“I saw someone in Florida.”
“A man?” Poppy asked. It was the first thing that popped into her mind. George Blake had been dead three years. If Maida had met someone new, it would follow that she might view the old from a different place.
“A therapist.”
Poppy was shocked again. “You did?”
“Yes. I was starting to feel old. Then I got down there in January andrealized that I was younger than many of the people around me. I’m only fifty-seven. That isn’t old by today’s standards. So I started asking myself why I felt so old, and when I couldn’t find an answer, I got a name.”
“Of a therapist?”
“Yes. She’s helping me see what I want.”
“Which is?”
Maida turned to her. “Happiness. Enjoyment. Lily said she told you that she’s pregnant.”
Excited at the mention of Lily’s baby, Poppy nodded.
“Well, I want to enjoy that baby,” Maida said. “I want to do things for that baby that I didn’t do for Lily. I wasn’t a good mother to her.”
“You were a good mother,” Poppy corrected as she turned onto the road that led to the school. She was directly behind a Suburban driven by a friend who was there to pick up her four kids. “You just weren’t always . . . understanding.”
“You’re being very kind, Poppy, and I won’t argue with you. But the truth is that I was obsessed with where I’d come from and what I’d done back there. I was obsessed with compensating for the guilt I felt, and I overdid it when my first child was born. Lily, being that child, took the brunt of all that I was trying to hide. But trying to hide things like that just doesn’t work. You think that you’ve tucked your dirty laundry away in a safe place, but after a while, inevitably, the smell escapes.”
“That’s a disgusting analogy.”
“But it’s true,” Maida insisted. “Or think about Micah’s sugaring. I’ve been here in town more than thirty years, so I’ve been watching sugaring that long, and things have changed. Dale Smith used to use a single large pan for the boiling. When the syrup started to sheet, he’d pour that off and add fresh sap to the pan, but there was always a little of the old left, and it would keep boiling, just keep boiling, and the finished product was never quite as pure or sweet, with that faint taste of old sap. Micah uses three pans. Sap moves from one to the next as it condenses, and when it starts to sheet, the whole of that batch comes off. It’s fresh. It isn’t tainted by old boil.”
This one was a prettier analogy. Poppy certainly got the point. Again, though, she started imagining. “Why are you telling me this?”
Maida didn’t speak for a minute. Then she said quietly, “I just want you to know.”
Poppy might have pressed the point if she hadn’t pulled up at the school and seen the girls already racing down the walk, eager to hear about the sap and to enthuse about going home. Then the moment was gone.
* * *
Steam billowed from the cupola of the sugarhouse, drifting up through the tops of the trees and into the sky over town. Even more than Poppy’s phone calls, the steam should have been a rallying cry. Cars should have been coming down Micah’s drive, disgorging townsfolk intent on sampling the first of the season’s syrup.This year, there were no cars arriving other than Poppy’s. She pulled up to the sugarhouse, parked beside Griffin’s truck, and let the girls out. They bolted inside.
“Where is everyone?” Maida muttered in dismay, but it was a rhetorical question. Without awaiting an answer, she left the car and went around to the back.
Poppy would have liked to follow the girls into the sugarhouse. She loved the sweet smell inside when the sap was boiling. But she figured that Maida might want to add something further to their conversation—a question, an observation, even an accusation. Poppy wanted to be there for that.
Maida did have an accusation to make, but it had nothing to do with Poppy. “This is not right,” she muttered as she hauled out one of the baskets. “They know he’s going through a hard time. So he lost his temper.”
“More than once.”
“Fine. But they know he meant no ill will. They should be here.”
Poppy pulled out another of the baskets, set it on her lap, and wheeled to the porch. The going was rougher than it had been even the day before, bare patches mingling with snow-packed ones. In another few weeks, the whole thing would be mud. By then, Micah would lay out long wood planks, not so much for Poppy as for Heather and the girls. Mud season was an unholy mess.
