loving either one of you. Okay?”
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HARD ROW
It could have been a Hallmark moment.
In a perfect world, he would have leaned over and
given me a warm spontaneous hug while someone
cued the violins, and bluebirds and butterflies fluttered
around the car.
Instead, he stared straight ahead through the wind-
shield for a long moment, then sighed and said,
“Okay.”
Hey, you take what you can get.
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C H A P T E R
14
% When he first suggested marriage, back when we
agreed it would be a marriage of convenience and
for pragmatic reasons only, Dwight said he was tired of
living in a bachelor apartment, that he wanted to put
down roots, plant trees.
I thought that was just a figure of speech.
Wrong.
No sooner was his diamond on my finger than he
borrowed the farm’s backhoe and started moving half-
grown trees into the yard from the surrounding woods.
I had built my house out in an open field. The only
trees on the site were a couple of willows at the edge
of the long pond that sits on the dividing line between
my land and two of my brothers’. Now head-high dog-
woods line the path down to the water. Taller oaks and
maples would be casting shade over both porches this
summer. Pear trees, apples, two fig bushes and a row
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HARD ROW
of blueberry bushes marked the beginning of a serious
orchard. He had built a long curved stone wall to act
as extra seating for family cookouts and we had planted
azaleas and hydrangeas behind the wall. The azalea buds
were already swelling despite Tuesday night’s freezing
rain.
Saturday’s warm sunshine and soft western breezes
had brought everything along, and in a protected cor-
ner on the south side of the house, buttercups were
up and blooming. Flowering quince and forsythia were
showing their first flush of pink and yellow and if the
