Cider Season

Chapter One: The Hollow Draft

The pie cooling on Stella Whittle's counter was, by any reasonable measure, perfect.

The lattice had browned evenly. The bottom crust had set without a hint of sog, which in a Chicago August, with the humidity pressing against the windows like a wet palm, counted as a small miracle. She had used three kinds of apple, macerated overnight, and a spoonful of boiled cider she'd ordered from a farm in Vermont that shipped it in glass jars with a hand-tied label.

She photographed it from four angles, chose the third, and sat down at her laptop to write eight hundred words about what it meant.

An hour later she had written: *There is a kind of apple pie that tastes like the house you grew up in.*

She looked at the sentence for a long time. Then she deleted it, because it wasn't true, or rather, it was the sort of true that anybody could have written. Her grandmother had made apple pie, yes. But the smell that actually meant *house* to Stella was Comet cleanser and the burnt-dust smell of the floor heater turning on in October, and nobody wanted eight hundred words about that.

The buzzer rang at four. Michelle Sumner came up the three flights without complaining about them, which was how Stella knew the conversation was going to be serious. Michelle complained about stairs the way other people said hello.

"You baked," Michelle said, setting a canvas tote on the table. "That's a bad sign."

"It's research."

"It's avoidance with butter in it." Michelle took out a manuscript, three hundred pages bound with a black clip, and set it down between them with the care of someone laying a body on a table. Sticky notes bristled from the edges in four colors. "Cut me a slice and then we'll talk about it."

Stella cut two slices. Michelle ate hers standing up, one hip against the counter, and made a small involuntary sound of pleasure that Stella filed away as the only unqualified success of the week.

"Okay," Michelle said, when the plate was empty. "You want it kind or you want it useful?"

"Useful."

"It's beautiful and it's empty." Michelle wiped her fingers on a paper towel. "You have written two hundred pages about homecoming without going home. The essays are lovely. The recipes are flawless. And there is nobody inside the book."

Stella folded her arms. Eight years of professional composure kept her voice level. "There's plenty of me in it. The chapter about the fish market—"

"—is about a man named Anton who sells whitefish. It's a great profile. It could run anywhere." Michelle tapped the manuscript. "That's the problem. Every chapter in here could run anywhere. Your publisher bought a book called *Homecoming*. They paid you actual money for a personal narrative cookbook about the place that made you. You have given them a very good magazine."

Stella looked at the pie. The cut edge had begun to weep a little syrup onto the plate.

"Where did you grow up?" Michelle asked.

"You know where I grew up."

"Say it."

"Colton Ridge. Northern California, up in the foothills. Two hours from anywhere." Stella heard her own voice go flat and hated it. "Population nine thousand if you count the people out past the reservoir. There's a hardware store, a bakery, a taqueria that used to be a gas station, and a farmers' market on Saturdays that is honestly better than most of what I've eaten here."

"When were you last there?"

Stella did the arithmetic she had been avoiding for a while. "Eight years."

"Eight years," Michelle repeated, not cruelly. "And your grandmother is still alive."

"Dot. Yes."

"And your sister."

"Lacey. She's getting married in October."

Michelle raised both eyebrows and said nothing at all, which was a technique Stella had watched her use on editors and which worked just as well on clients.

"It's complicated," Stella said.

"Everything worth writing is." Michelle pulled out a chair at last and sat, and her voice softened by a degree. "Listen. I've been your agent for six years. I've watched you build something real out of nothing — no culinary school, no rich uncle, just a blog and a stubborn streak. You're a genuinely good writer. But you write about other people's roots like a woman pressing her nose to a window. At some point a reader notices you're outside."

Stella pressed her thumb into a crumb on the table. "The house was sold," she said. "When my parents split. My dad moved to Oregon and married a woman named Peg who makes candles. There's no house to go back to."

"There's a town."

"It's a town I left."

"So did every writer who ever wrote a good book about one." Michelle checked her watch, then didn't get up. "Your delivery date is November first. They will not move it again; they moved it in March. If you hand in this draft, they'll publish it, it will get one nice review, and it will vanish. Or you go there. You sit in the actual place. You cook the actual food and talk to the actual people, and you put yourself on the page for once in your life."

"And if it turns out there's nothing there?"

"Then you'll have found that out honestly, which is more than you've managed from four hundred miles up." Michelle stood and shouldered her bag. At the door she paused. "For what it's worth — you haven't written a word with your own skin in it since Blake."

Stella's face did something complicated. "That's not fair."