Heather might miss it this year, Poppy thought, wheeling back toward the Blazer. Wood planks or no wood planks, if she wanted to go into the house she would have to drive around to the front. That was where the ramp was.
Maida shooed her off before she could get on the lift. “Go into the sugar shack, Poppy. They need an audience. I’ll organize these things, then I’ll be over.”
Poppy put her hands to her wheels, then pulled them back. Maida seemed calm. She seemed comfortable now. “What you told me on the way here—do the others know?”
“Your sisters? Lily does. I told her last fall, when she was having such a bad time. She didn’t understand why I was so frightened about having the press here. It was the only way I could explain my . . . fear of exposure. It helped both of us, I think. I haven’t told Rose. I should.” She sighed. “That’ll take more courage. But I’m working on it.”
* * *
Griffin was the grunt man. His job was to fire up the arch under the evaporator pan and to restack wood as the pile was depleted. Missy and Star helped with the stacking, running one log at a time from the woodpile to the pallet by the arch. They didn’t mind the back and forth; they had all the energy in the world. They were excited to be home and excited to be helping. Early on they threw their jackets aside, because the sugarhouse was warm. It was also moist; Missy’s hair grew curlier and curlier.Griffin teased her, as he often did with his two curly-haired nieces. “You are just growing more and more and more hair,” he said. “Did you eat something special for breakfast?”
Missy shook her head and did a little dance around the side of the room. Star was quieter, staying close to his side. From time to time, she reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a chocolate kiss, and unwrapped it. He had made sure that the ones in his pockets had nuts. This was not the pocket that held the phone number that could be Cindy’s. That was in his back pocket, transferred from one pair of jeans to the other, but not called yet. He hadn’t drummed up the nerve. The way he figured it, aslong as Ralph was off looking in other places, Cindy would stay put—assuming this really was Cindy, and he did want to assume that. The reality was that after all these years it could be another dead end. He was giving himself just a little longer to pretend that wasn’t so.
Keeping busy helped. When he wasn’t adding wood to the fire, Griffin was content to keep an eye on the girls, especially since Micah couldn’t do it. He was the sugarmaker. He was the maestro, and the process wasn’t simple at all. This was no boil-it-in-kettles-out-back-in-the-woods stuff. Griffin had sensed that, when he had first seen the equipment in the sugarhouse. The reality of it was more apparent now that the equipment was running.
Micah explained the process in a quiet voice as he monitored, shifted, directed, and scooped. Griffin didn’t know whether the narration was for him, for Billy, or for the girls, but he was grateful for it.
“This valve allows sap to flow in from the tank outside. I keep it there as long as I can, because the cold lessens the chance of bacteria developing. Once it comes in, it goes first through the reverse osmosis machine. That takes out a lot of the water. From there, it goes to the back flue, where the steam from what’s already boiling gives it a start heating up. Then it comes into the back pan and is brought to a boil.” He moved the liquid forward with a large metal scoop. “This next pan, the middle one of the three, is smaller than the back one because the sap’s already starting to condense.”
“How sweet is it straight from the
tree?” Griffin asked.
“Sap from the tree is two percent sugar. Half an hour in these pans, and it’s syrup. That’s sixty-seven percent sugar.”
He worked for a bit, alternately moving the sap and leaving it alone to bubble. “Used to be you burned at least one pan every season. Not only did you have to throw out that batch of sap, but the pan was often ruined, too. Now I’ve got a gauge on each pan to monitor the level of the sap. When it gets low, it lets me know.”
“Can I taste?” Missy asked.
“Not yet,” Micah said. “But soon.”
He moved more sap along. “The front pan, here, is where things get tricky. This is the last stage. This is where sap turns into syrup.”
“How do you know when that happens?” Griffin asked.
“You hear it,” Billy put in.
Micah explained, “There’s a subtle change in the bubbling. If you don’t hear it, you can tell from the thermometer in here. Sap changes to syrup when it reaches seven degrees above boiling. If you want to be sure, you test it with that little thing over there. It’s a sugar hydrometer.”
