Harvesting the Heart

yourself over. I’m holding Tony; he isn’t going anywhere ”

I knew as soon as I was sitting that I looked ridiculous. A little girl might have looked cute on a pony, but I was a fully grown woman. I was certain my legs almost touched the ground. I might as well have been riding a burro. “You’re not going to kick him,” my mother said. “Just urge him into walking.”

I touched my foot gently to the horse’s flanks, but nothing happened. So I did it again, and the horse shot off, bouncing me from left to right until I leaned forward and wrapped my arms around its neck. “Sit up!” my mother yelled. “Sit up and pull back.” I summoned all my strength and did what she said, sighing when the horse slowed to a quiet walk that barely jogged me at all. “Never lean forward,” my mother said, smiling, “unless you’re planning to gallop.”

I listened to my mother’s calm directions, letting all the words run together and feeling the simple meter of the horse’s movements and the scratch of its hide against my bare calves. I was amazed at the power I had. If I pushed my right leg against Tony’s side, he moved to the left. If I pushed my left leg against him, he moved right. He was completely under my control.

When my mother urged the horse to a trot by clucking at him, I did what she said. I kept my shoulders, my hips, and my heels in a straight line. I posted up and down, letting the horse’s rhythm lift me out of the saddle and holding the beat until the next hoof fell. I kept my back erect and my hands quiet on Tony’s withers. I was completely out of breath when she told me to sit back and let the horse walk, and I turned to her immediately. It wasn’t until then that I saw how much I wanted her approval.

“That’s enough for today,” she said. “Your legs are going to kill you tonight.”

She held the reins while I slid out of the saddle, patting Tony on the side of his neck. “So what do you know about me now that you didn’t know before?” I asked.

My mother turned, her hands on her hips. “I know that at least twice during that half hour you pictured yourself galloping across a field. And that if you had fallen the first time Tony pulled away a little fast, you would have got right back on. I know you’re wondering what it’s like to jump, and I know that you’re more of a natural at this than you think.” She tugged on the reins so that the horse separated us. “All in all,” she said, “I can see that you are very much like me.”

It was my job to make the salad. My mother was simmering spaghetti sauce, her hands on her hips in front of the old stove. I glanced around the neat kitchen, wondering where I would find a salad bowl, tomatoes, vinegar.

“The lettuce is on the bottom shelf,” my mother said, her back to me.

N€†iv height='1em' width='1em' align='justify'›I stuck my head into the refrigerator, pushing past nectarines and Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers to find the head of iceberg lettuce. My father believed you could tell a lot about people from their kitchens. I wondered what he’d have to say about this one.

I started to peel the leaves off the lettuce and rinse them in the sink, and looked up to find my mother watching me. “Don’t you core it?” she asked.

“Excuse me?”

“You know,” my mother said. “Take the core out.” She rammed the heel of the lettuce against the counter and neatly twisted it out. The lettuce fell open in a series of petals. “Your father never taught you that?” she said lightly.

My spine straightened at the criticism. No, I wanted to tell her. He was too busy doing other things. Like guaranteeing my moral conscience, and showing me how to trust other people, and letting me in on the unfair ways of the world “As a matter of fact,” I said quietly, “he did not.”

My mother shrugged and turned back to the stove. I began tearing the lettuce into a bowl, ripping it furiously into tiny pieces. I peeled a carrot and diced a tomato. Then I stopped. “Is there anything you don’t take?” I asked. My mother looked up. “In your salad, I mean.”

“Onion,” she said. She hesitated. “What about you?”

“I eat everything,” I told her. I chopped cucumber, thinking how ridiculous it was that I did not know what vegetables my own mother would eat in a tossed salad. I couldn’t prepare her coffee, either, or conjure her shoe size, or tell a stranger which side of the bed she slept on. “You know,” I said, “if our lives had been a little different, I wouldn’t be asking these things.”

My mother did not turn around, but her hand stopped stirring the sauce for the span of a breath. “Our lives weren’t a little bit different, though, were they?” she said.

I stared at her back until I could not stand it anymore. Then I threw the carrots, the tomatoes, and the cucumber into the bowl, while the rough anger and the disappointment pressed back-to-back and settled heavy on my chest.

We ate on the porch, and afterward we watched the sun go down. We drank cold peach wine coolers from cognac glasses that still had price stickers on their bottoms. My mother pointed out the mountains in the background, which rose in swells so close they seemed within reach. I concentrated on physical things: the bones of our knees, the curve of our calves, the placement of freckles, all so similar. “When I first moved here,” my mother said, “I used to wonder if it was at all like Ireland. Your father was always saying he’d take me there, but it never happened.” She paused. “I miss him very much, you know.”

I stared at her, softening. “He told me you were married three months after you’d met.” I took a large gulp of wine and smiled tentatively. “It was love at first sight, he said.”

My mother leaned back her head so that her throat was straight and white and vulnerable. “It could have been,” she said. “I can’t remember all that well. I know I couldn’t wait to get out of Wisconsin, and then Patrick magically appeared, and I always felt a little sorry that he had to suffer when I found out it hadn’t been about Wisconsin at all.”

I saw this as my lead-in. “When I was little,” I said, “I used to dream up these scenarios that had made you leave. I figured once that you were connected to a gang and you’d slipped up and they threatened the safety of your family. And another time I figured that you maybe had fallen in love with someone else and run off with him.”

“There was someone else,” my mother said frankly, “but it was after I left, and I never loved him. I wasn’t going to take that away from Patrick too.”

I put the glass down beside me, tracing its edge with my fingertip. “What made you leave, then?” I asked.

My mother stood up and rubbed her upper arms. “Damn mosquitoes,” she said. “I swear they’re here all year. I’m going to check on the barn.” She started to turn away. “You can stay or you can come.”

I stared at her, astonished. “How can you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Just change the subject like that?” I hadn’t come all this distance just to be pushed farther away. I walked down the two steps of the porch until we were standing eye-to-eye. “It’s been twenty years, Mom,” I said. “Isn’t it a little late to be dodging the question?”

“It’s been twenty years, dear,” my mother shot back. “What makes you think I remember the answer?” She broke her stare, looking down at her shoes, and then she sighed. “It was not the mob, and it was not a lover. It wasn’t anything like that at all. It was something much more normal.”

I lifted my chin. “You still haven’t given me a reason,” I said, “and you are far from what is considered normal. Normal people do not vanish in the middle of the night and never speak to their families again. Normal people do not spend two decades using a dead person’s name. Normal people do not meet their daughter for the first time in twenty years and act like it’s an ordinary visit.”

My mother took a step back, anger and pride making violet slashes in her eyes. “If I had known you were coming,” she said, “I would have taken my goddamned red carpet out of storage.” She started off toward the barn, and then she stopped and faced me. When she spoke, her voice was more gentle, as if she’d realized too late what she had said. “Don’t ask me why I left, Paige, until you can tell yourself why you left.”

Her words burned, flaming my cheeks and my throat. I watched her slip up the hill toward the barn.

I wanted to run after her and tell her it was her fault that I’d left; that I knew I had to take this opportunity to learn all thareN€†e things I had never learned from her: how to look pretty; how to hold a man; how. to be a mother. I wanted to tell her that I never would have left my husband and