by Elle Casey
I smile at the flirty tone in his voice and the fact that he’s pretty much managing this entire conversation without any help from me. “Sure.” It’s a lot easier for me to listen to his thoughts than to share my own.
“I was thinking how cool it would be to be like those people.” He nods at a couple headed in our direction.
“Who? Those people right there?” I point to clarify because I don’t see anything special about them. They’re just two people walking together, holding hands and chatting.
He reaches up and puts his hand on top of mine, pushing my arm down. “Yes. And next time, try to be more obvious about it so they can be absolutely sure we’re talking about them.”
Perhaps it’s my imagination, but it seems like his hand rests on mine just a few seconds longer than it needs to before it disappears. It makes me warm all over. “Sorry. I wasn’t sure I was understanding you correctly.”
He doesn’t say anything in response, but my curiosity is too piqued to let the conversation go at that. “Why would you want to be like them?” I do a further evaluation of the couple, trying to figure out the answer on my own, since he’s taking his sweet time answering. They’re both fit and good-looking, but so is Sam; he can’t be jealous of their attractiveness. Or maybe he wants to move to New York permanently and wishes he fit in more; they look like native New Yorkers—both of them have very stylish haircuts and they’re wearing really cool exercise clothing. Their sneakers are fluorescent. I could totally see them in an advertisement for a gym or a high-end yoga studio.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe because they seem happy together.”
I completely get what he’s saying, and it makes me fall back into the dream I was having earlier, about what I would like my life to look like someday. “Yeah.” My voice comes out dreamy as I picture myself walking with a man down this path, smiling about our life in Maine together. We’d be here on a vacation, visiting my sister, talking about how great our life is as we hold hands. I’d look up at him and he’d smile down at me. He’d have a beard . . .
Oh, shit. Stop that. I shake my head and say the first thing that comes to mind. “I was thinking the same thing.”
He pauses and looks at me. “The same thing about them?”
I keep moving forward so he’ll follow me and not stare at me so intently. “Yeah. Or whatever. I was just walking along here thinking how cool it would be to have a boyfriend . . . or whatever.” Oh God. I can’t believe I just said that out loud! Why don’t I just pass him a note written in crayon: Sam, would you please go out with me? Check Yes or No . . .
“That’s funny.” He’s not laughing. He sounds . . . intrigued?
Do I dare ask? “Why is that funny?” Why, yes, I do dare. I don’t know who I am right now. The old me would have left it alone. The new me—the New York me—is looking for his buttons.
“That we were thinking the same thing.”
“Oh. Yeah. That is funny.” I’m so relieved he’s not taking what I said as a hint that I want him to be my boyfriend, words start spilling out. “To be honest, I wouldn’t have expected that to be something on your radar.”
His voice is a little gruff. “Why? You think I want to be alone forever?”
“I don’t know.” I shrug, feeling out of my depth. “Guys don’t think the same way girls do.”
“Oh, yeah? How do guys think? Tell me.”
Okay, so this is an embarrassing trap of my own making. Now I have to show him how incredibly uneducated I am about the male species. But I’m going to woman up and deal with it, because I’m enjoying the fact that we’re actually having a conversation and not walking around in awkward silence anymore.
“Don’t guys just think about getting laid, having fun, and partying?”
He chuckles.
“What’s so funny?”
“You said ‘getting laid.’ It doesn’t sound right coming out of your mouth.”
I knew it. He thinks I’m a virgin. “I am just a touch offended by that,” I say.
“Why? It was a compliment.”
“It doesn’t feel like a compliment to be called a complete prude.”
“No, hey, I wasn’t calling you a prude.” He rests his hand on my shoulder for just a second or two before pulling it away. “You just seem like a really nice girl, is all.”
I’m only slightly mollified. “Well, I am a nice girl, but it doesn’t mean I’m a virgin.”
He leans his head back and laughs before responding. “Fair enough.”
I kick a stone off the path, imagining what I must look like to him, especially compared to all these people walking in the park around us. I fear I’m coming up short. “My life must seem really tame to you.”
“No, not tame necessarily . . .” He takes a few more steps before continuing. “Just different. I’m actually kind of curious about it, if you want to know the truth.”
“There’s no need to stay curious,” I say, not allowing the shyness to come in—the fear that wants to stop the conversation and send me back to the apartment alone. “Ask your questions. I’m happy to answer them.” This I can do . . . talk about my life. If there were a scale of conversations to measure my abilities by, an impossible one would be about orgasms, and an easy one would be about the weather. The one he’s introduced definitely falls more toward the weather end. In fact, it’s probably the easiest conversation I could ever have with Sam. It certainly doesn’t hurt to know that he seems interested in my life. Even if it’s just polite interest, I’ll take it.
“What do you do all day?” he asks. “What’s a typical day in your life look like?”
He starts to turn down a path that will lead away from the music, but I gesture for him to follow me toward it. He comes along without a word.
“I would say it’s very . . . tame . . . compared to New York City, anyway.”
“In what way?”
