—
Mattie refilled the buckets of sunflowers on top of the long wooden counter at Reeses’ Farm Stand, which stood under the shade of two giant oak trees at the edge of the Reese family’s farm on Parsonage Road in Sagaponack, Long Island. She sprayed water on the lettuces arrayed on the shelves. June was big for lettuces. All morning her sister Quinn and Matthew Reese and Patsy hauled chard, kale, arugula, spinach, and butter lettuce from the fields onto the big tables under the shade of the tarpaulins behind the farm stand while Mattie divided them into bunches and bound them with red rubber bands.
The other big thing now was strawberries. Mattie picked through the bins and arranged them in green cardboard berry cartons. Between the stretch and snap of the rubber bands and the juice of the berries, her fingers were deep red by the time she switched places with Dana out front under the high sun at one o’clock.
“All yours,” Dana sang, stealing a strawberry on her way out.
Mattie shot her with a rubber band in the back of the head.
People acted like Mattie was a ditz, but Dana made Mattie look like Albert Einstein. Dana used the calculator to add seven and two dollars. She posted pictures on Instagram of every semicool car that pulled up, preferably with some part of her dumb face barging into the frame. Half of the pictures were unidentifiably blurred because the car was moving.
“How’s business, Matilda?”
Mattie squinted into the sunshine at Mrs. Reese. Matthew Reese was her grandson and, now in his early twenties, he was the manager of the farm, but Mrs. Reese, who was at least eighty, knew exactly what was going on at all times.
“Pretty good. We sold over two dozen cartons of strawberries in the last hour. Seems like the season is really getting started.”
“I see we’re running low. Does Matthew know?”
“Yes, ma’am. He’s bringing more. Quinn and Patsy are picking right now.”
“Nobody’s buying sunflowers?”
“I just refilled them.”
“How’s your mother? Still delivering babies?”
“Yes, a few. But she tries not to take on many for the summer.”
Mrs. Reese nodded. Her wrinkly face rarely changed expression. “That’s fine,” she pronounced obscurely.
Mrs. Reese always asked after Lila, but never asked about her dad or her stepdad, Adam. Mrs. Reese subtly disapproved of both of them for not being “local people,” with the extra problem of not being white, in the case of her dad, or Christian, in the case of Adam.
Mattie saw Matthew and Quinn carrying the last two bins of berries up the hill. Matthew wore a faded blue bandana tied around his neck, which would have looked absurd on a regular person but looked distractingly good on him. His hair was sun bleached and his skin was already brown. His fame rang throughout the East End, and it wasn’t for no reason. There was a joke in town: do the ladies stop at Reeses’ for the corn or for Matthew?
Quinn wore old overalls and a tank top, her dark pixie-cut hair flattened by sweat against her neck. She and Matthew were talking a mile a minute, but Mattie couldn’t hear the particulars.
“Did Dana go?” Matthew called to her.
“Yeah.”
“Can you box these and keep an eye on the front?”
Mattie made a face. She hated when they tried to get her to do two jobs at once. “It’s been pretty busy.”
“There’s nobody in the parking lot,” Matthew pointed out.
“Well, there were a bunch of people a minute ago.” She hated when she sounded like this, but it had been a long day.
“Okay, princess.” Matt sighed. “I’ll do the berries.”
She wished it were flirtatious when he called her that, but she knew he was plain old irritated.
Quinn helped him, of course. The two of them expertly sorted and boxed while Quinn regaled Matthew with a story about a little kid she’d helped on Main Beach the day before. He’d hooked a three-and-a-half-foot striped bass on a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toy rod and together they’d landed it.
Mattie sat sourly at the front while no cars pulled in, listening to Quinn the magical storyteller at work. She tried not to be interested, but she couldn’t help it.
One problem was, it was impossible to be mad at Quinn, however much you wanted to. She was never boring, never predictable, never vain, never selfish.
