1

Jasper leaned on the tailgate next to his boss, a framing contractor named Roads, the kind of guy who’d hire you back on the spot after you quit for two years. Roads dabbled in philosophy and every now and then mushrooms and Jasper had once heard him talk about a meditation thing called a dark retreat. So it was no surprise when Roads said that the demons worth battling were your own. It’s a waste of your energy to walk a mile in your ex’s mud-crusted boots, he said. Just to give an example. Anyway, for sure bad for your personal sanity. To this, Jasper replied: I can’t help it. I get carried away. He stood and hiked up his jeans. Alright then, the boss said. Jasper sat down again and took the proffered beer.

 

2

 

The ladybug nymphs were hatching in the hoop house. They crawled out from under the ranunculus heads onto Kate’s hands as she worked. She brought a bucket of the blooms up to the flower shed and began assembling bouquets rapidly. Jasper appeared at the crest of the hill outside the window. He had that kind of lean long face you wanted to keep looking at even after you decided it wasn’t handsome. Today she would finally tell him the two things she’d been keeping secret. That she loved him beyond anything she’d ever thought possible, and also that she needed (could she use that word, needed?) to have sex with people who were not him.

            She finished assembling a sample bride’s crown—sweet pea, willow shoots—and framed it in her phone’s camera. Jasper came through the door and looked over her shoulder at the screen. “Brighter than life,” he said.

            She applied a different filter, then leaned back into him. “Who wouldn’t want life brighter?” she said. And then, “Jeez, listen to me.”

            “Lady Insta,” he said.

            “This is the lady who rattled your bones last night.”

            “True,” he said. “It was good.”

            She slipped out of his arms and faced him.

            “It was,” she said, slapping his chest with each syllable, “Fan-tas-tic.”

Across the field, a lamb started bleating. Kate turned back to the bouquets. “Lots to do,” she said. “We’ve got market tomorrow. Ellie and Owen are coming to look at some arrangements this afternoon. Two weddings next weekend.” Without even glancing at him she could feel Jasper sour at the mention of Ellie and Owen.

“We’ll get it done,” he said. "Do you want to have that chat?”

            “Now?” She squeezed a pink petal, smearing it on her fingertips. Every time there was a chance for them to talk, she couldn’t bring herself to tell him. The lamb got louder. The Saint Croix sheep were Jasper’s project. Breckinridge Farm—flowers and meat. The land was owned by Kate’s parents, four hundred acres of Virginia hills between the Alleghenies and the Blue Ridge. “Will you go check on that lamb?” she asked.

            He kissed her again and went out of the flower shed.

            “Jas wait,” she called after him. He turned back. It was just over three years since she’d returned to Craig County from Seattle. Almost as soon as she unpacked she’d sent him a DM. The old spark caught and within the month he’d quit framing houses for Blue Ridge Construction and was helping her put up the greenhouses. Before she knew what she’d done they were selling flowers to weddings and shops from Rockbridge to Floyd. This fall, they would truck the second batch of ram lambs to be processed. “Sister-in-law just texted,” she told him. “Riley’s hiding out again. Skipping school.”

            “That girl,” Jasper said, grinning. Riley was Kate’s niece, her brother, Spencer’s daughter, just old enough to walk down the long driveway herself, past her grandparents’ house to the bus stop on Haymakertown Road. “I bet I know where she’s at,” Jasper said.

            “Oh, and my dad wants your help with a downed tree today.”

            “No problem,” he said. “Let’s have that talk soon. You’ve almost got me worried.”

            She felt a jab of guilt, which almost instantaneously transformed into something else. She came down the steps into the grass and stood on her toes and kissed him. When he tried to say something she pressed harder and then he pressed harder and finally he picked her up over his shoulder and carried her back into the shed. He pulled her shirt up and kissed her ribs, getting each one. He had a methodical way of fucking. There was a steady, almost lordly rhythm to the progression of each act. She believed this had something to do with his upbringing. The way he’d pretty much had to raise himself.