“Something smells wonderful,” came a voice from the door. It was Lily Kipling, followed closely by her husband and Charlie Owens. When they took off their coats and looked ready to stay, Griffin left the girls in their care and went down to the house.
* * *
Micah liked talking about what he did. He felt competent and strong. With the arrival of guests, though, his attention was thrown off. Friends and neighbors stopping by at the first sign of sugar steam was the way in Lake Henry. This year, he would rather have done without their visit. Oh, he needed Billy and Griffin—they did the peripherals while he handled the sap. He also didn’t mind it when Maida brought food and drink up from the house. And he surely didn’t mind Poppy coming up. The girls loved her. She was practically family. He didn’t know what he would have done without her these past days.He could have done without Lily, John, and Charlie, though. They reminded him of the crowds that used to come with the first sap and how different it was this year. Worse, Charlie knew it too, and tried to be solicitous.
“What needs to be done?” he asked, rubbing his hands together. “I can work.”
“I’m set,” Micah answered, eyes fixed on the bubbling gold in the pan.
“Did you finish puttin’ in spiles?”
“No. I’ll do it mornings. Can’t start boiling until afternoon, anyway,” he said, thinking that Charlie knew that—and if he didn’t, why the hell would Micah want him around? Anyone who knew anything about sugaring knew that sap ran during the height of the day’s warmth and stopped when the sun went down and the temperature fell again. Micah might boil sap well into the night to finish up what had come down fromthe trees that day, because the best syrup came from fresh sap. Inevitably, though, he had to stop and wait until the sap flowed again.
“I can spare a boy or two, if you can use extra hands,” Charlie offered.
“I’m fine,” Micah said, setting his jaw. Truth was, he felt like a fool in the eyes of the town, what with Heather turning out to be someone else and his not knowing a thing. She might as well have cheated on him. He felt humiliated.
“Hey,” Billy said with a nudge.
Refocusing on the sap, Micah heard that deeper bubbling and felt anticipation in spite of himself. He carefully swept his metal scoop through the pan and lifted it clear. He had syrup. It dripped from the edge of the scoop in a sheet.
Flipping a valve, he let the syrup empty out of the pan into a vat. While it sat there, he scooped the next batch of syrup into the front pan, moved the sap in the back pan to the middle pan, opened the valve way in back and let in another seven inches of raw sap. It wasn’t until he was pouring the hot new syrup from the vat into an even larger vat lined with filters that he thought about Billy’s timely nudge. Without it, he might have scorched the sap. He prided himself on being a better sugarmaker than that.
Who to blame? He could blame Lily, John, and Charlie for distracting him, or Heather for haunting him. In the end, though, the fault was his. It behooved him to pay attention, or the season would be doomed.
* * *
Poppy was sitting in a cozy corner of Micah’s old sofa when Griffin came down the hall from the kitchen. She wasn’t reading. She wasn’t watching television or listening to music. She couldn’t say she was doing much of anything—and yet that seemed to take all the strength she had.She smiled when he came in, but didn’t speak.
He smiled back. “Your mom’s busy as a bee back there. I thought you’d be helping. Are you okay?”
She wasn’t sure. She felt . . . blue. It wasn’t something she was used to feeling.
But she nodded anyway and gestured for Griffin to come close. Whenhe hunkered down, she bent forward and put her nose to his flannel shirt. “Mmmm. Maple sugar. It’s an insidious smell. How’s it going up there?”
“Your sister came.”
Lily. Mommy-to-be Lily, Poppy thought, and felt a sudden need to share this news with Griffin. “She’s pregnant, only no one’s supposed to know yet, so don’t say anything.”
“I won’t. Thank you for telling me. A new baby’s always exciting.”
Poppy nodded. She laced her fingers in her lap.
“Something is wrong,” he said, still on his haunches.
She shrugged. But he was right, and she needed to vent. “I feel . . . like . . . a spectator. Like I’m just sitting here watching things happen.”
