“Happiness becomes you,” he said. “You are happy, yes? You’re not coming down with a fever.”
She laughed. “I knew there was something.”
“Yes, something.” He pressed his hand flat against her chest, what beat there, and time passed the way it seemed to now that they were together: right by them.
* * *
The garden was a tyrant, and they lived off it. Tomatoes, the reddest she had ever seen, their stalks twined up the cages Tim had built from galvanized wire. The peas were gone now, but Tim had planted radishes beneath the lettuces so that they might be shaded longer into the summer; each plant provided something for the other. Eggplants and peppers and squash, tents of beans, they were good for the soil. Basil and chives, a few melons, potatoes for the fall and keeping. And down the terrace, espaliered apples and pears that had fruited for decades, farther down the grapes, all this lushness, and then the wide blue stretch of the lake, a plate of glass.
Mary Frances stepped into the rows with her basket, pulling down what was ripe, Tim behind her, tying stalks back, turning the crumbs of their eggshells into the soil. The sun was hot on their necks, their shoulders brown, fingernails ragged and stained.
Tim said, “A child. A widow would long for a child.”
And Mary Frances’s hand stilled in the vines for just a moment, her head already nodding but a kind of alchemy taking place inside her. A child.
“She could marry again,” she said. “Someone with children.”
“Someone who already had them.”
She couldn’t see Tim in the mass of green behind her, but she could hear the rasp of his fork in the ground. He was thinking now about how that would work, about the novel, the man their widow might meet and how they would meet and why. And in that silence, her mind flashed across the baby Al had wanted and how even that had gotten smeared between the three of them: Al wanting the baby but not the thing they had to do to get one, Mary Frances wanting Tim. She could examine it now; she could talk about it with him. They talked about everything, sometimes folded inside other things, but still. Light reached all corners, now that it was just the two of them.
Her basket was full of tomatoes and beans; she would need to can some for the winter. Their last trip up the mountain to the orphanage in Fribourg, the car was overflowing with zucchini, leafy bundles of chard, carrots. They could not eat enough to keep up.
“What about the orphanage?” she said. “Perhaps she goes to an orphanage for a child?”
She stood and pressed her hands to the small of her back, arching; she looked around for Tim, but he had gone inside.
* * *
The bed in Tim’s room was wide and white. From there, she could look out the window toward the lake, and afternoons when he was painting, sometimes she would come to his door and drop her muddy pants, stretching out full on her stomach, her round white behind an invitation. She counted in French the seconds it took for him to cross the room. He pushed the back of her shirt up, over her head, away. He pressed against her. He did anything he liked, his canvases stacked against the walls again: his home, their home, together.
“For the first time in my life,” he said, “I regret not being able to father a child.”
Her forehead pressed into the sheets. The talk about their widow had brought this on, another thing they’d made together. She felt a vibrant new potential open inside her, not for some tangible baby, but the desire they carried for each other, their constant want taking shape.
“Say it again,” she said.
“I would have liked to have a child with you.”
Not everything was possible, but they had learned how want was a powerful thing.
The first hints of fall came in the night, the chill they closed the windows against, the extra blanket they drew across Tim’s bed. In the pasture, the asters bloomed, the grapes ripened, the tart apples and pears, the last vegetables pressed for their seed. Then it was time to rake things clean, to turn the soil so that in spring they might start again.
Mary Frances needed a divorce.
“You can send for it,” Tim said. “It’s a piece of paper and travels quite easily. Much more easily than you, in fact.”
She pulled the quilt around their shoulders and studied his face in the firelight. “I want to see the children. I want to arrange for Norah and David to visit us here.”
“And Anne?”
“Oh, Anne.” Mary Frances felt a stab of something in her guts. “Anne will have plenty to say to me, I’m sure. And Rex, and Edith. I want to get it all over with, face to face and then be done.”
Tim pushed her back against the pillows, his hand skating along the flat of her belly. She breathed out.
“And back here to you,” she said.
He dropped his mouth to her skin. “Ah, Mary Frances. What could I do to make you stay?”
And all night long, he tried.
But after Christmas she took a train to Cherbourg, and a ship out. As soon as she lost sight of land, she knew she’d made a mistake. Out in the world, time passed in the usual way; she felt her guilts and regrets, the things she wished had happened differently, as though she’d left the shell of herself back there with Tim and now she was only jelly. She would be gone for the short, dark days of winter at Le Paquis: their rest, the rhythm of their work together, their long nights. What had she been thinking?
* * *
In New York, it was a matter of signing her name where the notary indicated.
“Is it still mine?” she asked. “The Fisher. Or does it go back?”
He shrugged; this was just his job. “You bought and paid for it, I guess.”
His bright blue necktie lolled against the desk as he leaned over her. He pointed to another line, and she signed “MFK Fisher,” again and again.
* * *
It took three days to get to California, but still it felt as though the Kennedys were not quite ready when she arrived. Rex was busy at the paper with another change in editorial staff, and Edith was fluttery, dithering, older than their last visit in Paris. The children were not yet home from school. Mary Frances told herself she’d wait to tell everyone at once about the divorce, get it over with and be done.
But whatever she once would have busied herself with seemed lost to her now. She didn’t want to bake or can or listen to Edith’s gossip about town; she remembered trips from their house in Eagle Rock to the Ranch when she had first been married to Al — it had always been a whirlwind of activity. Perhaps she had made it so, not wanting to sit too long and think about her life away from home. Now her comforts were shifting.
She took long drives in Rex’s coupe, into the city, out to the ocean. She’d heard that Gigi and John Weld were living back in Laguna, that they had married and bought the newspaper there. Gigi had changed her name: she was Katy now. Mary Frances asked at the post office where she might find their house.
It was a big, sprawling house covered in weathered cedar shake, the yard filled with juniper and purple sage, maybe other things like bicycles or toys; Mary Frances hadn’t even considered the possibility that Gigi might have a family now. When she appeared on the porch, her hand shielding her eyes from the sun, she was still beautiful, still young.
“Mary Frances?” Gigi’s face opened. “Hello! What a surprise.”
“I’m sorry to just show up.” Mary Frances smiled but did not get out of the car. She looked up the lane to where it met the coast highway, as though she were still driving. “I’m not in town for long.”
“Come have a drink. John’s at the paper. It’s just me. Come inside.”