 

3

By the time she was outside again the morning glories on the side of the barn had closed their throats. A sprinkler clicked on inside one of the hoop houses, making that heavy sound on the plastic. Jasper had grown up in the same area Kate’s father had, out near Potts Mountain, in a rundown house on two acres. His parents had operated a dog kennel out of the back yard until they got shut down for animal neglect. In middle school Jasper had gone to live full time with his grandfather, who soon struggled to remember his grandson’s name.

            She always tried to keep that in mind when he desired her less often than she desired him. It excused him, she thought. She didn’t pity him, though. He had come out of his upbringing strong and kind. And these last few weeks excuses hadn’t been necessary. She wondered if maybe they could keep it going forever, putting off the conversation, riding the magic. She ducked into the hoop house. The air was dense with the smell of wet soil. It still amazed her, the little universe they had created here, the wonderful insanity of the vision, and also its maddening incompleteness. She wanted more of it all. More tulips, more lambs, more dirt turned over on itself.

She worked down a row, nestling lisianthus seedlings into their new homes. When she was done, she went to the barn and started up the old Massey-Ferguson tractor and drove out across the field. Along the far edge of the lake fog lingered in the loblollies. A blue heron took off from the shallows as she rumbled past. Why, she wondered, had this thing pushed to the surface now, of all times, when everything else in her life was settled just the way she wanted? She engaged the PTO and began to till a new row along an existing plot, the churn of the soil behind the machine predictable in its turbulence.

            She’d read scripts modeling the conversation. She’d read unending advice on polyamory sites and social media posts. They had clever headings like: “Being open about being open” and “Taking the plunge with your anchor partner.” None of it soothed her impatience. It was all so insistently practical, as if desire could be planned and partitioned. The writers of those blogs had never read The Awakening or Anna Karenina. They didn’t understand that love wasn’t just about satisfaction. And then also, admittedly, there was this to explain her impatience: the thing she most wanted to know was infuriatingly absent from all the material. How could she make sure Jasper would say yes?

            Coming back across the row the tiller hit a patch of stubborn soil and the Massy stalled. She got off the tractor and stood next to it, sweating. In the sunlight, the windows of her big brother’s house winked from the top of the hill. Her brother was a real estate developer who bought and renovated old industrial buildings in Roanoke, dividing them into sprawling “lofts.” Kate could see Jasper making his way toward their front door, carrying her niece on his shoulders. He was singing loudly, a song about crawdads. God he loved that song. To this day he woke up sometimes with it in his head:

You get a line, I'll get a pole
We'll go down to the crawdad hole
 

Back then he and Riley had spent hours together counting all the creatures on the property—crawdads, otters, bull frogs, even toadstools. Four otters meant rain. Seven sparrows was a secret the adults could never know—

Kate’s phone buzzed in her pocket. She left the tractor where it was and took a shortcut back to the house, across the creek and up through the beech forest. Ellie and Owen were waiting in the driveway outside the cabin.   

            “Hey-o,” Owen said, shaking her hand, his rings and bracelets clicking. He would have been too-typically handsome if not for the tattoos and gauged ears. Ellie held her patchwork skirt bunched at her hip while she one-arm hugged Kate, thanking her profusely for having them out to the farm. She had a womanly figure that Kate envied and a face that while plain in the flesh became magnetic in photographs. Ellie introduced her younger brother, Lyle, a tall college-aged boy with a swipe of acne across his jaw. He’d be Owen’s best man at the upcoming wedding.

            Kate had met the couple last month at the Roanoke Farmer’s Market. Ellie posted a picture of one of Kate’s daffodil bundles, quickly doubling the number of Breckinridge Farm’s followers. The couple had moved to the area from Richmond to embrace what they called “slow living," which meant selling folksy women’s clothing for outrageous prices via social media and documenting in excruciating detail Owen’s renovation of a log cabin down in Floyd County.

            “Should we check out some flowers?” Ellie said, brightly. 

