Bittersweet

by Sarina Bowen

  “That’s fine. All of it,” my newest employee said. He looked older than his twenty-two years. He had tired eyes. “Where should I put this?” He patted his gym bag.

  “That’s all you’ve got with you?” I asked, eyeing it.

  “That’s all I’ve got, period.” He lifted his chin, challenging me to say anything else on the matter.

  “No problem. Let me show you the bunkhouse.”

  But first my mother wanted a word. I saw her come out of the back door, her apron on, crossing the yard purposefully to where we all stood around Angelo’s car. I waited while she fussed over Angelo and greeted Jude. “Honey,” she said to this ex-con whom she’d never met before, “I checked every corner of our house and didn’t find any medication stronger than aspirin. Angelo asked me to do that for you. He said it was easier if you didn’t have to wonder.”

  “Uh, thanks,” he said, studying at his shoes. “Appreciate it.”

  I glanced toward the bunkhouse. God only knew what somebody might have left in that bathroom. “I should check the…”

  “Already did it,” my mother said quickly. “You might want to clean that shower more often. There are scarier things than narcotics in there.”

  Audrey giggled while I cringed.

  “I’m Ruth Shipley,” my mother said to our uninvited corporate raider. “And you’re…”

  “Audrey Kidder. I swung by to ask Griff about buying apples and cider for a group of restaurants in Boston.”

  “Oh!” Mom clasped her hands as if the queen herself had just dropped by. “Will you stay for lunch?” She ignored the look of menace that I aimed in her direction.

  “I would love to!” Audrey enthused. “Especially since my car is in a ditch at the bottom of your road.”

  “Not true,” I said quickly. Even as we spoke, I could see the Prius turning slowly up the drive. Zach had already swapped out the tire—although it was likely the spare was a donut, so Princess Perky’s troubles weren’t exactly solved.

  “Wow,” she said, her voice awed. “He’s a miracle worker.”

  “He is,” I admitted, even if it was just a tire change. “Shoulda been working miracles on my fence instead of your car, though.”

  “August Griffin Shipley,” my mother demanded. “Where are your manners? Since when do you not go to the aid of a stranger?”

  I would have preferred that Audrey was a stranger. Not that I’d say so out loud.

  May socked me in the shoulder. “Grumpy much? Take Jude to the bunkhouse already, because lunch will be ready soon. Brisket sandwiches and potato salad. Come with us, Audrey,” my sister the traitor said. “We’ll pour you some iced tea.”

  After saying goodbye to Angelo, who couldn’t stay for lunch, the women went inside, leaving Jude and I alone. I headed toward the outbuilding where we needed to stash his things, and he followed me. “The bunkhouse is pretty comfortable for what it is,” I said. “It’s been here a hundred years. My great-grandfather built it with the rocks he cleared from the meadow.”

  Jude studied the stone building as we approached. “Pretty cool,” he said. “You must not use it in the winter. Too expensive to heat.”

  “Not true. It has a hundred-year-old masonry heater. Every two days we build a fire in there, then seal that sucker up. It heats the place into the low sixties even on a sub-zero day. There’s electric baseboard heat to fill in around the edges. We make all our own electricity, too.”

  Sustainable architecture was one of my numerous causes. I wanted this farm to be around for a long time. The solar panels had cost a lot, though. I invested right after dad died, before I realized how tight cash really was. Then I invested in my first round of cider equipment, and now I was out on a proverbial limb all the time. One lost harvest and we’d be looking at bankruptcy.

  Holding open the front door, I let Jude enter first. “That room on the right is mine. Bathroom’s on the left.” I kicked off my boots and pointedly set them on the rubber shoe mat by the door. “After you’ve been working in the dairy barn, you’ll want to leave your shoes at the door.”

  “Makes sense,” Jude said, toeing out of his Chuck T’s. I was happy to see him following instructions. That boded well for both of us. “You sleep out here in the bunkhouse all the time?” he asked. “To keep an eye on the help, I guess.”

