But it had tanked the farm. I had tanked the farm.
“Rachel, I would do anything for you. I’m your father. I wanted you to enjoy your academic experience.”
“I didn’t want to enjoy it at your expense,” I said, wounded deeply. “You should have been honest with me. I would’ve gone somewhere else.”
“You had a good college experience.”
“I did. But I could’ve had it elsewhere, and not at the expense of the farm.” I rested my face in my hands briefly before looking back up at him. He looked like he was going to be sick. “Why didn’t you let me get student loans? Why did you insist on paying?”
“Because I didn’t want you to have to go through paying all that back,” he said. “I know how badly it can go. You’d have been paying off that debt for years.”
“But the farm!” I cried. “You killed the farm trying to give me what I wanted. I don’t know how we’re going to be able to save it.”
He leaned heavily against the doorframe, his face shiny with sweat. “This is why I want you to let me worry about these kinds of things. I own this farm. Not you. I’ll solve this.”
“I have some money in my savings account,” I tried.
“No, damn it.”
“This is my farm, too. And my home. I can do something to relieve a few of the bills. Let me help.”
Dad—stubborn as ever, too stubborn to admit he needed help when he was going under, his pride always in his way—only shook his head. I couldn’t believe he would be so hardheaded. Feelings raged inside of me, a rising tide of resentment that he had kept me in the dark on this coupled with incredulity at my own naivety. How had I been so stupid to trust him? Why hadn’t I done my own sleuthing into costs and finances and loans before going to college? He had given up on his dream for some misguided belief that I would only be happy at a certain school.
I was at war with myself, still clutching all of those foreclosure notices and credit warnings and bank statements. Would the end of the farm be a blessing in disguise? Or would it be the end of my happiness as I knew it?
I had to consider my mother in this moment, and the email she’d sent me. Was this the opportunity that she’d spoken of? Was this my chance to escape the farm? Had she known what kind of financial trouble it had been in when she wrote that? I found it hard to believe that Dad would’ve told her anything about what was going on, that he might’ve maintained contact with her about anything.
Did I really want to leave the farm? My mother had again mentioned dreams, and I had to confess that I didn’t know what mine would be.
And then my mind turned to Sebastian. He’d offered to buy the farm, and Dad had turned him down—pride usurping reason. Sebastian would’ve figured out very quickly that he’d purchased a lemon, but at least Dad would’ve been out of it. Why hadn’t he sold then?
It seemed that Dad still firmly believed that he could pull the farm out of its precarious debt, which was a delusion so enormous it made me worry about his mental state. How could he overcome all of these warnings and threats? It just wasn’t possible anymore.
“Why didn’t you sell the farm to Sebastian Clementine while you had the chance?” I asked quietly.
“What?” Dad looked at me. “Why would I have done that?”
“Because the farm’s going under, Dad.” I sighed, putting the papers back down on the desk. “These papers show it. You know it. And now I know it. You could’ve sold the farm to Sebastian. He wanted you to. He wanted to help, didn’t he?”
Dad narrowed his eyes. “What do you know about it?”
It seemed to be a night for revelations. I wasn’t about to sit here and accuse Dad of keeping secrets while still holding close to one of my own.
“I’ve known Sebastian Clementine for longer than you realize,” I admitted. “We were already acquainted when he visited the farm and you made me give him a tour.”
“How?” Dad looked confused, derailed, and like he needed to sit down. But I couldn’t let him off the hook yet. He’d lied to me and kept this from me. We needed to move forward, to find some kind of solution. Was Sebastian going to be the solution? Only time would tell.
“It was Sebastian who caused the wreck with the truck on the highway,” I said. “He was in a hurry. He was the one who cut me off that day. He gave me his card, but I hadn’t heard from him. So I went and found him. In his office at Clementine Organics. I wanted to get him to pay for damages to the truck, but not everything went according to plan…and we’re more involved than you thought.”
“You’re involved with Clementine,” Dad said, almost wonderingly. “Romantically involved?”
“Well…” How was I supposed to tell Dad that the extent of my “romantic” relationship with Sebastian was not much more than angst-filled pining, furious kissing, and our most recent hate sex in the cab of the truck?
“You were involved when he tried to buy the farm?”
“No, I mean yes, I mean…shit.” I rubbed my face as if the physical action would help me unscramble my brains, only vaguely aware that Dad hadn’t said anything about my foul language. “I’m trying to say that yes, I knew him before he came out to the farm that day, and that yes, we were kind of romantically involved, a little bit, but that when he tried to get me to help convince you to sell him the farm, I said no. That I wasn’t involved in that. I had no idea. He made me angry when he told me what he planned to do. I told him to go to hell.”
“That’s my girl.”
I shook my head at Dad, keeping him from saying anything else. “I might’ve told him something different if I had known, at that time, what the real situation here on the farm was.”
“You mean to tell me that you would’ve sided with some stranger against me?” Dad asked, visibly wounded. “Really, Rachel? After everything?”
It broke my heart, but I kept my head high. “Yes, after everything. Because I care about this place. No matter how hard my mother tries to convince me otherwise.”