            “Congratulations you two,” Kate said. “Are you so stoked?”

            They giggled and Owen squeezed Ellie. They followed Kate around the Canary Cabin. The younger brother hung back taking pictures on a surfboard-sized cellphone, shading his eyes to see the screen in the sun. “He’s documenting today,” Ellie whispered to Kate. “Owen and I take I don’t know how many pictures of each other but we almost never have any together. Do you mind?”

            “Course not,” Kate said, squeezing Ellie’s free hand.

            The flower shed was a mess of petals and wire and buckets.

            “Look at this place,” Ellie said. “Step on my face it’s so… lush.”

            “Farm life!” Owen exclaimed.  

            Ellie and Owen were rank posers. It had taken Jasper all of two minutes to see that.

But Kate believed that Ellie had an eye for putting together idiosyncratic outfits that were also rather sexy. And she was flattered by their interest in her farm and the way they said Appalachian like it was something holy. Despite the bracelets, Owen was a skilled carpenter. Kate had shown her father a picture of some detail work he’d done on a banister, and Big Dave had grunted and nodded, which was more approval than he ever showed for anything Kate did.  

            “I’ll give you the short spiel before we look at some arrangements,” Kate told her friends. She grew all of her own blooms beyond organic, she explained. The flower industry had a huge carbon footprint and then there was the matter of pesticides, and she was working against all that. But then also she wanted to be upfront with them about the limitations of the hyper local model in terms of bloom type and color palate.

            Ellie’s brother framed up a picture. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m not very good at this.”

            Kate showed them different bridal crowns: sweet pea, tulip bud, honey suckle. She pressed an experimentally colorful bouquet into Ellie’s hands. She held a boutonniere she’d made from a fiddlehead and a bluebell up to Owen’s breast. “Awesome,” he said. He turned to Ellie: “What do you think?”

            “Absolutely lovely,” she said. And then: “I wonder if maybe we might want to do something more traditional.” She pointed to the bucket of white and pink ranunculus that Kate had cut that morning. “What about those?” She grabbed Kate’s hand and brought it up to kiss it. “I’m sorry to be one of those brides! But they look almost like roses.”

            “Don’t apologize,” Kate said. Ellie’s seashell lips lingered on her knuckles. She felt slighted over the bouquet and at the same time she savored the moment. Ellie’s breath tickled the small hairs on her arm. She allowed herself a moment to fantasize about sleeping with both of them at the same time. In the fantasy, it happened with Jasper’s permission, of course.

            “Are you getting this, Lyle?” Ellie said, still holding the pose.

            But Lyle was gone from the doorway, and Jasper was standing there in his place. His hair was slicked down on his forehead and there was sawdust stuck to the sweat stain on his t-shirt. Abruptly, Kate wanted so much not to want this thing, this disgusting thing.                   

The idea had grown, cruelly over the last two years, at almost precisely the same pace as her love for Jasper. And then, this spring, without warning, around the time the redbuds bloomed, it had become more than an idea. She’d done six weddings since March and each one had made things infinitely worse. The strong tendril of the need had begun to rearrange her organs. It had fixed itself to her sacrum so that wishing it away was like wishing for a new body. It was selfishness that caused it, she knew. The heroines in her favorite novels had lived lives circumscribed by men. She’d had opportunity upon opportunity. Jasper was the one who had suffered. She knew all this, and it changed exactly nothing.  

            “Good to see you,” Jasper said to Owen. The two men shook hands, Owen’s bracelets jangling.

            “Your dad sent me to get the tractor,” he said to Kate. 

            “You guys are so hot,” Ellie said.

            Owen clapped Jasper on the back. “It’ll be y’all’s turn before you know it,” he said.

            “Owen!” Ellie said. “You can’t just say everything you think.”

            Kate watched Jasper carefully, shading her eyes.

            “The courthouse isn’t moving,” Jasper said. “We could stroll down there anytime.”