“Like Lily having a baby? Or Heather being locked up? We’re doing what we can. I’m hounding Aidan. Cassie is hounding the California A.A.G. To some extent, we’re all spectators.”
“But you’re busy with other things.”
His eyes lit. “Do you want to go back up to the sugarhouse with me?”
“And watch?” she asked crossly. She knew that she sounded like a moody child, but she couldn’t help herself. “No. I don’t want to watch.”
“You could help with the wood.”
She shook her head. The frustration she felt had nothing to do with sugaring.
“Are you still angry at me for what I said?” he asked.
“I should be. For that and more.”
“What more?”
“Coming here. Making me think of everything I can’t do. I used to feel like I could do anything I wanted.”
“Can’t you?”
Rather than answering, she said, “I sit at home and watch Victoria. She tries things. Nothing stands in her way. She is fearless.”
“She’s a cat. Cats don’t think the way we do. They don’t analyze things. They don’t feel guilt or regret. Or fear.”
“Well, I do,” she muttered. “I’m afraid of lots of things.”
“Name one.”
“You.” Embarrassed by the confession, she rushed on. “My mom is seeing a shrink. I think I should, too.”
“You don’t need one,” he said. “A good friend can serve the same purpose. It’s not like you have deep-seated anxieties. Sometimes it’s just a matter of having a forum to air out your thoughts. A friend can provide that.”
“So can a shrink.”
“A friend is cheaper. Besides, you don’t need a shrink. You have me.”
Taking a side of his collar in each hand, she moaned, “You’re the problem.”
“Because I love you? That’s crazy, Poppy.”
“That’s why I need a shrink,” she said.
“A shrink would sit here with you until you hated the silence enough to blurt out your fears. I could show you how it works. We could do some role-playing, you and I—only I don’t have very long. Not right now. I have to be back helping Micah. So let’s cut to the chase.”Everything about him gentled then, from his eyes to his voice to the hands that he placed on either side of her face. “I know about the accident, Poppy. I know about it. Imagine the very worst, and I know it. If you’re thinking that I’ll find out about it later and hate you, you’re wrong. There’s nothing you can say tha
t can turn me off.”
Poppy could barely breathe. She didn’t speak. Couldn’t speak. He was calling her bluff, purely and simply.
“If it’s a matter of forgiveness,” Griffin went on in that same gentle voice, “you have it, but it’s not even needed. Shit happens. Want to hear about shit? Shit is when your oldest brother supplies drugs for your teenage sister, and everyone looks the other way.”
Poppy gasped. “Cindy?”
He nodded sadly. “So we acknowledge it years later, but only in whispers, two of us at a time, and only after the damage is done. James is living with his wife and three kids in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Cindy’s long gone. He says she begged him for it, and, yeah, she was a rebel—yeah, she started with pot, and he had nothing to do with that—but then she got into the hard stuff, and he was involved.”
“He was dealing?” Poppy asked.
“No. But he had access. When she asked him for it, he got it. She kept asking, he kept getting. Things got worse and worse between her and the folks, worse and worse in her life until she was hooked, really messed up. Then all hell broke loose. She couldn’t take it, so she ran. Who was at fault? My dad, for being so rigid and judgmental that none of us would approach him—me and the others for not doing something anyway—James, obviously, for giving her the stuff just to tweak the old man.” Griffin took a breath. “What James did involved malice. You?” With a quick shake of his head he returned to the subject at hand. “Even when I dream up the worst -case scenario, I don’t see any malice on your part.”
Poppy was silent as she returned from the nightmare of Cindy Hughes’s story to her own. No, no malice, she thought, just a gross irresponsibility that had caused a person’s death.
“So that raises something else, says Griffin the shrink,” he teased in a way that told Poppy he was trying to make the truth easier to swallow. “That suggests the problem isn’t really about me. You don’t need me to forgive you for what happened that night. You need to forgive yourself.”
An Accidental Woman Page 30
