Ashley Warlick - The Arrangement

“That sounds fine,” Rex said. He turned to Al. “So different from last time around.”

“Sir?”

“I remember when you and Mary Frances were in Dijon, it seemed like you were off somewhere new every weekend. This apartment, then another. I must have wired once a week for a while.”

“Daddy,” Mary Frances said.

“You were so young.” Rex reached to touch the back of her hand, almost shyly.

Al cleared his throat. “It’s different this time, sir. Tim has provided us with everything, the house, the garden.” He met Tim’s gaze evenly across the table. “I’m afraid he’s gotten very little in return.”

Tim inclined his head and smiled, opening his fist against his thigh.

“The experience, though,” Rex said. “Invaluable.”

“Yes, sir.”

The waiter delivered their nut-brown roast chickens, more cold bottles of Dezaley. Across the low-lit table, Mary Frances excused herself. Minutes later, Tim realized he’d left his cigarettes back at the café. He would be right back.

He found her leaning against the wall outside the restaurant, rolling her head back and forth against the brick. He did not say anything, what was left to say, but went to her and put his hand to the nape of her neck, drawing her mouth to his, her cheek, her earlobe, his thumb on the pulse at her throat he had begun to feel hours before.

She had not yet allowed herself to imagine what this life would be like when they were gone, but she could see it now. It was almost here.

* * *

The quail, when she pulls them from the oven, are golden and crisp, and she wishes for some fresh spring peas to go with them, for a long table on a stone terrace and a warm season coming on, her family gathered around. And always Tim.

She remembers now their afternoon in the trellises, Tim and Al snapping off the new pea pods, each one a bell in the bowls they were filling for Edith, who slit them open with a sharp thumbnail, Rex draped against a chair, looking out over the lake, still and silver in the lengthening light. Then everyone gathered at the table with steamy platefuls, the color of brand-new anything, perfectly green and bathed in butter and salt, bursting with themselves — the first spring peas. All around, only the sound of knife and spoon and china, the bent heads of the people she had loved most in the world, the place she had loved most, the time. For better or worse, the last time they were all together.

She feels dizzy and rocks back in her joints to rest her head on her forearms. She has spent too long on her feet. Perhaps she is tired. Perhaps what she needs is to lie down.

A fire stammers warmly in the grate, and the marmalade cat is curled in front of it: down the hall, her own personal librarian taking his bath. She thinks she can hear him humming some old show tune, but her hearing has become a creative sense these days, filling the gaps as they occur. Maybe that’s what time is doing to her now, filling in.

She finds herself drawn down the hallway toward the line of light at the bottom of the bathroom door, the song becoming the sluice of water from his limbs as she imagines them, her imagination still sharp. She decides he must be strong to have loaded that van, dexterous to have plucked those quail. A flush seeps through her: this too, still strong enough to follow.

Her fingertips trail the shelves of books that line the hall, their slick jackets and spines. This is her last house; she knows every inch of it by heart. She slips her shoes from her feet, letting them fall, one by one, to the floor. At last she reaches for the knob. And turns.

They were deeply in love. There were other things in their lives that were not so effortless, but those things were far away from Le Paquis and their garden and their books; those things were in other countries, across oceans. News arrived by mail and could be opened at their leisure, on the radio they could turn on or off. There were whole weeks they did not drive to town, they did not see another soul. What pressed them were their appetites and what they grew themselves.

The house was finished as they had planned, space that opened one room into the next, where they sat to where they ate to where they cooked, the large stone staircase winding to the second floor and Tim’s room, filled with summer light. Mary Frances had the only quarters left over from the old house, a tight warren beneath the stairs, and her refuge near the stove.

She cracked blue-shelled eggs from the vigneron ’s chickens across the road, beating them for omelets, a nub of butter skating the pan. Out the window, boys were reaping in the pasture, the tall purple thistle and chamomile coming down with the hay, but this was the second reaping of the summer; she knew the flowers would return and be more for it.

She called to Tim, breakfast.

He kissed her; his mouth tasted of cigarettes and honey. She could see his relief after all those months on tenterhooks. It was hard to understand now what had taken so long, what they had thought they were doing, what they had been trying to protect. She promised herself she would not waste another moment not sure of what she wanted, not with him.

They sat next to each other at the long Valaisanne table, a streak of cadmium in Tim’s white hair, the fletching on an arrow. They talked of the novel they would write together, a woman’s story, maybe a woman trapped in a desperate life. They were still imagining it. The omelets were lacy and fine, a few crisp lettuces from their garden dressed with mustard, a bottle of cold ale from the fountain. Mary Frances stood to get her notebook, and Tim to the kitchen, returning with a bowl of strawberries, a pitcher of thick cream. The woman would be a widow perhaps. What would a widow long for? They had a pseudonym: Victoria Berne.

Her book Serve It Forth arrived from New York, as well as a clutch of the first reviews. Some of them were very good, and there was also a small check. But when she read the clippings, she could hardly remember the motion of the essays referenced there, as though she’d written them in a trance, in another life. She was flattered, of course, but after the first few, they stopped making her feel flattered, stopped making her feel any way at all. That had been so long ago.

Shards of hay spun in the shaft of light from the open window. It was already late in the morning; they had work to do outside. Tim looked at her wistfully. He reached out and ran one square finger down her collarbone, her chin tipping back to receive the length of his touch.

“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.