            Kate grabbed his arm and pulled herself against him. “We’re spontaneous that way,” she said. “You never know what it’ll be next.”

            She thought: we are fucking spontaneous. And then: of course, he’s going to say yes.

            “I’ll leave you all to it,” Jasper said. He slipped from Kate’s grasp and started across the yard, his long limbs in motion on the edge between awkward and brutal, almost just the way Kate’s father walked.

            “We’ve got to run,” Owen said. “We’re checking out a few retail spaces in Roanoke.”

            “Our baby’s growing,” Ellie cooed. She leaned forward and touched her thumb on the point of Kate’s hipbone. “I know the flowers are going to be perfect.”

            Baby? Kate thought. Did she mean her business?

            Owen hugged Kate, holding her longer than she expected. She gripped his back.

            “Don’t leave so soon,” she said to them.

            “Where’s my brother?” Ellie said, seeming not to have heard. 

            Owen stepped away and cupped his hands to his mouth. “Lyle!” he called.

            Lyle was crouched in the cottage garden by a row of blue stars, his nose just inches away from the flowers. The phone was put away in his back pocket. “Yo, yo,” he said. He stood and followed his sister and her fiancé back to their Subaru. Ellie blew a big kiss as they backed out.

            Kate remained in the driveway, abruptly alone. After a minute she spat in the dirt and set to work pulling up last year’s black plastic from the dahlia beds. Come autumn, maybe she would make dry flower wreaths and sell them via social media with long captions about her relationship with “the land” (or whatever), the way Ellie marketed her feed sack dresses and chambray blouses. She strung a new low wire of deer fencing around the main field, ratcheting it tight, and hooked up a new charge controller. She tested it with her finger, the current jolting her. She put her palm on the wire and the shock went deeper, all the way to her sacrum. She relished the sour, blank feeling of it.

            Back up at the Canary Cabin she plucked a beer from the fridge and stood at the counter drinking it down. She opened another and sat out on the porch. The barn swallows were out already, swooping and chittering. Jasper came into sight driving the tractor, hunched over with his wrist on the wheel, watching the mountains where the sun was just threatening to set. He parked and the tractor’s engine ticked in the driveway. She listened to him go inside and open a beer.

            He came out and sat down beside her, wiping his forehead on his shirtsleeve. “Today,” he said, “Big Dave said three sentences to me all in a row.”

            She nodded. Her father already liked Jasper almost as much as his own children. They had so much in common. In the boxwood along the driveway, the first cicada of the season started its Gregorian chant. 

            “Are you pregnant?” he asked.

            “No,” she said. She watched confusion flicker over his face. Pregnant. The possibility had hardly touched her mind. She finished her beer and set it next to her foot. Then she had to stop herself from getting up and swinging her leg over his knees and sitting down on his lap.

 “Ellie and Owen are so gross,” she said. She didn’t know what she was saying. He’s not going to understand, she thought. This was a man who’d never finished high school, a product of his upbringing. She felt a little barb of pity for him. She hated this feeling more than anything. She did not want to pity him.

She took a breath. “Let me start again. Everything has been so wonderful between us lately. That’s why I’m about to ask you for this.”

            He set his empty bottle next no hers.

            “Alright,” he said. “Sure. What is it?”

            “I’m wondering if we could consider opening things up, just to try it out. And maybe you’ll find it works for you. Maybe we’ll find it works for us.” 

            A swallow swooped past the porch and disappeared into the dark of the hills. After a moment, Jasper said: “Opening up what?”

            He still recoiled at the memory. Opening up what?

 

 

 

 

4

Here and there along the Blue Ridge Parkway pin oaks clung to their dry leaves. It was the day before the shortest day of the year. Jasper had imagined the drive many times. What Kate must have been thinking. Maybe she followed the GPS out of the mountains and down into the foothills, turning at a sign for Serenity Ridge Retreat Center. The gravel parking lot outside the main building would have been empty except (say) an old Honda. Ellie’s brother, Lyle would have been waiting for Kate under some prayer flags near the entrance of a defunct garden.

