The Orchard They Came To Measure

“Esther, you don’t have to wait on him,” Brad said.

“I’m not waiting on anybody,” I said. “I’m being a decent host on my own land while I still have it to be decent on.”

Brad had the sense to go quiet at that.

I sat down on the bench Arvid built under the big Wealthy tree, the one with the slat that still wobbles because he never got around to the second screw. Kaylene learned to climb for the high ones on that same tree, standing on Arvid’s shoulders at five years old, shrieking every time a branch dipped, and some Octobers when the light comes in low through those branches the way it was coming in that morning, I can still hear her laughing up there if I let myself listen for it. We pressed cider most years the first cold Saturday after the harvest, the whole family taking turns at the old screw press in the shed, Arvid always claiming the first cup off any new pressing before anybody else got one, calling it his tax on the operation.

I patted the space beside me on the bench, and I looked at Troy and said the one thing I had decided to ask him, which was not about storage units or lease prices or any of it.

“Where are you from, son?”

He looked a little surprised, the way young men do when an old woman asks them something that is not about the task in front of them. “Platteville,” he said. “Wisconsin side. Little town, you’ve probably never heard of it.”

“I know it a little. Arvid, my husband, had a cousin near there.” I nodded at the trees. “Any orchards out that way?”

And that is when his face changed.

It was small, the way these things are always small before they are large. His jaw moved like he was deciding whether to say the real answer or the easy one, and he looked down at his boots, and then he looked up at the Wealthy tree over our heads, heavy with fruit, the bees still working the drops on the ground even this late in the season.

“My grandpa had one,” he said. “Sixty some trees, outside Platteville. Apples and a few pie cherries. I used to spend every August out there picking with him and my cousins. He had this one Wolf River tree that grew apples the size of a softball, used to tell us a man only needed to eat one for lunch.”

“What happened to it,” I said, though I already knew the shape of the answer before he gave it to me, the way you know the shape of a storm coming across a field before the first drop hits.