  “No.” Studying this very jaded young man, I shook my head. “That’s not why. I gave up my bedroom in the farmhouse because Mom is trying to convince my grandpa to move in. He’s about a half mile down the road, all alone since my grandmother died. Every day she asks him if he’ll move today, and each time he says, ‘Not today!’”

  Jude laughed, and it made him look five years younger.

  “Anyway, I moved out here a couple months ago, because we thought maybe it would motivate him to give in. But no luck. And anyway—I don’t mind it out here with Zach. He’s easy company. You’ll see. Head straight back. End of the hall.”

  I followed Jude into the wide bunkroom with high, beamed ceilings. I watched him take in the two sets of bunk beds—one on each side—and a single bed under the back windows. “That’s Zachariah’s,” I said, pointing at the center bed with the Star Wars pillowcase—a gag gift from me. “He gets the best spot, because he lives in here year round. During the harvest my cousins will sleep in here, too.”

  I went over to our one big closet and pulled open the double louvered doors. “Storage space is our biggest hurdle out here. You can have a couple feet of this hanging bar if you need it, and you get one big drawer.” I pointed at the built-ins at either end of Zach’s bed.

  “One drawer is plenty for me,” he pointed out as I poked around in the closet for a set of sheets and a blanket.

  “True.” The guy would need more clothes if he was going to do farm work, though. We got plenty dirty. “Here.” I offered him the bedding I’d found. Then I sat down on Zach’s bed. “Now tell me what else I need to know about working with you. Is there anything special you need? Any work that you can’t do?” I’d never known anyone who was trying to get off drugs, so I couldn’t guess his limitations.

  Jude turned his back to me and shook out a sheet before answering. But when he spoke, he eyed me over his shoulder. “Angelo brought me here because I’m trying not to move back to Colebury until I have a few more months where I’m clean. Eventually I’ll have to go home, but I need to rack up some more time off the junk. He said your place would be like a halfway house, because I’d be stranded out here. So I’d rather not be sent into Colebury on errands, if you don’t mind. There’s drugs everywhere, and I just don’t want to think about it. Don’t want to run into any of my so-called friends.”

  Yikes. “Okay. Sure. What else?”

  “I’m a decent mechanic. Started working in a body shop when I was fourteen. If you need any maintenance work on your vehicles, just ask.”

  “Thanks. Zach is an engine whiz, too. He’s saved me a mint already.”

  “Well, that’s lucky,” Jude said. But I swear he looked a little deflated at this news.

  “What else?”

  He tucked the corners of the sheet over the mattress. “I don’t sleep too well. Drugs really fuck up your REM cycles.”

  “So if I hear you walking around at night, I shouldn’t call the police?” I meant this as a joke, but when the words came out of my mouth, I realized they were a poor choice for talking to someone who’d been arrested at least once.

  He sighed. “You might find me sitting outside on the porch at two in the morning. I’ll try to be quiet.”

  “No big.” I cleared my throat. “Now, don’t take this the wrong way, but I say this to every man who ever stays here.”

  He looked up at me, amusement in his eyes. “Yeah? Hit me.”

  “My little sister is off limits. I have to say it. She’s seventeen going on thirty.”

  “Aw, man. Don’t feel you have to say another word. I get it.” He chuckled. “Hey kids, stay the hell away from the junkie in bunk numb
er three.”

  I was relieved that he didn’t get pissed off by my little speech. I gave it to everyone. And this guy had that dark-eyed, brooding look working. Plenty of girls had probably flung themselves at him back in the day.

  Hopefully my little sister wouldn’t cast aside her adoration for Zach and shift it to Jude. Zach I trusted. This guy I’d just met. “You know, I used to include both of my sisters in this little warning, but May got wind of it. She hates it when I treat her like a kid. And she has a good right hook, which she’s not afraid to use on me.”

  “Good to know. But hitting on your sisters is not my style. Maybe you wouldn’t believe it from a guy who just got out of jail, but I’m a hard worker. Toward the end there I was mostly working hard to feed my habit. But I know how to put in a long day.”

  “Good. We start at six and end at five, but we take two hours off during the day for meals and breaks.”

  His nod was stoic. “Got it. Maybe I’ll sleep better after a long day, anyway.”