            “Hey,” he said. “Welcome.”

            He held his arms hugged against his coat. The acne on his jaw was gone and there was now a shadow of stubble. He pushed the swoop of blond hair out of his eyes.

            “Thanks,” she said. Her legs were stiff from the long drive. “It’s just you up here?”

            “Yup,” he said. “Well, me and Roads.”

            “Give me a second,” she said. She went back to the truck and removed her left mitten and then her wedding ring and set it in the cupholder. It had been her maternal grandmother’s. Three diamonds. She and Jasper had gotten married that fall, a small ceremony in front of a pyramid of pumpkins decked out with every color of dahlia you could imagine (they hadn’t yet found the time to make it official at the courthouse, but they would soon). Three months later and here she was for the first time, actually doing this. Jasper had kissed her goodbye like she was running out to get groceries, though he knew she wasn’t. He had kissed her that way, hadn’t he? He had tried, at least.

            The building was strangely office-like for a Buddhist center. There was a kitchen on the bottom floor where Lyle already had a plate of lunch food assembled; kale and beans and bread. She followed him as he brought it back outside and across a courtyard to a shed-sized building with a red door.

            “Roads is in there,” Lyle whispered. “It’s his first dark retreat. Five days to go.”

            He knelt and pushed the plate through a slot at the bottom of the door.

            “He just sits in there the whole time?” Kate said.

            “He’s meditating. He’s like a monk, but not quite. My Eastern Studies Professor says they go into a hallucinatory state.” He pointed back toward the garden. “My room’s that way.”

            At Ellie and Owen’s wedding reception (Jasper had declined to attend) she’d danced with Lyle, the ranunculus petal confetti she’d made to match the arbor sticking to their bare feet. He’d been charmingly awkward. He’d made her laugh. And then she’d gone home, though not before securing his phone number.

            “You’re staying here why again?” Kate asked, following him.

             “I thought it would be interesting,” he said. “I mean I guess I’m fascinated by the eightfold path and all that. Also, they needed a volunteer.”

             His room had a desk and an electric keyboard and a twin bed. He started unzipping his coat and then stopped and came toward her and kissed her. It had taken Jasper a few days to come around. There were rules, things he wanted to know and others he didn’t. No overnights. No public declarations of their openess. He’d yielded to her need with a detached and joyless placidity she’d found infuriating. Then there’d been the wedding to think about (their wedding). That had been part of the deal, too. Lyle’s mouth was unfamiliar, smaller and wetter than Jasper’s. He bit her lower lip and then grabbed her wrist and put a forearm across her chest and shoved her into the wall. “You like it like that?” he said.

            “No,” she said.

            He pulled back, his eyes big.

            “I’ll show you,” she said.

            She took him out of his coat and sat him down on the bed. She put her hands through his hair and lifted his arms up and tugged off his shirt. His chest was thin and pale with a few hairs around his nipples. She touched a finger to his forehead and laid him flat. She kissed his ribs, at first methodically, and then recklessly, going up and down, making sure to get each one.

 

5

She’d been the kind of kid who kept snail shells in the pockets of her cargo shorts. Her high school yearbook superlative had read: “Strangest prom queen ever.” During her West Coast years, all through her twenties, she’d dressed up for Halloween (zoologist, the white rabbit always in a rush). Jasper had never been to the West Coast but he could imagine her there in costume. On the way home from Serenity Ridge she would have felt as if she were nobody at all. She’d have felt emptied out and needless. She considered this a good feeling. Maybe a buck crossed the road ahead of the truck and slid away into the blue shadows. After that, she drove slowly, forgetting whole stretches of road she’d only just traversed, and at dusk as if by accident found herself on Haymakertown Road and then at the entrance to Breckinridge Farm.