Furthermore, you couldn’t be jealous of her in any conventional way either. Quinn wasn’t flirting with Matthew. Not even close. Her friendship with Mrs. Reese went just as deep, and her most abiding connection of all the family was to old Mr. Reese, who sat by the parlor window in his wheelchair.
Quinn kept her own hours, ate half the parsley in the greenhouse, rode her bike in circles inside the barn, and dressed like a gypsy. And yet the Reeses adored her and begged her to come back every summer. Quinn refused to work up front selling to customers, but the customers loved her. She watered and planted according to her own odd theology, but apparently the fruits and vegetables loved her too.
Mattie got to work on time every day. She never (hardly ever) talked on the phone and only texted if there were no customers. She wore her hair in two fetching blond braids and treated employees and customers alike to the view of her long legs in very short cutoffs. But the Reeses did not love her, except possibly Cameron, eighteen-year-old brother of Matthew, who happened to be a caveman.
Matt Reese, most importantly, did not love Mattie. He did not find it adorable that they had nearly the same name. He called her princess, without flirtation, and told her to quit working on her tan.
The self-same Matt huffed over, balancing a huge flat of berry cartons. He began arranging them on the display shelves.
“I can do that part, at least,” Mattie allowed.
“What a model employee you are,” he said.
Mattie shot him in the shoulder with a red rubber band. For good measure.
Emma was the one who put her finger on it: Everyone loves Quinn the best, and she doesn’t even try.
Emma’s youngest brother and sister were born two weeks apart, a perfect duality. Here in Wainscott they’d slept in the same crib, gotten their diapers changed on the same table. Kind of like twins, except also kind of the opposite. They’d never even met. They existed for their big sisters in perpetual alternation, never gracing the same place at the same time.
“They don’t know each other at all?” Jamie had asked over dinner in Manhattan the night before.
“No. I told you. My parents completely avoid each other.” It didn’t seem strange to Emma to love people who didn’t love each other. She was used to it.
“And Ray and Sasha share a room in Wainscott?” Jamie persisted, eyebrows up.
“I’m not sure the word is share. They’re never there at the same time, but I guess, yeah. They’ve always had the same room.” When it came to your own family, it was hard to remember how weird they were. “When Sasha was born, my stepmom set up the complete nursery with all the fixings, and you know Lila. She didn’t object to putting baby Ray in a crib festooned with pink and yellow if it meant she didn’t have to buy a new one.”
For Emma, her brother and sister were opposites who balanced each other out. Sasha was dark, Ray was light. Sasha was small, Ray was big. Sasha talked first, Ray walked first. Sasha had the problem with her foot. Ray couldn’t make a hard “c” sound until he was five, so “cookie” was “tootie,” “peacock” was “peatot.” Rayspeak, they called it.
The two babies didn’t have any parents or genes in common, so it was up to Emma to keep track of these things. Sasha had colic, but Ray was the throw-up king. (They called it spit-up for the first year.)
Mattie always favored Ray, because he was a brother and that was new and exciting. Emma and Quinn felt a responsibility to be more even-handed.
They didn’t appreciate her for it, but Emma looked out for them. When Ray got grumpy or arrogant, she put him in line. When Sasha got timid and self-deprecating, Emma helped boost her up. She wor
ried when they didn’t get good grades (Ray) or try out for teams (Sasha). She worried when they didn’t go out with anybody (Sasha) or went out with somebody too dumb for consideration (Ray + Violet).
That morning, as Emma packed her few things in Brooklyn to go back out to Wainscott, she heard Ray lumbering around in the kitchen below. It frustrated her that both he and Sasha were too lame to find jobs in Wainscott for the second summer in a row. Granted, it was harder for them than for their sisters. Emma, Quinn, and Mattie got to be out there full-time, while Sasha and Ray only came every other week.
Emma thought over the conversation she’d had with Jamie the night before, and in particular the word “share,” which was how she got the idea.
—
“I had the most unbelievable brainstorm.”
Ray looked up from his cereal and realized he was the only other person in their small Brooklyn kitchen. “Yeah?” he asked Emma after a long pause to see if maybe she did not need him to respond.
