* * *
During those early years with Forster, she drank deeply from the well of their marriage, a balance of belonging and being needed, and she didn’t miss the life she had turned her back on. Except for her books. The sorrow of abandoning domesticity turned to relief. She felt her whole being expand with the freedom of spending her days outdoors.
Forster teased that she would try to read a novel during childbirth if she could. He was about right because it was her only free time. As if observing another person’s life, she looked back to the time of school and books, working in her father’s store and reading away the long, idle afternoons, as meaningless now in the hard struggle of daily survival they faced. Her parents stopped asking her when she would return to college to finish her degree. A heresy to them that a course in soil science would have been more useful than one in English literature. But farming was so rich in the present that it was a chore to consider the abstractions of a book.
In turn, she joked that Forster rested from working out in the orchards by dreaming of working out in the orchards. As the summer worn on, he grew thin and then thinner. When light-headedness took him to the doctor, stress was blamed. The doctor prescribed rest, a vacation, which was about as impossible to ask for as telling a bird to not fly. Claire tried not to show how scared she was. Despite their differences in temperament, the rigors of the work, she still felt a fierce passion for her husband that was returned. Escaping during the night, Forster and she would sneak out to the barn to make love in the loft, their only place of privacy, the slatted moonlight striping their bodies in silver. Life without him was impossible to contemplate.
She would take more on herself, try to keep the worst from him. She took Octavio aside, told him to give the bad news only to her. The foreman wondered if she understood the burden she was taking on.
* * *
One afternoon, while Claire fed Joshua on the back porch, Hanni came and set down a cup of tea. Roles had reversed, Claire more and more assuming the role of matriarch.
“I worry,” Hanni stated.
Claire noticed the stoop in her back as she sat down. When had she grown old? “About?” Now Hanni’s abrupt style of speaking was her own.
“We’re losing money. It can’t go on.”
“Yes,” Claire said carefully, wondering why Hanni had come to her, not her son, for this conversation.
“I can hardly say it aloud … should you talk to him about selling?”
“Why not talk to him yourself?”
“He’s too proud,” Hanni said, the usual mix of arrogance and humbleness. “You’re not.”
* * *
Claire could have gone to Mrs. Girbaldi, who understood money, but Hanni was wrong — Claire was too proud to admit their financial difficulties outside the family. After a sleepless night, Claire came up with a plan. Hanni and she fed the girls, gave Josh his bottle, then told Forster they were going into town to shop. Sofia came to babysit.
“Don’t spend all my money.” Forster grinned, but strain was in his eyes. He went on his way to the fields with Octavio.
Instead of shopping, the women went to the bank. The family only had checking and savings accounts; everything else was paid in cash, no credit cards. Feeling out of place, they stood clutching their purses at the counter and asked the teller if they could speak to a loan officer. Once they gave their name, a secretary appeared and shuttled them upstairs to a mahogany-lined office. The president of the bank, Mr. Relicer, a neurasthenic man in an expensive black suit, came in drying his hands with a paper towel. He moved sideways, crablike, around his deep desk, stooping with a small, curtsying bob.
“I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you yet. I wasn’t invited to the wedding. What’s it been? Six years?”
“Eight.” Claire shook his hand, his nervous dampness causing her to pull away and wipe her palm along the side of her dress.
“Coffee?” he said, but when she looked up, his eyes were not on her but on the secretary. She realized it wasn’t a choice but an order. “Hold my calls. Baumsarg. I consider myself a bit of a Germanophile. The name means ‘coffin wood.’ In the Bronze Age, they fashioned a coffin out of a tree trunk. Strange, is it not?”
Hanni coughed and stared out the window behind him. No help. She had gone away to that high ground of Baumsarg mulishness.
“We’re considering taking out a loan for farm improvements,” Claire said.
“Very wise idea, Mrs. Baumsarg.” The address confused Claire, thinking at first he was addressing Hanni.
“Please call me Claire. It would be a temporary thing. We should earn out enough extra to pay it back within a couple of seasons.”
Mr. Relicer shrugged as if the fact were inconsequential, as if he were a dear family friend that they had never known they had.
“What amount are we talking about?” he said softly.
Now it seemed as if he were their doctor, and they were navigating the gory details of some wasting disease. “I’m not sure just yet…” she said, looking at Hanni for help.
He scribbled something down on a notepad in front of him. “Consider the request, within reason, a blank check. We are very interested in having the Baumsarg family as a client.”
“Surely you aren’t going to advertise the fact?”
They both laughed, he a little too loudly. She noted that he didn’t answer.
Hanni stood up as the secretary came in to lay down a coffee service. “Where’s the bathroom?” she demanded.
“This way,” the secretary said. Hanni bolted without a word to either of them.
“Banks make her nervous.”
“Why would that be?” They remained silent for the duration of his pouring the coffee. He scooped a heaping spoonful of sugar into his cup, stirred vigorously, the spoon making an annoying clink against the side. If he had been her child, Claire would have reached over and stilled his hand.
“I’m glad to have this moment in private,” he said, and Claire flushed, feeling as if she were committing some vague infidelity. “The Baumsarg place is such a gem. I drive by it on my way to work each morning. I live in the development down the highway, Pepper Tree Estates?”
Claire nodded, noncommittal. Thank God Hanni was in the bathroom. Old man Fuller had sold off his ranch years ago, and the developer turned it into the hated tract housing of Pepper Tree Estates. The locals all tried to drive another route so as not to pass by it. A faux-rustic sign of defeat. Fuller had made a fortune, retired to Montana, and now raised buffalo as a hobby. They bad-mouthed Fuller, but they also knew he had caved to the inevitable.
“It’s just wrong, to me, to not leverage such a valuable asset.”
“I think we need to get more automated, farm on a bigger scale.” Claire drank her coffee, her hand shaky. It had been a mistake to come alone. Relicer probably thought Forster was too proud and had sent her, that they were already that desperate.
“Maybe it took someone new, fresh blood, to take initiative. To unlock the value of the place.”
“Write down your terms,” Claire said. Her head had started to pound. Hanni was making her way through the door. “We better be going.”
“What about your coffee? I have some chocolates from Switzerland I’d like to share.”
She felt that every extra minute in that office was costing them some exorbitant percentage of interest. “So kind, but we’re wanted back. Young children, you know how it is.”
“I understand.” He stood at his desk and studied her a moment. “I’ll have papers drawn up for a simple line of credit. The farm appraised as collateral. I’d be glad to drop by with the papers on my way home. For Mr. Baumsarg’s signature. Since we’re neighbors.”