  “You’d almost have to.” I stood up. “I’m heading in for lunch. It won’t start for another fifteen minutes, but be on time, okay? Lunch is at one o’clock every day and mom busts her ass to get it onto the table like clockwork, so she wants you to show up on time.”

  “Yessir.”

  I paused on my way out of the room. “And don’t call me sir. My siblings do it sometimes, but they’re just fucking with me.”

  Jude laughed as I left the bunkhouse.

  Chapter Four

  Audrey

  Maybe Griff Shipley was a grumpy asshole. But his family was lovely. Their bustling kitchen was controlled chaos of the very best kind. Griff’s mom was busy slicing up a slab of braised brisket large enough to feed several developing nations, while everyone else pitched in to get food on the table.

  Or didn’t, in the case of Griff’s younger brother, Dylan. Best as I could tell, he was minding a big sterilizer full of jam jars on the stove. He had the tongs in one hand, but mostly he busied himself singing Technotronic’s “Pump Up the Jam,” and dancing around.

  “You are killing me with that song,” his twin sister Daphne complained. The two of them looked to be high school aged.

  “This is what I sing when we make jam.”

  She rolled her eyes, her arms braced around a tall stack of plates. She nudged her brother and indicated an open drawer full of linen napkins. “Can you put those on top here?”

  He reached into the drawer and piled a handful of napkins on top of the plates.

  “We’re ten people today,” she said. “Put some more on.”

  “Stop calling me a moron.”

  She groaned all the way out of the kitchen, and Dylan went back to singing “Pump Up the Jam,” changing the line about “booty” to “fruity.” And all the while his mother and sisters moved like ninjas around one another.

  The lunchtime bustle in the Shipley family kitchen rivaled a busy night on the cook line at l'Etre Suprême, but it was a hell of a lot cheerier.

  The kitchen in the house where I’d grown up could not have been more different—it had been like a large, sparkling tomb. I’d never been allowed to cook anything in it, or disrupt its perfect order. Since my mother had been busy climbing the corporate ladder, she’d played host to guests all the time. But she didn’t cook. We’d had a full-time personal chef who made me feel like an intruder if I wandered in there looking for a snack.

  I hadn’t started cooking until college, when I finally got free of that stifling place. My freshman year I had a rented house with a couple of girls I knew from high school. One of them was a great cook already, and I learned a lot at her elbow. In fact, I’d liked everything about that first year at BU except for the schoolwork. I’d liked our house, my friends, the sorority I rushed, and partying. If I’d spent fewer hours learning to make dumplings from scratch and more hours doing homework, I might have gotten B’s instead of D’s.

  But I hadn’t.

  Water under the bridge.

  Drifting into the dining room, I watched Daphne speed-set the table for ten people. “During picking season we hold lunch outdoors, because we’re twenty people then,” she told me.

  May Shipley rushed by with a tray of coffee cups and a water carafe.

  “How can I help?” I asked her for the third time, following her back into the kitchen. “There must be something.”

  “You are so sweet, but we’ve got this down to a science. We serve a whole lot of food in this kitchen.”

  “I can see that.” It seemed categorically impossible that there wasn’t something I could do to help, but if she didn’t want to assign me a task, that left me free to admire the farmhouse kitchen. The house had to be over a hundred years old, but it had been lovingly handled. The giant butcher’s block table in the center of the kitchen looked as if it had been there since the dawn of time—there were scars and scratches in its oiled surface. But that only made it more beautiful to me.

  What I’d wished for as a child was exactly this—a storybook family on a farm somewhere, crammed around the table, a rope swing on an old tree, lacy curtains blowing in the breeze…

  Someone had abandoned a small bowl of cherries in the center of the table, half of them pitted. They gleamed like perfect red jewels. “Hey—these are gorgeous. Are they sour cherries?” I lifted the bowl up to my nose for a sniff—occupational hazard of being a chef. Wow. Nothing else had the same rich scent as a cherry.