            At the cabin she washed herself in extra-hot water. Afterwards, she crunched through the frozen grass to one of the hoop houses and picked a maroon hellebore from a group she’d been coaxing to bloom. She snapped a picture and posted it sans caption. A flower this time of year spoke for itself, right? But when it appeared in her feed she chastened herself for not curating the shot. She should have laid the flower on a slab of maplewood beside some sheers and a casually placed dahlia bulb. What a silly regret.

            She drove the truck down past the lake and up her parents’ driveway. Sunday was family dinner. This particular Sunday they were celebrating the completion of her brother Spencer’s big real estate venture, the renovation of Roanoke’s old boxcar factory. Inside the windows of her parents’ house, Spencer was bouncing one of his new twin babies on his knee. Her niece Riley was at work setting the table.

            Kate cut the headlights. Jasper had been waiting for her, and as soon as he saw the car pull up he stepped out onto the porch. “Hey,” he said. She buried her hands in the folds of his shirt, encircling him. He pulled her against his chest and she breathed the smell of him, pleasantly sour. He whispered something. She pressed her ear against his chest. His heart was there. It was a disgustingly perfect feeling, to be secure and free at the same time. She savored it, willing him not to speak.

            “Did you have a good time?” he asked.

            After a few moments, he repeated the question.

            “Yes,” she said, at last. “But I’m glad to be back.” She leaned away from him and handed him the hellebore. The heavy flower tipped as he pinched the stem between his fingers.

            “So,” he said, “now you’re satisfied… for how long, exactly?”

            She pushed away from him and grabbed playfully at the hem of his coat. “Silly,” she said. “I’m sorry we have this stupid dinner.”

            “Now that this is real,” he said. “I don’t know if I can do it.”

            The moon was full. She felt strange, unlike herself. The perfect feeling was gone.

            “Let’s go inside,” she said.

            “Kate,” he said.

            Tired. That’s what she was. How she looked, at least. The spindly branches of a persimmon tree cast a shadow in the moonlight. Maybe she felt shelled up, so inside herself she had no way of knowing what she really felt. She longed for the feeling of just a moment before, when she’d pressed her ear up against his chest. “We talked about this already,” she said. “We’re just trying it out.” She paused, and rallied: “And the way you’re feeling… it’s natural.” She slipped off a mitten and held up her left hand, where the ring sparkled. “We’re married.”

            “We had a ceremony,” he said, “but it’s never the right time to go to the courthouse and you’re not ready for kids and you feel… what was it? Unspontaneous.”

            “You’re taking my words out of context.”

            The door opened and Riley’s head appeared. “Uncle Jas,” she said. Then she saw Kate and her face got serious. “Sorry,” she whispered, and closed the door.

            “What was that about?” Kate asked him, nodding at the door.

            “I just want to know what it was like,” Jasper said, ignoring the question.

            She managed to put her eyes on his face. His lips were chapped.

            “We agreed it would be better if you didn’t.”

            “But now it feels different.”

            “Jas,” she said. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.” 

            “Well, I know it wasn’t Owen,” he said.

            She considered him, puzzled. He gestured toward the window.

            “He’s here?” she said.

            “I couldn’t stop imagining some guys who do reiki or something,” he went on. “Two or three of them, and their girlfriends there too, all of them at the same time.”

            “It wasn’t like that,” she said. “It wasn’t like that at all. I missed you.”

            “When did you miss me?”

            Inside the house, Kate’s mom cackled at something her father had said.  

            “The whole time,” she said.

            “The whole time you were fucking someone else, you missed me?”

            “I missed you the whole time,” she insisted. “I know how that sounds. But it’s true.”

            “And you still enjoyed it?” he pressed. “You got in touch with yourself?”

            She tucked a strand of hair back behind her ear. She was crying now. “Yes,” she whispered. “It helped me.” After a moment, she added: “And I want you to have the same freedom to explore, to meet new partners or reconnect with old ones. I’ll be your anchor.”

            The words felt insubstantial. She wanted to say so much more. He would love her more unbound, she wanted to say. They could have love that was bigger than just a word.

