Sunrise Point (Virgin River #19)(55)

“But you lived in Denver?”

“Why are you asking this? Did he complain about this?”

Tom felt the icy wedge of her voice. He reached over and took her hand. “Never,” he said. “I just never thought of it before, and I wondered.”

“I was willing to move, to change jobs or companies, but Bob said it wasn’t fair—he’d just be deploying soon anyway. He didn’t want me to give up a good thing when in the end I was just going to sit alone, waiting, worrying…”

And Tom thought—he is a much better person than I am. If Tom fell in love and got married, he wouldn’t want his wife in another state. If he was newly married and about to deploy in a few months, he wouldn’t be happy about his wife not being around. Proving that he’d really screwed up by directing the conversation to her dead husband, she fell silent. He wasn’t sure what was worse, the silence or the conversation about drug trials and expense accounts. Finally he pulled into the square in Arcata and found a parking place.

“The only sushi place I know about is crappy and, I guessed, probably beneath your standards. How do you feel about Mediterranean?”

“Wonderful!” she said, beaming, quiet mood gone. And she held her place in the car until he came around and opened her door for her.

Darla seemed pleased with his choice of restaurant; she appeared to be back to her bright-eyed self. After they’d ordered drinks, an appetizer and their entrees, she reached across the table and took one of his hands. “Thank you, Tom, for being such a good host, good date.”

“I am?”

“You really are.” She laughed. “I look forward to these weekends with you. I hope you’re enjoying them as much as I am.”

“Totally.”

“I researched your orchard last week, in between other assignments for my class. It’s very well-known, you know.”

“Is it? Well-known to whom?”

“That’s what I love most about you—you’re so modest,” she said. “You have a laptop—search Cavanaugh Apples on Google sometime. The foodie sites love you. You’ll learn a lot about yourself.”

He lifted his eyebrows. “Is there anything I don’t know about myself that I should know?” he asked.

The drinks came, the stuffed grape leaves. And Darla laughed at him. “I’m not sure. Do you know you have forty acres and two hundred and fifty trees with roughly twenty-eight types of apples? You’ve been the primary supplier in the county for twenty years. And most of your forty acres are still undeveloped and what’s considered to be prime real estate. And you have a very successful local cider business going on there. Cavanaugh is leading the pack in cider. You have quite a successful business.”

“Well, Maxie does,” he clarified.

“I was under the impression it was a family business,” she said, sipping her wine.

“It seems to be—it’s been in the family a long time. I had to make a choice between the Marine Corps and the orchard. Maxie can’t run it alone forever. Afghanistan helped me make the choice pretty easily.”

She sipped her wine thoughtfully. “Have you ever considered selling it?”

He devoured the stuffed grape leaves; Darla was apparently satisfied with one bite, half remaining on her plate. Funny, he was getting used to that—how she barely ate. “It was going to eventually come down to that, unless I made the decision to come home and run it. Maxie won’t retire till she’s on her last legs, but I’m not oblivious to the fact that she’s getting older. And a little slower, though not mentally,” he stressed. “We had a major showdown about the ladder last year. Junior, our foreman, brought to my attention that she’d fallen a couple of times. Even though she hadn’t been hurt, he could smell disaster coming and had no influence in convincing her to get an employee to climb the ladder if there was something she wanted done.” He laughed to himself. “Maxie’s been up on tripod ladders since she was just a kid, pregnant with my dad. She doesn’t really think she needs to slow down. And it probably keeps her young.”

“It’s a shame,” Darla said. “She deserves a much more relaxing retirement!”

“Like?” Tom asked, taking on the rest of the grape leaves.

“Like a low-maintenance home where people do all the hard stuff for you. In a nice place, like near the ocean. Where there are lots of people and activities and life is finally about fun rather than back-breaking work. But if anything should go wrong, like a fall or illness, there are trained professionals nearby. At the orchard, if Maxie falls off a ladder, it’s only you or Junior to help her. Or if she, God forbid, had a stroke…”

He stopped chewing and stared at her. He had never thought of that. In this place, in the country, people got old on their land and, unless they moved away to live with their children or grandchildren, they often died on their land. If they had an accident or got sick, their family took care of them.

Darla picked up the last piece of her stuffed grape leaves and popped it in her mouth. “We put my grandmother in assisted living last year. She didn’t think she wanted to go, but now she loves it. She’s the community poker champ, can you beat that? And it’s in a really beautiful Colorado Springs valley with glorious views, near enough we can visit her and bring her to visit us for weekends, where there are walking trails and all kinds of fun things for the residents to do. She’s so grateful now.”