She did need him to. “And it is for you,” she declared.
“Oh no.”
Emma rolled her eyes. “Oh yes, is what you mean. Because I got you half a job.”
He put his spoon down. “Really.” It was not a question and did not hold hope.
“Really! You are a stock boy at the Black Horse Market in East Hampton earning $13.80 an hour.”
He saw a problem right away. “Are you my boss?”
“No.” She rolled her eyes again. “You are not cut out for baked goods. Not yet. Are you kidding?”
He was relieved enough to smile. “True. So what am I cut out for?”
“Dry goods. You can’t mess it up.”
“Huh.” This time he meant it. “Really? $13.80 is good. The manager knows I can only work every other week?”
“That’s the thing.”
Of course there was a thing.
“The listing was for a stock boy or girl.”
“I also have to be a girl?”
Emma laughed. “No, dumb-ass. I asked Francis, the manager, if you could do a job share. That was my brainstorm.”
Ray pushed his bowl away. He was indebted enough not to slurp down the few teaspoons of milk remaining, because Emma hated that. “Which means?”
“Francis needs full-time, but he knows you can only do every other week.”
“Okay.”
“And there’s another person I know looking for a job who can only do every other week.”
Emma was always playing guessing games. And it was always boring, but before ten a.m. it was excruciating. He rested his head on his hand. “Can you please just tell me what you’re talking about?”
“Sasha!”
“Sasha.”
“Together you make full-time. Right?”
He sat up a little straighter, even though he hated to gratify Emma when she was already pleased with herself. “I guess. Yeah.”
“You’d take the job together. You’d alternate weeks. Francis said okay.”
“Have you told Sasha yet?”
“I’m just about to. What do you think?”
He thought. He breathed in all the smells of the kitchen. “He doesn’t need us there together? Ever?”
“Exactly. That’s the point. Together you make one employee.”
Well. “What if she screws it up?” What if I do? “He can’t exactly fire half an employee.”
Emma lifted her shoulders in a dramatic shrug. “Let’s be optimistic for now. Okay? Anyway, not even you two can mess up dry goods.”
The Black Horse was precious, overpriced, and annoyingly located astride the perpetual summer traffic jam known as Montauk Highway. But $13.80 was pretty good. “Starting when?”
“Next week. Monday.”
“Sasha goes first.”
“Right. So?”
“If it’s okay with her.” An idea occurred to him. It seemed remarkable and a little wild. “Should I talk to her?” The mythical Sasha had a phone and a phone number, presumably. She was as close as ten digits, like anyone else. Right? She wasn’t just an idea, a figment, a collection of possessions, a smell.
“You could, I guess.” Emma’s eyebrows confirmed the strangeness of this.
But why was it strange?
“If you want,” Emma said. “Why, though?”
It seemed a natural thing, and yet he could come up with no reason. They were all trained to keep the households separate. It was a reflex. A matter of safety. Even for him. If you fell into the void between the two families, you might just keep falling.
“You don’t need to worry about it,” Emma assured him, crises averted, space-time continuum spared. “I’ll talk to her.”
Ray felt himself deflating a little, but he didn’t want Emma to notice. “Okay, so now can you find me half a job in Brooklyn?”
—
“And Ray is good with it?” Sasha asked Emma over the phone, cutting half a brownie in half and then in half again.
“He is psyched,” Emma assured her.
Sasha abandoned the brownie and sat down at the sun-soaked Wainscott kitchen table. She put her phone on speaker and set it down in front of her. “This Monday?”
“Yep.”
“Wow. Okay. And your manager knows I don’t have grocery store experience?”
“Yes. You’ll be fine.”
Sasha thought about it. It was remarkably perfect. She’d make some money, make her dad happy, get some space from her mother, and have a virtuous excuse for staying at the beach through the weekdays. The off weeks in New York she could study for SATs and volunteer again at the City Garden day camp.
“Em, thanks. This is amazing.”
“No problemo.”
Sasha got up and grabbed her phone and paced around the table. “Kind of weird to be sharing another thing with Ray.”
