The Orchard House

Chapter One: The Road Home

The hospital in Hays let Glenn Blaney go at eleven in the morning, which meant Marilyn drove him the fifty-two miles back to Grainfield in the worst of the August heat.

He sat in the passenger seat with his hands on his knees. He had insisted on the shirt with the collar and the gray trousers, though the trousers hung on him now and the belt was cinched two holes past its old crease. A nurse had offered him a wheelchair for the ride down to the entrance and he had looked at her the way he used to look at attorneys who arrived late to his courtroom, and then he had walked out under his own power with one hand skimming the wall.

"You can put the air on higher," Marilyn said.

"It's fine."

"It's ninety-eight degrees."

"It's fine, Marilyn."

So she left it. Out the window the wheat stubble ran flat and gold to the edge of everything, cut two weeks ago, the fields shorn and bristling. Grain trucks passed them going the other way with chaff blowing off the tops. There were three grain elevators visible from the highway at any given time, white and windowless, standing up out of the land like the only buildings anyone had thought worth making tall.

Marilyn was forty-eight years old and had taught fourth grade for twenty-three of them. In two weeks she would be standing in front of nineteen children with a laminated seating chart, and she had not yet copied a single worksheet. There was a milk crate of student workbooks in the back seat, next to her father's duffel and the plastic hospital bag that held his wallet, his watch, his reading glasses, and a foam cup of pills.

Her father had had a stroke on a Tuesday morning while polishing the banister. The neighbor's boy, cutting through the yard, had seen him sitting on the third step from the bottom with the rag still in his hand and one side of his face gone slack, and had had the presence of mind to knock. Nine days in Hays. The word the doctor used was mild. The word he used in the hallway, to Marilyn, out of Glenn's hearing, was another word entirely.

"He shouldn't be alone in the house," Dr. Sandhu had said. "Not at night. Not for now."

"He's going to say no."

"Then somebody should say it louder than he does."

Nobody had ever said anything louder than Glenn Blaney. That was not how it worked.

They came off the highway onto the county road, and the tires changed pitch, and then they were on gravel, and the dust came up behind them in a long brown wall. Three acres at the end of the road. The white clapboard house her great-grandfather had put up in 1911, with the wraparound porch her grandfather had added, and behind the house the orchard: sixty-one apple trees planted in 1921 in eight crooked rows, of which maybe forty were still alive and maybe twenty still bore anything worth picking. The grass between the rows was knee-high. Nobody had mowed it in nine days, and nine days in August is enough.

Glenn looked at that grass the whole way up the drive.

"I'll get it tomorrow," Marilyn said.

"I'll get it."

"Dad."

"I have mowed that orchard every summer of my life since I was eleven years old."

"And you'll mow it again," she said, which was a lie so soft it barely counted, "but not tomorrow."

She came around to his door. He waited until she had stepped back and then got himself out in stages, one hand on the roof of the car, one on the frame, and stood in the driveway in his courthouse trousers with the heat coming up off the gravel in waves. His breathing was audible. He was seventy-two years old and had been, before that Tuesday, a man who could still carry a fifty-pound bag of feed across the yard without shifting his grip.

The walker was folded in the trunk. Marilyn had bought it at the medical supply in Hays with her own money, and she brought it out, and he glanced at it once.

"Put that back."

"It's just for the steps."

"Put it back in the car."

She put it back in the car. She got the duffel and the milk crate and the hospital bag, and she followed him to the porch steps, four of them, and she watched him take each one with his right hand crushing the rail and his left arm hanging a half second behind his body the whole way, like a coat he was carrying.

Inside, the house smelled the way it always smelled: floor wax, coffee grounds, the faint apple-cider sweetness that came out of the walls in humid weather and that Marilyn had never smelled anywhere else in the world. Her mother's blue glass hen sat on the windowsill over the sink where it had sat for thirty years. The oak table stood in the middle of the kitchen with the grain of it going soft and pale in the middle from all the polishing.

Glenn stopped in the front hall. He put his hand on the banister, and Marilyn realized, with a lurch, that he was checking whether he had finished the job.

"You'd got up to the landing," she said. "I did the rest."

"You used the lemon oil?"

"I used the lemon oil."

He nodded once. He did not thank her. He went into the front room and sat down in his chair by the window, and by the time she came back through with a glass of ice water he had picked up the newspaper from Sunday, nine days old, and was reading it as if it had come that morning.

Marilyn carried her suitcase up to her old bedroom. It was the smallest of the three upstairs rooms, with a slanted ceiling on the west side and a window that looked out over the orchard, and it still had the yellow curtains her mother had sewn in 1974. She had slept in this room until she was twenty-two, and then, off and on, for most of the years since: the year her mother's depression came the first time, the spring of the chemotherapy, the eleven months of the hospice bed in the dining room. She had her own house in town, a two-bedroom rental on Delaware Street with a lawn the size of a bath towel, and it occurred to her, sitting on the edge of the bed with her suitcase unopened, that she could not remember which of the two places she thought of as home.

She unpacked. She put her school things on the desk. She went down and made him a supper of chicken and green beans and a boiled potato with no salt, which he ate about half of, and afterward she laid out the pills in the sectioned plastic box she'd bought: the blood thinner, the statin, the pressure pill, the aspirin.

"Four," he said, looking into the box.

"Four in the morning, two at night."

"I've never taken a pill in my life."

"You've taken aspirin."

"That isn't a pill," Glenn said. "That's aspirin."

And that was the closest thing to a joke he had made since the hospital, and Marilyn laughed, badly, once, and turned to the sink so he would not see her face.

At eight thirty he went up to bed. She heard him on the stairs a long time. She heard the drawer of the nightstand, and the murmur that was him reading a psalm out loud the way he did every night of his life, and then the click of the lamp.

Marilyn sat at the oak table with the workbooks in front of her and did not open them. Through the screen door the crickets were going. The heat had not broken; it never broke in August, it just got quieter. Out past the yard light the orchard stood in its rows, and the apples on the closest tree were the size of golf balls and green as pond water. Nobody had pruned those trees since her mother died. Her mother had done it every February in a canvas coat, up on a stepladder in the cold with a pole saw, humming.

At eleven she checked on him. He was asleep on his back with his hands folded on his chest, breathing, and in the light from the hall he looked like the sculpture on a tomb, and Marilyn stood in the doorway for a full minute the way you stand over a sleeping child, waiting for the next breath to prove itself.

Then she went to bed in the yellow-curtained room and lay awake and thought: three weeks. Three weeks and school starts, and I will drive twenty-two miles each way, and I will make his breakfast at six and his supper at six, and I will grade papers at his table, and nobody is coming to help me.

She was wrong about that, though she would not have called what came help.

Two days later a car she didn't recognize turned in off the gravel — a Buick the color of dishwater with a dent in the driver's door deep enough to hold rain — and rolled up the drive slow, the way people drive when they are not sure they are going to stay.