“Well, it’s very quiet, first of all. The only sounds I hear most of the time are birds chirping, bees buzzing, horses neighing, or goats bleating sometimes, and occasionally the dogs barking. Every once in a while there’ll be people talking, but not always.” I laugh, thinking about how strange it would seem to him, being from LA. Sometimes the people at the farm are so busy snoozing or meditating, I don’t hear a single word uttered for days.
“It sounds pretty cool.”
“It is pretty cool. I love my life.” I can’t help the smile that spreads across my face, even when I catch him looking at me.
“I guess I can see why you aren’t too thrilled about being here in the city.”
“It’s not that bad.” I’m admitting this to myself at the same time as I’m admitting it to him. “It’s just a bit much. I wasn’t planning on it. My sister kind of sprang the trip on me at the last minute, and I didn’t have time to prepare myself for it mentally.”
“Tell me more about your life,” he says. “Your farm.”
“Well, I get up every morning pretty early. Around seven.”
He moans. “Oh, man. That is so not me.”
I smile. “I’m not sure it’s me either. It’s just what I’ve had to do my whole life. I’m in charge of taking care of the animals, so I have to get up early and feed them. I don’t like them to go hungry for too long. It’s not good for their digestive systems, or so Rose tells me.”
“Rose?”
“My sister. She works at an animal clinic.”
“How many animals do you have?”
“The number varies. Sometimes we take in rescues and our numbers go up, and some of them pass away from either old age or illness, and our numbers go down. My sister isn’t exactly a veterinarian, but she’s really good at giving medical care to them, so they don’t die from sickness very often. Usually, death happens when a rescue comes in that’s in such bad condition there’s nothing we can do to fix it up. But I would say we usually have around two or three dogs running around, several cats . . . I have a herd of six goats, two pigs, five horses, fo
ur cows, and I have, right now, I think, twenty-four chickens? Give or take?”
“Wow. That’s a real farm.”
“Well, yeah.” I smile at his city-boy amazement. “We also grow some things. We have a really big garden, and we sell a lot of our produce at the farmers’ market because we could never eat or can it all ourselves. And in the winter, we tap our maple trees for the syrup. We harvest our honey all summer long and sell it through the winter.”
“That’s so cool. Do you ever do tours?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, like people come to your place and see all the things you do, and you give talks about it while you show them around.”
He says this like I live at some kind of amusement park. I guess to someone from LA my life must look pretty silly. I try to use humor to brush off the little bit of sadness that his comment creates. “Why? Are you interested in a tour?”
He nods, not getting my joke at all. “I actually would be. I’ve never seen anything like that. I’m a city boy, born and bred.” He seems serious.
“Well, you’re in luck, because the farm is open to anyone who wants to come there. People can stay as long as they want, as long as they’re contributing. It’s an intentional-living community . . . Do you know what that means?” No one ever does, not even the people who frequent the farmers’ market.
He shakes his head. “Nope. But it sounds cool.”
I laugh. “Well, I don’t know how cool it is. I think some people consider it pretty dorky, but what it means is our community is open to anybody who wants or needs to be there, so long as they share the same values and ideas about community as we do. You can pitch a tent on our land, or, if we have room, you can stay in the house. And in exchange for the space and the place to rest, you just have to do some work on the farm. Contribute.”
“People contribute in what way?”
I shrug, trying to picture all the things I’ve seen people do around my home. “You can help in the garden, with the animals . . . or if you’re good at repairing things, you can do handyman projects around the place. We have a lawyer who comes once a year who helps us with legal issues when we need it. There’s always something that can be done; you don’t have to be a skilled laborer to do it. We had one guy who just came up with activities to keep the kids busy while the adults were working. I loved it when he came. He always had fun games for us when we were younger, and he played guitar, too. We sang songs every night by an outdoor fire in the summer. I never got tired of it.” It was so sad when he died. I still think of Wilbur often.
“You said it was intentional living. What does the word intentional mean? Where does that part fit in?”
I’ve never actually explained it to anyone, so I have to fish around in my brain to remember what my mothers have said to people who have asked at the farmers’ market. People know us so well there, we don’t get many questions anymore.
“Well, we try to have very low impact on the environment. We make sure that whatever we do is sustainable, so for example, if we cut down a tree, we plant two trees. We treat ourselves and others with respect and think about why we do what we do. People who stay with us need to agree that being kind to one another and at peace with ourselves and the world is the best way to be, whenever possible. We don’t practice any specific religion, but I guess you could say we follow the Golden Rule . . . treating people the way you want to be treated and all that.” Explaining this to Sam warms me, reminds me of how much I love my life at Glenhollow Farms. How could I ever be angry with my mothers for making the decisions they did way back in the day, when the result has been this life? I can’t. I just can’t blame them for anything because they gave me a gift that I will have for my entire existence.
“Does everyone eat vegan there or something?”
His comment makes me laugh. So many people equate our lifestyle with veganism, I’m not offended. I’m used to hearing this from people in town. “No, not as a rule. Some people who come to stay with us do, but my family eats meat. But we don’t buy it anywhere because we don’t know how those animals were treated. We raise the animals, and we have them slaughtered on our property by a professional butcher in the most stress-free and kind way possible. We try to be mindful of what we’re doing with the animals and treat them right, since they’re nourishing our bodies.”