“But genius, right?” It was hard to compliment Emma sufficiently, because she always outdid you. “And it’s not like you and Ray have to hang out or anything,” Emma went on. “The whole point is you don’t have to be there at the same time.”
Sasha sighed. She wanted to say that she had no issue with Ray. They weren’t proxies for their parents. It wasn’t her idea that the two sides of the family never touched. But she could think of no way to say it to Emma that didn’t feel complicated.
“Can you get us an SAT tutor to share too?” Sasha joked instead.
“I bet I could,” Emma said seriously.
“No, no. You don’t need to do that.”
—
“Oh, Matthew, you’re a lonely young man.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. I can see it.”
“I have my grandparents. I have you. I have the asparagus.”
Quinn laughed, though she too counted the striving little spears of asparagus among her dearest.
Like Matthew, she had many loves at the Reeses’ farm, and he was among her best and most trusted. There were Mr. and Mrs. Reese, the familiar fields of flowers and food; she knew every foot of every row by heart. There was the smell of the old falling-down barn. There was also Cameron, whom she did not care for.
For the last two summers she’d told herself she should try something more challenging. An organic farm growing heirloom vegetables and medicinal herbs in Northwest Harbor. A teaching garden for elementary school–age kids in the Springs. But she couldn’t abandon her old perennials at Reeses’: the asparagus, artichokes, rhubarb, spinach, strawberries, apricots, and plums were her dear old friends too. She couldn’t help going over to check on them in late spring, and the next minute she found herself employed.
Every summer she and her sisters gravitated back here to the beach. Emma got fancy job offers from investment banks and tech companies, but instead spent her summer tying pastries in white boxes with red bakery string at the Black Horse. Mattie said she loved to travel but sat day after day in the dust of cars pulling in and out of Reeses’ parking lot.
There was an unspoken feeling a
mong them of needing to hold on to the old place. Because every time you looked, it changed. A new mansion sprouted up in place of field or forest. And around the mansion sprouted a hedge, so the streets became tunnels. It was changing so fast they worried that if they looked away it would be gone—a place they could no longer recognize.
“I’m happy you’re back,” Matt said.
“Me too.”
She collected wild poppies at the edge of the melon patch for Myrna Chapman before she went in to find Mr. Reese.
He was sitting by the window, his usual spot.
“Quinn Hardy Thomas, I can tell it’s you by your footsteps,” he said without turning around. “Welcome home.”
She went over and kissed him on the cheek. She dragged a chair close to him and sat. On the table next to him she left the brown paper bag of ramps she’d picked in the woods near her house. “Tell me about the farm,” she said. She grasped his hands for a moment, orienting herself to him, to his particular warmth and pulse. He always liked to start with the farm. Other stories radiated from there.
As he talked about storms and snowmelt and local governance, Quinn felt the familiar sensation of floating above herself. She felt the strain and rub of his vocal cords, the soft ruffles of skin on his neck, the pent-up muscles in his arms, the nerve memories in the bottoms of his legs. She looked down at the map of the world stretching across the tops of his hands.
She’d done this since she could remember, did it more now. She became untethered from herself and sifted her way toward others. Through the cracks in their faces she found her way in. Not pushing or bursting, but just feeling and finding. Sometimes their sufferings overwhelmed her. Did she alleviate anything by her presence? She didn’t know, but in some cases, she felt her peculiar kind of comfort was wanted.
Inside Mr. Reese whirled a dark pool you could fall into if you weren’t careful. Little sorrows circled down into the big ones. No sugar in his coffee, then no milk in his coffee, then no coffee. No feet to stand up to the sniveling accounts manager, no feet to stand up to his wife, no feet to stand up. Loss and loss and more loss.
But he was still here. He still sat at the window. Still smiled when she came. Why? She had to be careful to hold on to the edge. Not to fall in, but not to shy away either. That was her life’s challenge. Not to shy away from the pain. Not to deny it, but rather to take it on. Give it a voice if it needed one. Accept that it had a right to be.