“Then quit.”
She laughed.
“I’m serious.”
“And do what?”
“Literally anything. You can do literally anything, Josie. Take Common Ground someplace else.”
She rolled her head across the window.
“You used to say that to me all the time,” he said. “The night of your graduation you said it, and it was like I heard you. And I believed that you believed it, but I just could never believe it myself. And if I hadn’t left this place…I might not have ever believed it.”
“You’re saying quit my job and belief will come?”
“Yep.”
“Said by the guy who doesn’t have to pay rent in Queens.”
He laughed. “True, but so is what I’m saying. Sometimes you have to let go of one thing to grab onto another.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Yeah, it is. You just don’t want it to be.” She was silent and he glanced over to see if she was glaring at him, but she was looking out the window, chewing on her lip. A classic Josie tell that she was thinking deep thoughts.
“Hey,” he said. “Alice wants to do a Five Questions.”
“That’s a great idea,” she said. “I’m surprised you haven’t done it yet.”
“Well, I started one yesterday but she brought up my mom and I stopped. And she said today that we could try again and she’d pretend she didn’t know me.”
“That would be awful,” Josie said.
“For her?”
“No. Awful TV.”
“What should I do?” he asked.
“Oh, I think you know what you should do,” she said. “You should do a Five Questions with her all about your relationship. And how you came to be at the inn and what she taught you and what you learned from her. It should be a total reveal about your beginning in the kitchen.”
“No one wants to see that,” he said.
“Everyone wants to see that. And you should be peeling potatoes while you do it.”
“You make it sound easy,” he said.
“It is. You just don’t want it to be.” She smiled at him like it was nothing how coy she was being. So coy he wanted to pull this truck over and get his hands under her shirt, teach her a lesson about what happened to girls who smiled like that.
God, the things I want to do to you.
He turned from the road onto the winding driveway that led to Athens Organics and Haven House.
“Wow, it’s gotten a lot bigger,” he said as they pulled up to park in front of the farmhouse.
He had a painful déjà vu. The last time he was here had been the night of Josie’s graduation. Helen had had a fake ID and sneaked out of the house to join Josie at the parties, but then got drunk and called her mom to tell her she loved her. Classic Helen.
He felt all the years, all at once. The years he’d been here. And the years he was away.
Part of him had believed that the inn and the farm and Haven House would sort of hang in suspended animation. Unchanging. And he was glad there had been progress, of course he was glad, it was just strange not to have seen it. Not to have helped.
Yeah. That was it. There’d been a lot of changes he hadn’t been a part of.
When, for a lot of years, all he’d wanted was to help this place grow.
There was a giant greenhouse behind the farm now. Daphne was experimenting with hydroponics. And one of the sheds he knew was devoted to her mushrooms. Behind and beside the greenhouses, the fields were all sleeping under the snow. The orchard, too. Next door was Haven House, built when he still lived at the farm. He’d had one summer job helping the contractor clear the area. He’d gotten poison ivy so badly he’d blown up like a balloon.
Don’t you know what poison ivy looks like? Josie had asked, rubbing calamine lotion on his arms.
I do now, he’d said, the excruciating embarrassment giving the itch a run for its money.
Haven House looked like a cross between a stately manor home and a very beautiful hotel. There were porches and balconies outside every window. White gingerbread nestled into peaked roofs. And all of it right now was covered in Christmas lights. Some blinking and flashing. Some steady and plain white. It was like a patchwork quilt of lights. Daphne’s doing. She didn’t like uniformity or themes the way Alice did. She liked a little mayhem.
“Another water slide?” he asked. The new one burst out of the fourth floor and snaked around the building only to disappear through an exterior wall on the ground floor.
“Helen said they got it a two years ago.” She shook her head, smiling the same smile he imagined he had on his face. Like it was all just so damn good. Good to see. Good to feel. “I’d forgotten how big this place is.”
He turned off the car, and in the silence the truck felt smaller. Snow landed on the windshield and melted, running down the glass.
“Why haven’t you been back, Josie?”
She looked over at him and he saw how complicated it all was. The same complicated that had made him want to leave the other morning.
“It’s not…all because of me and that night?”
“That’s part of it,” she answered. “But part of it is also my job.”
“Because you’re busy?”
“Yeah, and my mom just can’t keep her opinions about it to herself. And defending my choices every time I see her is a drag. And…” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I don’t know. I guess…I’d put the Riverview away.”
“Away?” he asked with a laugh, like he didn’t know exactly what she meant. Like it didn’t strike some deep chord in him, too. No, he thought, he didn’t want to fall backward into that place they’d occupied—knowing each other’s thoughts before they were words. Knowing each other’s experiences because they shared such a similar way of being in the world.
“I made them come to me,” she whispered. “Visiting me in the city because I was so busy. They were busy, too, building this place…”
“But they visited you?”
She nodded. “I acted like my work was more important and, I mean, look at how wrong I was.”
“Not everything has to be important,” he said.
“That sounds ridiculous.’’ She rolled her eyes at him.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m sure I Do/I Don’t is important to its viewers. You know, who are looking for something mindless to take them away from whatever hard reality they’ve got happening.”
She looked at him for a long moment and then smiled. “You always were good at that.”
“At what?’
“Making me feel better.”
The front door of the farmhouse was thrown open, and there was Helen looking nervous.
“She planned this, you know,” he said, leaning forward so he could see her out of Josie’s window. He felt Josie’s breath on his cheek, the skin of his neck.
“Helen is always planning something,” Josie said.
“You mad at her?”
“Are you?” Josie asked, turning to look at him, and their faces were inches apart. Not even.
“No,” he whispered, his eyes on her mouth. Remembering so clearly what she’d tasted like that night. Artificial fruit salad. And now she would taste like Chapstick and coffee. Maybe the lasagna he’d made with his own hands. “I’m glad she brought me back. I missed this place.”