Erik came up just after sunset, his sleeping bag and mat over one shoulder. He readily agreed when I forbade any talk whatsoever about hops or money.
I had planned to care for him, but during his years minding his marijuana patch he had developed exceptional skills as an outdoor chef, and he insisted on doing the cooking. He didn’t appear to take any pleasure in it, but it gave his impatient hands something useful to do, and I could see that it helped him decompress after the day’s tensions. I had bought some sweet corn, which he soaked in heavily salted water for a half hour. When he deemed it and the fire ready, he expertly raked and spread the coals, then arranged the cobs so they would singe and steam in their husks. Then he set up some cheese sandwiches with ham slices and thick slabs of sweet onion and tomato in them; my only suggestion was to add a few basil leaves I’d culled from Diz’s derelict garden. He quickly seared the ham, then grilled the sandwiches in my big iron skillet until the cheese oozed, and that meal was blue-ribbon, off-the-charts delicious. We were ravenous but tried to eat like civilized humans.
Looking at him, I was dismayed to see how slim he had become—he’d never had any weight to spare, and had lost easily ten pounds since he first arrived.
The night grew dark around us as we faced each other across the fire. It was windless and very quiet except for the muffled hooting of a barred owl—goo-goo-ga-joob!—somewhere deep in my woods. With the late-summer foliage dense around my clearing, we were totally enclosed but for the circle of dark star-pricked sky above. It was a safe and private place to talk about serious things, I thought.
My plan was to cleverly maneuver our conversation toward generalities about relationships and then gradually bring the issue to bear on him. He didn’t need any more pressure, but it wouldn’t hurt him to start thinking about it. In a low-key, almost absentminded way, I would eventually suggest that if you don’t like these periods of singleness, maybe you ought to take a look at your approach to relationships and think about someday checking one out for more than a few months.
Instead, the soul of tact, I said: “So. How’s your love life?” I said it briskly, meant it rhetorically.
“However it is or isn’t, it’ll have to wait until the fucking hops are harvested, won’t it?” He spat into the fire. “What I was thinking, I don’t know. I’d rather pump gas. Bag groceries. Go back to Elk fucking Ridge! My blood pressure is through the roof. Anything goes wrong, I’m done. Cooked. Game over.”
It was true: He had staked everything on this first harvest and had inadvertently staked the farm’s future on it as well. I was trying to formulate a reassuring reply when he preempted me.
“Funny that you should bring it up, though,” he said. “My love life.”
“I was just—”
“What are you doing, Annie?”
“What do you mean?”
He sighed and shut his eyes, a pantomime of great, weary patience. “You’re the smartest person I know, and yet there are places where you’re … dense. Slow on the draw. Sorta stupid, actually. Sorry, but it’s true.”
“Gee, thanks, bro. Now that you’ve totally alienated and offended me, what were you planning to say?”
“You know what I think? I think you can’t see it because it’s sort of against the rules. Like you’re afraid of it, or you’re not allowed? And this I don’t get, because in every other way, you seem willing and able to break rules and live pretty far outside the ordinary.” He gestured at my tidy yet wild little clearing. “I’m proud of you for that, by the way.”
“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“See? That’s what I mean!” He was a very tired man, sincerely frustrated with me. “We were talking about love. I’m trying to tell you something here. Jesus Christ!”
“Yeah? Well, you’re not making it any clearer, whatever it is.”
“Okay. So tell me, how’re you sleeping at night?”
Again his change of tack confused and affronted me. “What’s this? Now you’re my shrink?”
“Whatever, Annie.” He snorted with disdain and scuffed dirt at the campfire. “Whatever.”
It bothered me that he was right. I often awoke in the night and lay there in a jittery malaise. It was a physical as well as emotional discomfort, my body drawing taut with tension that I had to consciously dispel again and again. The feeling of fecundity I’d cherished at first, that sphere of warmth cradled between my hipbones, had become more of an ache.
“Of course I can’t sleep! I’m as nervous as you are about the hops! It’s a stressful period for all of us. We—”
“Do you need ‘permission’?” He put quote marks in the air with his fingers. “Is that what it is? Okay, you have my permission. It is totally permitted. Permission City here.”
His attitude irritated me, and I almost snapped at him, “I don’t need permission for anything from my little brother.” But his words had set my mind spinning, thoughts and feelings like rollers in a slot machine, a blur of roses and cherries, spades and clubs, peaches and diamonds. I intuited that the wheels would stop and end up at some configuration that made sense. Even in my confusion, I knew that much.
“I still don’t get it,” I told him.
He gave me a hard look, utterly out of patience. “I’m going to sleep now.”
And he took his gear and crackled away into the darkness.
So that’s how I got permission to fall in love. It took another few weeks for the rollers to chunk into place—one, then another, then the
