The Excellent Lombards(48)
“Say he knew everyone was out working, and he slipped in to steal the money. Or—maybe just to look around.”
“A robber in daylight?”
“Yes. So May Hill wouldn’t have put the chair by the basement door.”
“Ah,” my father said.
“The robber,” I went on, “would start looking at—at everything but then, then, he’d realize that she was climbing up the stairs.” My heart was beating hard as I told this fictional although nearly true-life tale.
“May Hill coming upon a thief,” my father considered.
“What would she do?”
“I wouldn’t want to be the robber. Would you?”
“No,” I whispered. My voice was failing me. “Would she—would she knock him out? Would she injure him or—?”
“Hmmm,” he said. We were at a stop sign. He turned to look at me. I think it’s fair to say that if I had ever been in doubt that he loved me, which I hadn’t, but if I had, I would have known then that in fact he loved me maybe better than anyone. He didn’t drive on. We were at a standstill. He was smiling at me, a small, lopsided smile, and yet it was with his whole self. All the love in the world—it was in our car. “I imagine,” he said, “I bet she’d lock him up. The robber. Some of those doors have locks, as I recall. That would be punishment, don’t you guess, to be held just for a while, and to wonder how May Hill would deal with you?”
I nodded. I couldn’t look at him.
“Plenty of punishment,” he said, before he drove on down the road, saying he thought the Honey Crisp was probably a better apple than we had given it credit for.
I muttered, “Okay.”
“Give it a chance, Marlene,” he instructed.
Later in the summer I went with my father to a new farmers market that had been launched in a town six miles away. It was in addition to Sherwood’s market in Milwaukee and the market my father went to in Madison where, along with a crew of five others, we frantically did commerce from first light until noon. This new market, however, was for my father and it was for me.
I was happy for just about the entire vacation because Amanda went to three different band camps and I didn’t have to consider not playing with her, and also Coral was at horse camp and then at her family lake house in Michigan. It seemed that I had grown up enough not to need those girlhood companions, grown up enough to have consuming interests and obligations, even. I wasn’t at all the slightest bit lonely. Ten hours a week I worked at the library, a real paying job cleaning DVDs and doing the precision job of shelving. I didn’t get money for my orchard work, which was fine because I knew that when Sherwood had been a boy he hadn’t gotten paid, either. If you belonged to the work there was no reason to get money from it.
Best of all, every Friday, on our market day, my father and I loaded up the van with apple boxes, a basket of knitting worsted, the honeycomb display, the scale, the bundle of bags, the white tent, the cottage cheese container of change, and my carefully printed signs. Along the barricaded street opposite City Hall we made a line of stalls: the Lombard apple girl and man, the bread lady, the cheese lady, the sweet corn man, the plant people, the garlic and onion couple, the popcorn matron, the duck egg woman, the beef and pork guy, and at the opposite end, another apple vender, the Sykes Orchard representative. Tommy sent an employee to work the market who had the title Sykes Orchard Manager. He was twenty-three years old and his name was Gideon.
Like every other facet of the Sykes operation the hiring of Gideon, a dedicated, strong young person, was a genius business move by the gentleman farmer. Gideon, which means “Feller of Trees.” He had studied ag science for two years at the university before he’d dropped out to live his dream. In addition to his other gifts he was disciplined about waking at dawn, he was unsentimental about nature, and he knew chemistry. As much as Tommy’s grown children may have wanted to keep the farm in the family they had no interest in running it or even in living nearby. The understanding was that Gideon would make a life on the orchard, that he would not own the property but when Tommy eventually retired he would be the person in charge.
In July, at our first market, I wandered down to Gideon’s stand. I stood looking at his red blushy apples, varieties that were bigger than ours and shinier. “Did you spray for maggot flies this week?” I asked him.
He looked startled, I suppose because most people didn’t begin a conversation or an acquaintance with that question.
“Yep,” he said, “and for codling moth.”
“We did, too,” I said importantly. I said, “We’re trying that new disruption technology, the CM Flex.”
Maybe he laughed; it’s possible he was chuckling. “Good stuff.” He nodded. “It’s pretty effective.”
“I know it.”
Gideon was undeniably cute even though he was old, a man hardly taller than William, a pixie with soft-looking brown hair and pale-blue eyes. All at once I was aware of my knobby knees, my skinny legs, my shorts, my plain yellow T-shirt, my drab hair, my ragged fingernails. I had occasionally wondered what it would be like to kiss a boy and even though he was old, as I said, you couldn’t ignore Gideon’s upper lip, which had a freckle smack in the center, right below the philtrum. The other thing in addition to kissing, the thing I’d learned that was very different from the business of the ram and ewe, the tomcat and *cat, the thing that President Bill Clinton and his intern had taught us—I had blocked that from my mind. Kissing Gideon’s freckle, the idea of it, made me feel sick enough. He was about to say something else to me when a woman butted in on us, blaring her righteous question: “ARE YOU ORGANIC?”