            “Maybe you were right,” he said.

            “Maybe I was right about what?”      

            Over near the shed, she could make out the outline of the “bug hotel” Jasper and Riley had made together the year before, nooks and crannies drilled under a little sloping roof. They’d worked at the picknick table under the big oak, the sun speckling their hands. During the winter there were lady bugs and morning-cloak pupa in there, suspended in diapause. He’d taught Riley that word, “diapause.”

“About my jealousy coming from a place of masculine possessiveness,” he said. “Who the fuck knows, maybe you were right. But that doesn’t make it hurt any less.”

            “I’m so lucky to have you,” she said. “I’m not sure any of this—” she gestured into the darkness, toward the greenhouses, “would have happened without your help. And the way you are with Riley…”

            “Your family’s the only one I’ve got,” he said.

             “I don’t know what happened to me,” she continued. “I moved back here, and you came and I was so glad, and then one day this thing started happening inside me and I couldn’t figure out how to stop it. Part of me wishes I’d never told you, that I’d kept it secret. I think I could have done that and been almost happy. Is that want you would have wanted?” 

            The front door opened again, and Spencer stuck his head out.

            “Dad says dinner time,” he said.

            “We’re coming,” Kate answered, wiping a tear from her cheek.

            When Spencer was gone, Jasper said: “When has what I want ever mattered?” And then, more harshly: “How am I supposed to act around your family?”

            “We can tell them if you want,” she said. She was really crying now. “It won’t be easy, but I’m open to it.”

            “Don’t be a cunt,” he said.

            He turned away from her and went through the door. She lingered on the porch, watching her breath drift, oddly calm, the tears getting cold on her skin. After a few moments she removed her boots and went inside. Big Dave, still in his cooking apron, was at the fireplace, carefully sweeping coals into a bank along one edge. A broad-shouldered blonde woman was browsing the bookshelves that framed the bay window. Kate recognized her as a board member and curator at Roanoke’s Taubman Art Museum. She’d been an early investor in the boxcar factory renovation. Spencer’s wife was at the table with an infant propped on each leg, talking to Kate’s mother, Linda, who sat alert as a red tail hawk. Riley stood on a chair, reaching across the table to fill the water glasses from a pitcher. In the center sat a large serving pan with potatoes and three roast chickens.

            “The happy couple,” Spencer said, coming into the dining room, raising his wine glass.

            The others followed suit. Kate put a hand on Jasper’s back. She wondered, for a moment, if Spencer had overheard them, then dismissed the possibility. Owen appeared, greeting Kate with a hug, his bracelets clacking. He and Ellie had been the first to lease a retail space in the boxcar factory. They were calling the store “Folk Matters.” Kate wondered where Ellie was. Maybe she’d gone up to Richmond. Maybe she was making a night of it.

            “Let’s get a drink,” she said to Jasper.

            At dinner her brother gave a toast, expressing gratitude to friends and family, without whom et cetera et cetera. When he finished, Owen startled Kate by finding her hand under the table and encircling her fingers. She turned to catch his eye, but he was reaching for Jasper’s hand, too. “I’ll give thanks for all this,” he said, nodding at the food. “If nobody else wants to do it.”

“I’ll sing Kumbaya,” Big Dave said at the head of the table, deadpan.

Ellie and Owen were Christians, Kate realized. How on earth had she been blind to that fact? She felt woozy, like she’d chugged a glass of wine, though she’d only had a sip.  

            “I hope you all don’t mind,” Owen insisted.

            Big Dave made a gesture of condescending approval, and Owen began to say a prayer. 

In the midst of everything that had happened, was happening, the realization that the couple were religious should have felt insignificant. Instead, Kate felt increasingly that she had lost track of herself. That she no longer knew at all what she wanted. She closed her eyes and opened them again. Food had appeared before her and she took up her fork. Her mom told a story about King Lear and the girls she taught at the arts high school in town, who hijacked the discussion to talk about themselves, and their own fathers, whom they charmingly resented. In Jasper’s water glass, the hellebore looked down at the table. “Isn’t that what you want?” Spencer said. “They’re using literature to reflect on their own lives.”