“That’s cool. So the intentional thing is just to kind of think things all the way through?”
“Yeah, in a way. We take time out every day to center ourselves, to meditate and connect with our inner selves.” I shrug as my face goes a little pink. “I can only imagine what this sounds like to a city boy like you. Pretty hokey, huh?”
“Nah, it sounds interesting. Nice. Really.” His expression has gone really soft. He places his hand on my shoulder for couple seconds. “Thanks for telling me. I don’t want you to think I’m judging you with my questions. It’s not like that.”
As he says it, I realize it’s true. He could be sitting there making faces and laughing, but he’s not. He seems sincerely interested. “You should come see it sometime,” I say boldly, not realizing until the words are out that I’m going to say them. “You might like it. Maybe it would be a place for you to unwind a little bit.” From what I heard coming out of that bedroom, it sure seems like he could use the time-out.
I won’t tell him it’s a place where he could write music, because I know what it’s like to be an artist and to be told by someone that a certain place would be good for me to create in. Nobody knows what that place is but the artist, and thinking that someone is sitting there wondering why you’re not painting a picture or writing a song is enough stress to stop the creative process altogether.
“Maybe I will,” he says. “Someday.” He doesn’t sound very hopeful. Perhaps he doesn’t really think intentional living is as cool as he said he said it was. Oh well. It’s not for everyone, and that’s okay with me. I wouldn’t want it to become too popular; the farm could quickly become overrun like this city is.
I like my privacy. I need it, in fact. But if Sam wanted to come out to Glenhollow Farms and stay for a little while, I don’t think it would be so bad. Not that I’ve spent a ton of time with him, but he seems pretty nice . . . not judgy, like he said. The more I think about it, the more I believe it might actually be fun to have him visit, to show him all the things I’ve described to him . . . these things that make me proud and happy. I get the feeling that he’d respect it, even if he didn’t want that life for himself. It’s too bad that’s not in the cards for us. He’s an LA guy, and I’m a hippie chick who lives on a farm in the middle of Maine. There aren’t too many people who could be more opposite than we are.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
As we make our way around a bend in the path, we come upon a group of artists doing their thing. A couple of them are packing up to leave, but there’s still a guy drawing portraits, a woman in rainbow-colored clothing juggling three bowling pins, and a guy in dreads strumming an acoustic guitar with a girl singing next to him.
We stop several yards away and watch in silence. The guy is playing a song that I remember from one of the many Red Hot albums my mothers have played over the years. I see movement out of the corner of my eye and look down to catch Sam’s fingers playing an invisible guitar on his thigh. I don’t even think he realizes he’s doing it. Amber’s voice plays in my head: Find his buttons. Push them.
“You should come out here and play sometime,” I say casually.
His fingers stop moving, and he slides his hands into his front pockets. “Nah. It’s not for me.”
“Why not? I hear you’re pretty good.”
He turns his head toward me. The lamplight coming from our left hides the details of his face in shadows, but I can feel the intensity of his gaze. “Who told you that?”
“My sister. She told me you’re going to write some music for the band, so you must be decent at it.”
He shrugs and goes back to watching the people in fro
nt of us. “Maybe.”
The person drawing a portrait by portable-lamp light is almost finished. It’s not a terrible job, but I’ve seen better. He gets paid ten dollars for his efforts and then sits there looking around for his next customer. He catches my eye and wiggles his pencil at me. I shake my head no.
“You should give it a try,” Sam says, a challenge in his voice.
“Go sit for that guy? Are you crazy?”
“No, not sit for him. Draw.”
“Noooo way.” I shake my head vigorously.
“Why not? I hear you’re good.”
He’s mocking me with my own words, but he doesn’t mean it in a cruel way. He’s smiling too hard for that—the white of his teeth is reflected easily in the meager light. We might be flirting, but I’m not sure.
“Who’d you hear that from?” I’m feeling emboldened by the darkness.
“Your sister. When you were in your room. She told me all about you.”
“Is that so?” Oh, how I wish my sister were here so that I could interrogate her for an hour and learn everything she told him. “What did she say?” Please, God, don’t let it be anything embarrassing!
He shrugs as he looks at the portrait artist. “Well, based on what she said, you could wipe the floor with that guy’s stuff.”
I laugh. “My sister is my biggest fan. I’m not sure I’d believe what she says, if I were you.”
“Yeah, well, sisters are like that.”
“Do you have one?” Maybe Sadie is a sibling?
He shakes his head. “No, but I’ve got a brother, and that’s close enough.” His voice softens, like he’s fallen into his own thoughts and doesn’t realize he’s still talking out loud. “Sometimes you think they’d jump into a fire to save you.”
“Yeah.” I get choked up thinking about it. My sisters would do that for me, and I would for them too. But I can’t claim anymore what a big sacrifice it was for me to come to Manhattan for Amber, because I’m having too much fun now for it to be considered anything but pleasant. I realize in that moment that Sam makes me feel lucky to be here.
