Page 12 of Under the Orchard’s Spell

“Hush,” June tells him. “There’s no such thing as a debt between our families. Besides, you’re welcome to stay with us for as long as you need. But Ali here might have alternative lodging for you and I think you’d be perfect for her job. Besides—Oh gosh, Logan, do you mind?”

Despite his mother’s rhythmic rocking, Teddy has let out a bleating wail just as a customer steps up behind me.

Before she’s finished the sentence, though, Logan is tucking his metal-tipped tool away and rounding the stand to take her place. June disappears with a grateful squeeze of his shoulder and the man at the counter orders two apple-blackberry ciders. Logan checks the guy’s ID before pouring out liquid into mason jars. As the customer gathers up his glasses, my eyes graze Logan’s flannel shirt again—the spot where it’s open at the top, and the buttons straining slightly against his broad chest. He looks indecently good. Like he belongs in the October photograph of a wall calendar featuring shirtless lumberjacks and firefighters. Instinctively, I feel guilty for the thought before remembering that I have nothing to be guilty about. More than half a decade of monogamy will do that, I guess.

“So,” Logan says when the customer has cleared off. “Do the pears know you’re drinking that?”

He tips his chin toward my barely touched glass.

I grimace. “Everyone here always tries to force-feed me their fruit like some kind of conversion therapy into a cult of apples.”

Logan presses his lips together like he’s repressing a smile. Then he gently guides the glass off the counter and tips it into a flowering bush by my feet. “Not today, Satan.”

I gape at him. “Surely you don’t have a problem with apples?”

“Never liked them much.”

“Never?” I ask. I have a distinct memory of Logan balancing an apple on his knee, eyebrows drawn together as his pencil furiously worked over his sketchbook. When he finished, he tipped the page toward me with a bashful smile. And maybe this was teenage hormones, but I remember thinking it was a masterpiece. Logan might not have had expensive paints, canvases, or a dedicated workspace, but he could draw out shadows and light with nothing more than ink and paper, like a window to another world.

He considers for a beat. “I guess there was a time I felt differently.”

“And you changed your mind? But you’re from Apple Valley. Negative opinions about apples are pretty much blasphemous.”

“Says the woman who called them cultish.”

“Right, but I hate apples for good reason, like lifelong bias imbued by five generations of pear farming.”

Logan’s lips twitch and I try not to be too pleased with myself. “Tell me. June said something about lodging and a job?”

I sense movement by my shoulder and find another customer—this time a woman in a comically wide sun hat. Logan pauses our conversation to card her, too, and remains impassive as she huffs and makes a big show of fishing out her wallet.

I’m grateful for the moment to organize my thoughts—in particular about asking Logan Wright to move into my farmhouse and pick fruit in exchange.

Of course, my brain hijacks the moment to replay memories instead. The smell of late-summer pears as Logan and I wandered through the trees, fingers braided together. A kiss while pressed against the barn doors. Lounging on the moss by the south-side creek, Logan’s sketchbook flung open in the grass, our bare feet trailing eddies through clear water.

The goodbye that felt like I was carving my heart in two.

The phone calls that started out raw but eventually succumbed to silence.

“Ali?” I look up to find Logan leaning a corded forearm on the counter, customers gone.

I have to decide whether I’ll ask him. There’s a clear answer, though. As Val has bluntly put it, I need another picker. Logan might be available. And so, even though this could end in familiar disaster, I need to try.

“I don’t know if you know this,” I say, “but I inherited my uncle’s orchard. Moved onto it earlier this year.”

“I didn’t.” His chin dips. “I did hear we’d lost him.”

My shoulders rise as I wait for Logan to fire off one of the statements posing as questions that have become familiar over the last few months.

He didn’t even tell me he was sick.

It must have happened so fast.

I heard no one in town was invited to the funeral.

Instead, though, I hear Logan say, “He was a good man.” I nod, jaw clenched, as my chest pulls tight—that old ache rising again when I try to think about my uncle in the past tense.

“He might not have been around much in the final years, but his death was a huge loss for the valley,” I find myself saying. It’s easier to recite the lines I’ve taught myself than to give voice to anything deeper. “My uncle’s legacy will outlive him for generations.”