The Orchard My Grandfather Left Me
Back at the house, meanwhile, Fennella’s birthdays got a bounce house one year and a rented pony the next. Mine got a store bought muffin with a candle in it, three years running, and a card in my mother’s handwriting that always used the same phrase, so proud of you, like she was working from a template she’d stopped bothering to update. I’m not telling you this because a childhood birthday is the tragedy of the century. I’m telling you because it was one more small proof, in a long list I’d been keeping without meaning to, that in that house, celebration flowed one direction only.
Ivar’s shop, meanwhile, was quietly going under. I didn’t understand the details as a teenager, only the atmosphere. Raised voices behind a closed office door. A stack of certified mail my mother would slide into a drawer before Ivar got home so he wouldn’t see it first thing. A used truck that got repossessed my sophomore year, which the family called “trading it in” at dinner that night in a tone that dared anyone to ask a follow up question.
Fennella, for her part, had decided by seventeen that she was going to be a businesswoman. She wanted to open a little shop in town, candles and skincare and gift baskets, the kind of place that does well in a tourist town and struggles in a farm town, though nobody in my family seemed inclined to point that out to her. She talked about it at every meal. She had a logo before she had a lease. She had, more than once, told me directly that once she got “the startup money,” she’d hire me part time if I “kept my grades up and stayed nice.” I want you to sit with that phrase for a second, because I did, for years. Stayed nice. As if my temperament was the variable in question, and not the fact that there was no money that belonged to her to give away in the first place.
My grandfather died the spring I was fifteen. Heart, sudden, in his sleep, out at the orchard house he never did move out of even after he built the bigger house in town for my father’s family years earlier. I found out at school. A secretary pulled me out of second period and I knew before she said a word, because nobody pulls a kid out of second period for good news.