Claire’s heart beat faster. Here was a proof of her version of a handsome, moody island boy whom Minna had left behind. Or had she left him? When Claire later told her about the call, she jumped from the table and ran to her room, slamming the door.
* * *
Claire lost her appetite from the radiation, but it could also have been caused by the debilitating heat that kept them supine much of the day. Minna ate little more than she did, but as Claire lost weight, she gained it.
“What’s wrong?” Claire asked at Minna’s lackluster attempt to push the mop across the floor.
“Too much to do,” she said, snapping the conversation abruptly off.
“No one’s here to see the floors,” Claire said, but in truth Minna already did little. The floors, and everything else, had remained untouched for a long while. The saving grace was the lack of witnesses to the disorder. They seemed to have discouraged visitors to the point that Claire had not talked with Mrs. Girbaldi since the girls left the last time. Once Claire thought she saw her friend’s car in the driveway, but by the time she dressed and made her way downstairs, the car was gone.
“Who was that?” she asked.
“Someone lost.”
“But it looked like Mrs. Girbaldi’s car.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Minna said.
* * *
That was another new theme of Minna’s — disavowal of anything having to do with responsibility. The lack of dinner on the table, Octavio’s quitting, the filthy kitchen, Claire’s losing weight — Minna denied fault for any part of it. She acted the role of disinterested guest at a hotel going to ruin.
“The oranges need picking. We need a foreman,” Claire said.
“I know that,” Minna said.
“How long has it been?” Claire would spend a long, passive week somnolent, then wake up, driven and anxious by all she saw going wrong. The week deadline had passed into a month. Forster and she had shouting matches on the phone.
“Then do something about it!” Claire snapped.
* * *
Now she avoided Forster’s calls because her guilt was overwhelming. Each day that passed made her feel a further constriction. The effects of the neglect were unavoidable: weeds crowding the driveway, dry cracks in the fields. Claire knew she would have to pull herself together. Yet how to explain that as soon as she relaxed her vigilance, she felt this deep pleasure in the moment, that as each former necessity was stripped away, it revealed itself to have been at some level less necessary than she had thought. As if weighted chains were being lifted off her. She knew she would have to return to the everyday, but for now she delayed.
“You’re too sick to be worrying about such nonsense,” Minna replied to her complaints.
“Forster offered to help.”
“Why can’t you wait till I’m ready?”
“The trees don’t wait. Fruit doesn’t wait.”
“You want me to do this, you want me to do that. I’m only one person. Who’s going to make your dinner?”
* * *
Finally Forster demanded they go out to lunch alone.
When Minna heard, she threatened to unplug the phone.
“What good would that do?” Claire asked. “He can drive over. He’s insisting on a foreman. He’s in the right, of course.”
Minna pouted and claimed that what with the radiation appointments in the morning and all the work in the house, she hadn’t had time to contact her cousin.
At noon, Forster’s truck pulled off the road and started up the driveway. Claire rushed to find shoes, wanting to avoid his seeing the state of things, or, worse, meeting up with Minna.
They reached the porch steps at the same time.
“What the hell is this?” Forster said. She saw anger in him she didn’t remember since long before. Claire had worried about his coming inside, seeing the chaos there, but now she looked with his eyes at the surrounding farm and saw the secret was out. She was astonished at the speed of the disrepair and disintegration.
Fruit lay rotting in the fields; the hot, melting sun tainted the air with a sweet, decaying smell. Weeds, dried to crackling, spread out between the trees, along the driveway, up through the bricks of the patio. On the porch, books and dishes wantonly covered the outdoor table, the swing, the chairs. Minna had left a blanket and book spread on the lawn weeks ago, and the regular waterings from the sprinklers had bloated the book into another kind of obscene, overripe fruit, past the point of reading. The blanket lay stiff and faded as a remnant on a battlefield.
Forster stalked the front of the house, his face broken into a sweat unrelated to the heat. His gaze searched in each direction as if he were expecting a gun to ring out, a ghost to appear. Claire wanted to laugh and shake him, wanted to say, Don’t you realize that everything bad has already happened?
“Let’s go,” she said.
The cab of the truck was as chilled as the hospital, and Claire greedily aimed the vents at her face while Forster walked around and got in.
“What the hell is going on?”
“Wait till we get to the restaurant. I don’t want to talk here.”
“You’re looking good,” he said.
“I look like hell. Let’s eat.”
He chuckled. “Thank God you still sound like yourself.” He drove east, away from town, to where it still felt like open, rural farmland. They passed the white clapboard church they were married in. Claire had not been this way in a long time and was surprised that the windows were boarded up, the parking lot chained closed, the church announcement board cracked and dirty. The letters, crooked and falling, only suggested an old and long-ago invitation:
We are people of God’s extravagant welcome.
“What happened?” she asked.
Forster, lost in thought, looked over. “They sold the church. It’s going to be demo-ed for a retirement community.”
“How sad.”
“That’s the way things are going. Whether you hold on to that scrap of land or not.”
“That scrap of land was our life.”
They ended up in a chain restaurant in a strip mall. After iced teas were brought, Forster cut the small talk and got down to business, a trait that she used to find endearing and now found brutal.
“I don’t know what’s going on between you and that girl…”
“That girl’s name is Minna. What’s going on is I’m trying to not die of cancer.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“Bad luck, having to replace Octavio. You of all people know how it is. No one is with you forever.” She was determined to not let Forster see how guilty she felt.
“Running the place is a full-time job even when times are good.”
“What do you expect?”
“The farm’s legally still half mine. You’re running it into the ground.”
“Minna knows an expert foreman.”
“What the hell would she know about running a farm? I’m concerned. More about you than the farm, but it’s the same thing, isn’t it?”
Claire picked at the club sandwich she’d ordered. No chance that she could eat it. She’d have survived for a week on that sandwich alone: one day eating the bread, the next the tomato, the turkey. Later on, if she needed, gnawing on the bacon. She had learned to deconstruct life to its basic components.
“Are you listening to me?”
“Yes.” She had drifted, something she now was in the habit of doing.
“Do it, or it’ll be done for you.”
“Is that a threat?”
“If it was, I’d already have hired an attorney. Forced sale. You wouldn’t have a chance in court. I’m trying to be gentle here.”
For the first time, Claire got scared. They ate in silence.