been endless, bushy plants and every pepper had to be examined, and sorted.

So he guessed that if he was a farmer, he’d be pretty pissed. Though, with a little over half of the field picked and the good peppers boxed, it still looked like there were a lot of goddamned peppers. Maybe he grossly underestimated the organic pepper consumption in central Ohio, and Paz Farms was going under, but the point was, he wanted to understand why she was so quiet and had been so short with him.

She could just be tired, God knows he was. His back was on fire, and even after a cold shower with all the soap, he felt a little too warm and still grimy from the fields.

He glanced over at her in the passenger seat. She was looking out the window, not speaking, in a skirt and T-shirt with a café pie she was bringing to Betty’s in her lap.

He was nervous about her meeting his family in this official way.

He’d be less nervous if he knew what she was thinking and didn’t have to try to guess if she was tired or had something else on her mind.

He knew that as certain as he was of his feelings about her, he needed to give her time to learn what she needed to about him, time to see that he would do his best, and he hoped in that time she would learn to feel the same way about him.

His mom always said that both she and his dad “just knew,” from the very beginning, even though they were so young. His parents had to wait for the rest of the world to catch up to their love, but the whole time that his mom was converting to Catholicism, and their families were talking and trying to get them to slow down, they knew.

Then they waited until everyone else had settled down and got married, and that was that. It was good, too, that they had married so young, that they had the fullest measure of time together possible before his mom died.

What they knew, Sam thought, was that they just needed to get started already.

With life. With loving each other.

“Why’d you come out to the field today, Sam?”

Nina’s voice was a little sharp, and she was still looking out the window. Sam gripped the wheel tightly.

“To help.”

“I could tell Lacey needed your help.”

“I spent nearly the whole day at the clinic with her yesterday, and Lacey and I are good.”

“You’ve been spending a lot of time at Paz Farms. More than what you signed up for.”

“I told you, I like it.”

“The point was to get a partnership with businesses in the neighborhood.”

“Right. Which we’re doing. I’m volunteering. We’re doing the vegetable cooking classes and the CSA discount.”

“You’re not volunteering, you’re
working
for me.”

“And I fucking told you, I like it. I like
you.
” Sam squeezed the steering wheel even tighter, already hating the tone that had crept into his voice, but he hated hers more. Flat, disconnected. She wasn’t even looking at him.

“Lacey and the clinic don’t need you to find a new job, they need you to work the one you have. I don’t want to mess up Paz Farms’ relationship with the neighborhood health clinic, or the potential relationships we could have with the wellness divisions at the hospital.”

Sam felt the anger push in the back of his throat, but for once, he didn’t just open his mouth.

He did hit the brakes, though, right in the middle of the street.

He just wanted her to look at him. Look at him and say what she was going to say now that his heart was in the worst possible position.

The pie slid off her lap and hit the wheel well at her feet.

She looked at him.

“Don’t leave,” he said at the same time her hand was on the door handle.

“I’m tired, Sam. Incredibly tired.”

“I know.”

“I haven’t talked to Adam about the harvest today, and he’ll need to plan for tomorrow. I haven’t checked in on Tay.”

“When you picked up the pie, Rachel said she’d had a good day.” He didn’t know why he said that. He knew it was wrong, even as he didn’t know what to say that was right.

“Why am I meeting your family?”

“You’ve met most of them already. Except Des, and she’ll just be on the computer.” This was also the wrong thing to say, but he
didn’t
want her to leave. He wanted her to come with him, to sit with his family, to see Des.

“Sam.”

“I know.” Someone honked behind him, and Sam started forward. He didn’t know where to drive.

“I’m sorry,” Nina said. But she was looking out the window again.

“Where can I take you?” He tried to think about how Mike would handle this, or PJ. What Des would
tell him to do. Nina had suffered an awful day at her job. Her friend was in the hospital. The pressure on her had to be immense.

And the thing is, he fucking understood all that. He got that.

“The hospital.”