Page 66 of Under the Orchard’s Spell

Val swallows hard and her gaze goes distant. “She sure was.”

In half explanation she adds, “That’s how Martin got on this whole idea the first time. When Nora left, everything went haywire. Cold frosts, colors draining out of the leaves. A few years of crops so thin we barely thought we’d survive to the next season. Martin took all that real hard. Got convinced it was connected.” She sighs heavily. “Maybe he was right though. Maybe it wasn’t just the shock of her leaving.”

I glance at the family portrait hanging above the old, cast-iron radiator. Mom’s standing off to the side. A picking bag weighs her shoulders, and she has her hands on her hips, lips pinched. That photo isn’t an aberration. In fact, I can’t think of one in this house where Mom doesn’t look tense or withdrawn.

“I thought she hated it here,” I say.

“I suppose she did,” Val says, expression curiously blank as she swirls wine around in her glass. “For the most part.”

“And my dad was only in Apple Valley for a short time.”

Here, I’m certain Val’s eyes flash. “Yup. Probably the reason she wanted him in the first place.”

I blink. “Like she married him for a ticket out of town?”

Val rubs at the back of her neck, the spot where her short hair fades into skin. “No. Forget I said that. She loved him all right. I’m sure of that. But she was looking for an escape, and your dad was everything that Apple Valley wasn’t. Educated, a traveler. He walked into our town with that big camera and an even bigger smile, started taking pictures and asking questions like he already had us all figured out and he’d be ready to get on out of here by Tuesday.”

This is the most I’ve ever heard Val—or Martin for that matter—talk about my dad. When I was a kid, they both acted like they knew nothing about him, and I had no reason to question it. But that wouldn’t be right. He was in Apple Valley for at least a few months, working on that photo series, before my mom left with him. They all must have met at least a few times.

“It sounds like you didn’t like him.”

She presses her lips even tighter. “I don’t want you to take that from it. He was your father and you didn’t even get to know him. All I’m trying to say is that I can see why he was appealing to Nora.”

“So, you couldn’t have been surprised she left.”

Val reaches across the table to grab the wine bottle again, leaving new fingerprints against the dust. She swirls her freshened glass a few times before taking another swallow. “In retrospect, I guess not. But at the time, it was a shock. Nora was always supposed to take over, you see. Was groomed for it from the beginning. She might have been—well, she might have been Nora, but that’s just it. How she was. Never one to make a fuss. She had high standards. And she took the work seriously. The land listened to her, too.”

There’s a distant, maybe begrudging kind of admiration in Val’s voice. I think about Mom patiently clipping at dried buds or measuring lukewarm water into one of her brass watering cans. “She was a good orchardist.”

Val nods. “Very. Your grandmother—I always called her Mrs. Reid—always said her daughter was born with two green thumbs and a green pinky, although she still watched over Nora’s shoulder like one of them might fall off. The woman was devastated when your mom left. She had lost her daughter, but also, I think she knew what the land was losing, too. What this meant for her legacy. She threatened to come after your father with her shotgun, even though Nora was legally drinking age by then, and there was nothing to do about it. Then she pulled out about six fistfuls of hair and screamed herself hoarse every night for a month.”

My eyebrows tick up. “Dramatic.”

But Val’s shaking her head, as though clearing the memories. “That’s how your grandmother was. High highs and low lows. Anyway, Mrs. Reid probably wasn’t wrong to be worried.” Val’s eyes flash before she brusquely moves forward. “I never would have breathed a word of this to Martin when he was alive, but Nora would’ve kept this place running smooth as clockwork, even with all the bad luck piling up. She wouldn’t have gotten distracted with some specialty irrigation system or a fancy new tractor. But it’s not a fair judgment, I guess. Martin wasn’t the one raised to be in charge.”

“Why was she the one?” I ask. Mom’s life on the orchard wasn’t something she ever talked much about, despite my many attempts at asking. “If she didn’t seem to like it.”

Val lifts a shoulder. “She was the oldest. Mrs. Reid saw it like I did—Nora was damn good at growing things. And Mrs. Reid was a hard woman to impress.”

“But that can’t have been all,” I say, “if it was always planned that way.”

“Well,” Val concedes, “I think it’s also ’cause Nora was the daughter from Mrs. Reid’s first marriage. The one who died. ‘The soulmate,’ she called him, even after she remarried. None of the others lived up.”

My eyebrow ticks. I hadn’t put my grandmother’s long list of ex-husbands on the list of people who have left the orchard, but it certainly fits the pattern. “Was that the curse at work, too? My grandmother’s husbands?”

“That was Martin’s theory, yeah. And there were others, too. In those years when he started shutting himself up here, he went looking farther back in the family tree. Turns out every Reid who farmed this land—starting with your great-great-grandfather Ransom, who lost his wife in childbirth—died here alone.” She rubs at her forehead. “I sbould’ve listened to him when he told me all that.”

My breath stills as her words sink in. Cursed to solitude. Cursed to die alone.

“And every time a husband left, the magic acted up? Like when my mom did?”

“Right. Things were always weird around here when we were kids, but when a husband was out of here, it all got worse. Big swings in weather. New pests coming and going. Noises at night that we couldn’t always explain.”

“But no crystal pears.”

“Not that I know of, no, but it wasn’t like that for Martin, either, after—” She cuts herself off with an aggressive swig of wine.

“Subtle,” I say.