His face got grayer. “Your mother?”
And with that, the other cat was out of the bad. It didn’t matter anymore. I was ready to just let it all hang out, clear the slate, find some way we could start over and begin moving forward again. I didn’t see a way yet, but maybe it would become apparent soon.
“I emailed her after you gave me her contact information that night,” I told him. “She emailed me back and tried to convince me to leave the farm, saying that I’d never make it anywhere if I stayed. That I’d be forsaking my future. My dreams. My happiness.”
I couldn’t have done more damage to Dad in that moment if I’d conked him over the head with a two-by-four. He looked like he was going to be sick.
“I’m still here, aren’t I?” I asked him gently. “Is that what you want to know? If I thought about leaving?”
“You should go,” he said, his voice weak. “You don’t have to stay here if you don’t want to.”
“That’s the point, Dad. I don’t want to leave. I want to stay here. The farm is my home. I care about it, and I care about you. We have to do something to save it. Anything. What were Sebastian’s terms? What kept you from accepting them? We can negotiate something. He mentioned that you’d still be in charge.”
“We’re not selling the farm to Clementine,” Dad said hoarsely. “Absolutely not. That’s out of the question.”
As much as I hated to admit it, Sebastian had been the only way forward I’d seen. He was actually eager to buy the farm, would probably still be keen on it even if he saw the kind of trouble it was in, and seemed genuinely interested in its mission. And I knew that he’d probably forget about how rude we’d been to him out of outrage and go on with his proposal.
That he was really a good guy, underneath it all.
Maybe I’d made a huge mistake leaving him at that loading dock and telling him that everything was over. One mistake in a long line of many.
I set my shoulders and took a deep breath. “I will transfer my savings
into the farm’s business account,” I said, hoping my tone conveyed that I wasn’t about to entertain any arguments about it. “That won’t dig us completely out, but it might buy us some time. Don’t try to talk me out of it. I’ve already made my decision.”
“What did I say, Rachel?!” Dad shouted, making me flinch. “No! I won’t accept your money!” He slammed his fist hard enough into the wall to punch a hole through the sheetrock, surprising us both. Dad clutched his hand, then his shoulder.
“Did you hurt yourself?” I asked when I could find my voice again. I had never seen Dad raise his hand in anger in my entire life. He expressed his displeasure through sarcasm and outrage, sure, but he was never violent, not even when coaxing one of the dilapidated tractors to work.
Now, though, he cringed at the damage he’d done to the wall, turned back to me, opened his mouth, and collapsed to the floor.
I thought perhaps, at first, that he’d crumpled because of the pain in his hand, at the shock of my many betrayals, the fact that I’d discovered his deepest, darkest secret. I exhaled a heavy sigh and walked around the desk for him, feeling that our roles had been reversed. I was the responsible parent calling out the child, who was having a tantrum on the floor, for doing the incorrect thing. Dad should’ve known better. He should’ve been more honest with me, regarding my choice of colleges. He shouldn’t have gotten sucked into the trap of short-term loans and their sky-high interest rates. He should’ve sold equipment on the farm, or leased part of the land to pay for the bills that he’d started to incur, not take on more debt to try and dig himself out of one hole by jumping into another. These were all things I’d learned in my business classes at my impossibly expensive college experience, all things that Dad apparently didn’t know himself. It hurt my heart to contemplate the idea that I knew more about running this farm than he did. We’d reached a strange crossroads together, me becoming the more knowledgeable individual in this partnership. I’d always felt like I’d continue learning things from Dad about the farm—the right kinds of natural pesticides, the exact time something needed to stay on the branch or vine or stalk or beneath the ground to taste the best—for the rest of my life. What were we doing here now? We were switching roles. I was the one who was fussing at him for messing up whereas it had been the other way around for my entire life up until this point.
“Don’t feel bad, Dad,” I said finally. “Everyone makes mistakes. We’ll get through this one. It’s not the worst thing to ever happen.”
I had no idea what would be worse than what he’d already done to the farm—a decade-long drought, maybe, or a plague of locusts—but I was trying. He was lying on the floor, his head turned away from me, his injured hand still cradled against his chest. I wondered if he’d let me take him to the urgent care center, or if he’d be stubborn and simply wrap his wrist in an improvised bandage. I hoped he hadn’t broken anything in his hand. He’d hit the wall so hard. I glanced up and assessed the hole he’d made, wondering if the entire sheetrock would have to be replaced or if we could just get away with a creative bit of carpentry.
“Dad, come on,” I tried again. “Let’s get you up and get that hand checked out. How are you going to do your chores if you don’t have one of your hands to use? I’ll let you off the hook for dinner tonight, but you’ve got another thing coming if you think I’m going to be the one in charge of the repair for that wall.”
But still nothing. He didn’t even turn to look at me while I was talking. I was just babbling at this point, trying to get a response from him, feeling more and more uncomfortable with each passing second that he didn’t even acknowledge my presence. Maybe he hated me after realizing that I’d been involved with Sebastian and had emailed my mother. I couldn’t help either of those things anymore. There was no use dwelling on the past. It would’ve been like Dad’s thoughts looping around over and over again about my mother leaving. There was no point. She was gone.
