refused to memorize phone numbers, so that I wouldn’t be able to answer questions like these.
The bus driver threw the radio on the floor in anger. He glared at me, and I held his gaze in defiance. I hoped he would drive off and leave me alone on the side of the road. I would prefer to be left than continue on to school, and I relished the thought that my abandonment would likely cost the bus driver his job. He tapped his thumbs on the horn, and my anticipation stretched down the empty road.
Just then Perla stood up and stepped out in front of the driver. “You can call my father,” she said. “He’ll come for her.”
I squinted my eyes at Perla. She looked away.
Carlos did come for me. He put me in the truck, listened to the bus driver’s version of events, and then drove me back to the vineyard in silence. I looked out the window as we drove, paying attention to every detail as if taking in the landscape for the last time. Elizabeth would not keep me, not after this. My stomach lurched.
But when Carlos told Elizabeth what I’d done, his rough hand clamped around the back of my neck, forcing me to face her, she laughed. The sound was so unexpected and fleeting that the second she stopped laughing, I thought I’d imagined it.
“Thank you, Carlos,” Elizabeth said, her face turning serious. She reached out to shake his hand and quickly released it, and the gesture was grateful and dismissive at once. Carlos turned quickly to leave. “Do the crews need anything?” Elizabeth asked as he walked away. Carlos shook his head. “I’ll be back in an hour, then, maybe more. Watch over the harvest, please, while I’m gone.”
“I will,” he said, disappearing behind the sheds.
Elizabeth walked directly to her truck. When she turned and saw that I wasn’t following, she walked back to where I stood. “You’re coming with me,” she said. “Now.” She took a step toward me, and I remembered the way she’d carried me into the house, just two months before. I had grown since then, and gained back the weight I’d lost, but I didn’t doubt she could still throw me inside the truck if it was her will to do so. Following her into the cab, I imagined what was to come: the drive to social services, the white-walled waiting room, Elizabeth leaving even before the social worker on call could check me in to the system. It had all happened before. Clenching tight fists, I stared out the window.
But as we started down the driveway, Elizabeth’s words surprised me. “We’re going to see my sister,” she said. “This feud has gone on long enough, don’t you think?”
My body turned rigid. Elizabeth looked to me as if for a response, and I nodded stiffly, the reality of what she had said sinking in.
She was going to keep me.
My eyes filled with tears. The anger I’d felt toward Elizabeth that morning dissolved, replaced immediately by shock. I had not, for even one moment, believed Elizabeth when she said there was nothing I could do to make her give me back. But here I was, only moments after having been sent home from school—a suspension would follow, if not an expulsion—listening to Elizabeth talk about her sister. Confusion and something unexpected—relief, maybe, or even joy—swirled within me. I sucked in my lips, trying not to smile.
“Catherine won’t believe you hit the bus driver over the head while he was driving,” Elizabeth said. “I mean, she won’t believe it because I did it, too—the exact same thing! Maybe I was in second grade, though? I can’t remember. At any rate, one minute he was driving, and the next minute he was glaring at me in the rearview mirror, and before I could stop myself, I was out of my seat, yelling,
I started to laugh, and once I started, I couldn’t stop. Folded over, my forehead pressed against the dashboard, my laughter escaped in a series of choking gulps that sounded like sobs. I covered my face with my hands. “My bus driver isn’t fat,” I said when I had calmed enough to speak, “but he’s ugly.”
I started to laugh again, but Elizabeth’s silence quieted me.
“I don’t want you to think I’m encouraging you,” she said. “What you did was clearly wrong. But I feel bad that I ignored your anger, and that I sent you to school in the state you were in. I should have explained myself better, should have included you.”
Elizabeth understood.
I pulled my forehead away from the dashboard and shifted my head onto her lap, suddenly feeling less alone than I ever had in my entire life. The steering wheel was only an inch from my nose, and I nuzzled the crown of my head into her stomach. If Elizabeth was surprised by my sudden affection, she didn’t show it. She moved her hand from the gearshift to my hairline, stroking my temple and down the bridge of my nose.
“I hope she’s home,” she said, and I knew her thoughts had returned to Catherine. She switched on her blinker, waiting for a line of cars to pass before turning from the driveway onto the road.
Elizabeth had not stopped thinking about her sister in the weeks leading up to the harvest. I knew this because of the phone calls, dozens of them, all messages left on Catherine’s answering machine. The first few were similar to the one I had overheard on the porch: moments of scattered reminiscing followed by a statement of forgiveness. But lately her messages had been different—chatty, and long—sometimes so long that the answering machine cut her off and she had to call back. She rambled on and on about the minutia of our daily lives, describing the endless tasting of the grapes and the cleaning of the picking bins. Often she described what she was cooking as she cooked it, tangling herself up in the long, spiraling cord as she moved from the stove to the spice rack and back again.
The more time Elizabeth spent talking to Catherine, or, more specifically, Catherine’s answering machine, the more it struck me how little Elizabeth spoke to anyone else. She left the property only to go to the farmers’ market, the grocer, the hardware store, and, occasionally, the post office. These visits were only to pick up plants she had mail-ordered from a gardening catalog, never to mail or receive letters. It was obvious that in the small community, she knew everyone—she asked the butcher to give her regards to his wife, and when she approached the vendors behind the stands at the farmers’ market, she greeted each one by name. But she did not have conversations with these people. In fact, I thought, she had not had a single conversation that I had witnessed throughout the time I’d been with her. She spoke to Carlos as necessary but only about specific aspects of growing and harvesting grapes, and not once did their words meander off topic.
As we drove to Catherine’s, my head in Elizabeth’s lap, I compared my quiet existence at Elizabeth’s to all the things I had previously understood to compose a life: large families, loud homes, welfare offices, busy cities, violent outbursts. I didn’t want to go back. I liked Elizabeth. I liked her flowers, her grapes, and her concentrated attention. Finally, I realized, I had found a place I wanted to stay.
Pulling off the road, Elizabeth parked the truck and took a deep, nervous breath.
“What did she do to you?” I asked, suddenly interested in a way I had never been before.
Elizabeth looked unsurprised by my question but didn’t answer right away. She stroked my forehead, my cheek, and my shoulder. When she finally spoke, her words were a whisper. “She planted the yellow roses.”
Then she pulled the parking brake and reached for the door handle.
“Come on,” she said. “It’s time to meet Catherine.”
Grant drove through the city, his oversized truck slowing for tight turns in crowded intersections.
“Grant?” I asked.
“Yeah?”
I searched the crumpled white paper bag for crumbs but didn’t find any. “I don’t want to see Elizabeth.”
“So?”
Like the white poplar, his response was unspecific. “So, what?”
“So, if you don’t want to see her, don’t see her.”
“She won’t come to the farm?”
“She hasn’t visited since the day you came with her, and that was—what?—almost ten years ago?” Grant