  “Yes they are, and they’re terrific in pies,” Mrs. Shipley said, lifting slice after slice of brisket onto a platter. “But we won’t get enough for a pie until next week. I never know what to do with the first few—it’s not enough to make anything. I tossed them into a batch of strawberry jam last year.”

  “Can I eat one?” I laughed. “Is that rude? You can never find sour cherries at the store.”

  “Go ahead, honey,” Ruth Shipley said.

  I popped one in my mouth, and it burst forth with a wonderful sour fruitiness. “Fantastic.” The flavor filled me with ideas. I wanted to make chutney from these cherries. Or a gin cocktail. Or a tart. “Damn. I always wanted to live somewhere where there were fruit trees.”

  May Shipley laughed. “All we’ve got are fruit trees. Twenty thousand of them.”

  “Twenty…thousand?”

  “That’s right. And that’s not counting Griff’s experimental crops.”

  It was hard to even form a mental picture of twenty-thousand trees. Humming to myself, I picked up the paring knife and began to pit the rest of the cherries in the bowl. Knife work was soothing to me. Some people knitted. Some did yoga. I liked to cut things.

  A few minutes later I had a tidy pile of pitted fruit. “I suppose you have a compost can for the pits and stems?”

  Ruth Shipley looked up from her own work. “That didn’t take you but a minute.”

  “Cooking is the only thing I’m good at.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true. The compost can is there beside the coffee maker.”

  I dumped the pits and then washed my blood-red fingers.

  “May!” Ruth called to her older daughter. “Can you find the barbecue sauce in the refrigerator? We need to heat it up. Then we can eat.”

  “Sure!”

  “Um…” Dylan mumbled in that sullen teenage way. “Didn’t know you still needed that.”

  “Dylan Gerard Shipley! Did you finish my sauce and not tell me? Now lunch is going to be late! I can’t serve brisket without barbecue sauce!”

  Aw. The younger Shipley brother hung his head. He was a thinner, gawkier Griffin.

  I felt bad that he’d been shamed in front of strangers. “I’ll whip up another batch if you need it,” I offered.

  Ruth was still staring at her son with a laser gaze, and I was pretty sure the teenager would have been incinerated if looks could kill. “Thank you, honey,” she said to me. “I’d love that. There’s an onion there”—she indicated a bowl on the prep table—“and you can use the same c
utting board.”

  Yay, a task! When you’ve been told all your life that you’re quite useless, whipping up a little barbecue sauce is a good time. I grabbed the onion and went to town. “Ooh, garlic scapes,” I said, reaching for the green shoots. “I never find these, either.” A quick mince had them falling into tiny discs on the cutting board.

  “Yikes,” Daphne gasped, watching my knife move so fast it blurred. “How are you not missing a finger?”

  “Still have all ten, and none have had to be surgically reattached. But the day ain’t over yet.”

  As she giggled, the kitchen door opened and Griff Shipley filled the opening with his NFL-sized body. I’m ashamed to say that the rhythm of my knife faltered for just a moment. That chest beneath that tight T-shirt just did things to me.

  My traitorous brain was saved from further embarrassment by the look on his face when he spotted me. First a bushy eyebrow quirked, as if he couldn’t believe I was still here. And then he gave me his now-familiar frown.

  Ah, well. All that hotness wasted on a grouch.

  I dragged my attention off Griff as Ruth Shipley scraped my minced aromatics into a saucepan. “Let’s see,” she said. “A little ketchup, because we’re in a hurry. Some vinegar…”

  “You know what would be great in here?” I couldn’t stop myself from suggesting. “Those.” I pointed at the cherries.

  “Interesting pick, miss.” She handed me the pan. “Go for it. I need to run upstairs for a minute.”

  “Go on. I’ve got this.” I shooed her away and she smiled. At least one of the Shipleys liked me.

  Turning my back on Griff, I put the pan on the stove on a low temperature. Then, still feeling his eyes on me, I went to his giant family refrigerator and opened the door. The ketchup was in a huge bottle. It would have to be if they served ten or twelve people for lunch every day. Before adding some to the onions, garlic and butter already in the pan, I sautéed the veggies for a minute to bring out the onions’ natural sweetness.