“You’d better not be taking a nap,” I joked weakly, taking him by the shoulder and shaking him. His head lolled alarmingly, and I realized with a surge of adrenaline that Dad wasn’t just having a petulant tantrum on the floor. There was something wrong with him—something really wrong.
“Dad?”
I took his head and turned it toward me, and that’s when I realized he wasn’t breathing, his gray face even more ashen, his lips turning blue.
“Dad!”
All of the little things I’d observed starting to add up into one big and terrible understanding—how he’d been out of breath and sweating for nearly our entire confrontation, barely able to stay on his feet, how he’d clutched his arm after punching the wall and collapsed.
He wasn’t ignoring me. I’d wasted precious time not understanding fully what was happening here.
He was having a heart attack. He was dying right here in front of me.
Chapter 12
I held my hand over my heart, trying to time its beats to the beeps of Dad’s heart monitor. His pulse was so slow, but mine fluttered wildly like a caged bird inside of my chest. I’d felt out of breath from the moment I dialed 9-1-1, throughout the excruciating commute into the city, racing behind the wailing ambulance in my truck, and pacing throughout the waiting room while they took Dad into the operating room, put him under the knife, and poked around his heart to see what had stopped its beating.
I could’ve told them.
It was I who stopped it.
My dogged insistence on raking him over the coals over the state of our farm—tanking, as it turned out. My pushing him to sell it, after all, to Sebastian Clementine in order to get out from under the crushing debt Dad had incurred. And the fact that it was my education that had contributed to the debt that piled up on the farm, Dad’s dream, hurt me even deeper. That he hadn’t told me that he couldn’t afford to send me to my dream school to save me the disappointment. That he hadn’t even let me try to take out loans on my own to help pay for it, attempting to spare me the agony of something he knew all too well—interest payments.
Dad was having a heart attack now because of me, because of the things I’d revealed to him in that awful confrontation. That not only had I snooped and discovered evidence of the farm in its last gasps, but that I’d also been romantically involved with Sebastian, whom Dad hated. Sure, the romance was more than over and had been rocky at best, but that didn’t matter. It was enough to wound Dad like this, enough to make whatever channel inside of his heart that had been narrowing clog a little bit more. And maybe it had been the nail in the coffin, so to speak, to tell Dad that I’d been in contact with my mother, the woman who had left us, left behind Dad’s dream in pursuit of her own.
It had all been too much, and all I’d been trying to do was relieve some of my guilty conscience.
This was my fault.
In his tiny room in the intensive care section of the hospital, Dad looked like he was made of tubes more than he was made of flesh. The doctors had let me know, as gently as they could, that the situation right now was tentative, at best. That the reason Dad looked like more tubes than flesh was because machines were conducting the business of his body right now, not him. If it were left up to his body, things would be over right about now.
“You’re going to have to ask yourself some hard questions,” the doctor said. “How long are you willing to leave your father in this state? Is this what he would’ve wanted? Are you willing to let him go naturally, as his body wants to do?”
I’d shaken my head, panicked at this barrage of uncertainties. “We…we never talked about what to do if something like this happened. I don’t even know if he has a will, any wishes about how to do things if this ever took place.”
“Well, you don’t have to make any decisions right now,” the doctor told me, kindly.
That was a relief in the moment, but it didn’t relieve me of the responsibility to figure out what to do. Surely Dad had mentioned in passing his views on the topic of dying, hadn’t he? We’d talked abou
t everything else under the sun—the cycles of crops, the status of the tractor, the families of farmworkers we’d worked with for years and years. Dad’s life had been consumed by the farm, and I realized that was the capacity in which I knew him. He was a farmer, plain and simple, and we hadn’t ever really gone beyond that. No late-night conversations of metaphysical mysteries because we both had to be up in the morning. We never had very much time to talk about anything other than the farm, now that I really got to thinking about it. The farm had been a consuming pastime, a demanding passion, an almost selfish way of making a living. The farm didn’t leave us with weekends or lazy mornings or anything of that nature. It demanded our full attention, all day and every day, from before sunrise to after sunset.
To me, it had seemed like the farm was immortal, like it would always be there, no matter what. It had taken me snooping in the office to discover the opposite—that the farm was fallible, was failing, and we had a limited time with it.
And along with the farm, I’d sort of expected Dad to live forever, too.
I knew that I was old enough to observe things—Dad’s graying hair, for example, or the fine lines on his face deepening, or spots that hadn’t been there before marring his working man’s hands. All of these were signs of change, of the inevitable aging that none of us could escape, no matter how hard we tried. And yet, Dad’s mortality had never crossed my mind. He had been the one constant in my life—besides the farm. He had always been there for me, especially when my mother had elected to leave, and the idea that he would be taken away from me so suddenly was disturbing.
I watched the hills and crevasses mapped on his heart monitor, examined the maze of wires and tubes covering his body, and wondered where Dad was right now. If he was dreaming, I hoped it was a pleasant dream. I hoped he was somewhere on the farm, doing the things he loved the most.
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