"No," Michelle agreed. "But it's accurate. Call me from California."

The apartment was very quiet after she left.

Stella cleaned the kitchen, which took forty minutes because she cleaned it thoroughly, and then she stood in the middle of her small bright living room with its two good chairs and its shelf of cookbooks arranged by cuisine and admitted to herself that she had chosen every object in it and did not feel that any of them belonged to her.

She called her grandmother at seven, which was five in California, the hour Dot Whittle had watered her tomatoes for fifty years.

"Whittle residence," Dot said, as though it were 1974.

"Gran. It's me."

"Stella." The warmth in the word arrived so fast and so completely that Stella had to sit down on the arm of the chair. "Are you sick? You only call at dinner if something's wrong."

"I'm not sick." She rubbed her eyes. "I have a question and I want you to say no if the answer's no."

"I have never once had trouble saying no."

"Could I come stay with you for a while? A few weeks. Maybe two months. I'm writing a book and it isn't working and my agent thinks — I think — I need to be there to write it."

There was a pause on the line, and in it Stella could hear the tick of the kitchen clock she would have recognized anywhere on earth.

"The guest room's got my sewing in it," Dot said. "I'll move the sewing."

"Gran—"

"When?"

"End of the month? I'd drive. I want the car there."

"Then you'll be here for the last of the figs," Dot said, and her voice had gone slightly rough. "You'd better call your sister."

Stella closed her eyes. "I was working up to it."

"Work faster. She'll hear it from Marlene Otway at the market otherwise and then we'll all pay for it."

So Stella called Lacey, and Lacey picked up on the fifth ring with the sound of a dog barking somewhere behind her.

"Hey," Lacey said. "Hang on. *Down.* Sorry. It's a Great Pyrenees and he thinks he's a cat. What's up?"

"I'm coming home for a while," Stella said, because there was no graceful runway to it. "End of August. Staying at Gran's. Probably through October."

The silence lasted three full seconds.

"Through October," Lacey said.

"Yes."

"My wedding is October eighteenth."

"I know when your wedding is."

"Do you? Because you RSVP'd through the website and the little box for the chicken or the vegetarian option is still empty." Lacey's tone stayed friendly, which was somehow worse than shouting. "Sorry. That was — I'm running on four hours of sleep. That's great, Stell. Gran will be over the moon."

"I want to help. With the wedding. Whatever you need."

"Uh huh." A drawer opened and shut on the other end. "Can I ask why?"

"Because you're my sister and I'd like to—"

"No, why *now*. Because I have known you thirty years and you don't do anything without a reason, and last time I asked you to come out you had a shoot in Copenhagen."

Stella made herself say it. "I have a book due and it's about home and I can't write it from here."

"Okay," Lacey said, and there was something in the word that sounded almost like relief. "Okay. That I believe. That I can work with." A pause. "Look — I'm not going to pretend everything's fine because you're here for a few weeks. But it'll be good to see you. Gran's slower this year. She won't say so."

"Slower how?"

"Slower how do you think. She's eighty-three." Lacey exhaled. "I have to go, there's a goat with a bad eye in room two. Text me when you leave. Drive safe. Don't take the northern route, there's fire."

The line went dead.

Stella sat for a while with the phone in her lap and the city noise coming up through the open window — a bus sighing at the corner, someone's music, the particular Chicago clatter she had learned to love and had chosen, deliberately, at twenty-six, because it was as far from foothill quiet as she could get without leaving the country.

Then she got up and pulled the suitcase from the closet.

She left on a Tuesday with the trunk full of notebooks, a knife roll, two boxes of the cookbooks she actually used, and a cooler she forgot to fill. Iowa took most of the first day. Nebraska took an eternity. Somewhere in Wyoming she stopped at a diner and ate a slice of pie made from canned filling and wrote in her notebook, *what does it cost to know a place*, then crossed it out for being the sort of thing that sounded good and meant nothing.

On the third afternoon she came down out of the Sierra with the windows open, and the air changed. Pine gave way to oak. The light turned that particular late-August gold, thick as syrup, and the hills went the color of a lion's back, and she smelled dry grass and dust and something underneath it, faintly sweet, that she couldn't name until she was almost into town.

Fruit. Somewhere out past the road, tons of it, ripening at once.

The sign came up on the right, weathered green, the paint flaking off the R.

WELCOME TO COLTON RIDGE — ELEV. 1,840 — *A GOOD PLACE TO STOP*

Stella slowed the car and, for reasons she chose not to examine, found that her hands were unsteady on the wheel.