            “I want them to understand the damn play,” her mom said, and smiled that smile that meant she was only mostly serious.

            “Aunt Katie,” Riley said, looking up from her uneaten food.

            “Yes, Riley?” Kate said.

            “Never mind.”

            The blonde curator told Kate about a Thomas Eakins painting that the Taubman Museum was in the process of acquiring. They’d run into some kind of roadblock. But wouldn’t it be amazing, she declared, to have a piece of that caliber in a town like Roanoke? 

            “Aunt Katie,” Riley interrupted loudly. “Do you really want a second Uncle Jas?” She scrunched her face up and turned to Jasper: “I’m sorry I told,” she squeaked.

            Everyone at the table stopped eating, except Big Dave, who worked diligently cutting a chicken thigh. Owen examined one of the oak candle holders.

            “No,” Kate said, quietly. “There’s no such thing.”

            “Oh my,” Spencer exclaimed. He pointed at Kate. He’d always had a gossip’s intuition. “How progressive of you guys!”

            “Spencer,” Kate’s mother hissed.   

            He held his hands up, mock innocent. Then he made a face like he could hardly contain his laughter. “Hey, now,” Jasper shouted. He was sitting very upright in his chair, his face a mask of composure. Kate watched him. He was pale and brutal and awkward. How carefully he’d chosen his words when he confided in Riley, like he was telling a folk tale, a yarn, a story for children. He had loved Riley. Had Kate been jealous of that in some way? Not likely. She’d hardly even seen it. She’d hardly considered that her family had become his family. Later, that’s what would kill him. Missing Riley and the lake and trees and lambs and toadstools. Kate, too, of course. There was no point denying that.

            At the dinner, she would have wondered if he would ever be able to love her as he had before. He had said so many times that she was the best thing in his life. But maybe you could hurt a person so bad, she’d have thought, that when they looked at you they couldn’t ever think about anything else except that hurt. Surely she thought about the dogs his parents had kept. Row after row of cages. She’d been so blind in so many ways. Before tonight, she’d believed Jasper was strong and generous, but she suddenly understood (thought she understood) that he was vulnerable, maybe even damaged, certainly pitiable.

            “Family blitz,” Big Dave announced, standing up.

            The family took up their guests’ plates and followed Big Dave to the kitchen. Spencer wiped down the counters. Kate diligently cleaned the silverware, which couldn’t go in the dishwasher. While the others ate almond pavé she found her father on the back porch smoking a cigar. “Where’s Jasper?” she asked.

            He gestured toward the orchard, heirloom apples he labored over tirelessly. The trees were backlit by the moon, frozen in skeletal dances. Jasper was crouched there in the frosted grass. She couldn’t tell if he was facing the house or looking down across the field toward the lake.

            “Dad,” she started.  

            “None of my business,” he said.

            She took the cigar from him and kissed it and rolled the dry smoke in her mouth and let it curl into the darkness. “Dad,” she said. “He’s just like you.”

            “No,” Big Dave said firmly. “Not him.”

            She studied the silhouette of her father’s face. After a moment she nodded. They stood with their shoulders almost touching. Up at Serenity Ridge, the almost-monk was still in the dark retreat trying to peel himself away from every kind of wanting. Kate did not want to stop wanting. She wanted to grow more flowers than ever before. She would drown herself in flowers before she settled for a man she pitied. Was that it? She watched his form down there crouched in the grass amid the trunks. Maybe she had no eye-opener, not that night, and maybe not ever. No change of heart. Probably she just hardened into herself was all. She’d always been selfish. But there was also more to her than that, wasn’t there? At the edge of the orchard, Jasper unfolded himself and began moving. He walked through his own shadow, a shape long and uncertain in the moonlight, seeming to get closer and then further away.