When we first started going, she raised her eyebrows at the number of Hmong vendors, but she never said anything beyond, “They don’t farm out by my family,” and she bought anyone’s produce as long as it was good quality and not overpriced. She talked shop with the farmers, discussing rainfall and temperatures. She didn’t care about herbicides or how the cows were treated. I was the one who insisted on the organic stalls while Mary would roll her eyes and laugh. When I tried to show her articles about the effects of chemical fertilizers and insecticides, she scoffed and said, “There’s a study for everything. You know you’re going to die anyway, don’t you?”
She was never interested in organic farming. So where the hell had this come from?
“I’ve been talking to a guy near Rochester who has the whole operation down. Mobile coops and vegetarian feed. He sells to restaurants in the cities at a premium price, and we’re going to start doing the farmers’ market circuit in the spring.”
“We?”
“Me and him and a few other farmers in the area. There’s a demand. All those people in the cities like you, wanting their eggs from happy chickens, wanting their meat grass-fed and humanely slaughtered.”
She shook her head on the last two words. It was a point we agreed on, but for cosmically different reasons.
“Where is this coming from, Mary? You know Elsa’s not going to last the year.”
She flinched at the words and I backpedaled, lowering my voice.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say it like that, but it’s obvious the doctor was right. She’s weaker every day. She remembers less and less of what anyone tells her. The other day she didn’t even know who I was.”
I didn’t mention that—because she didn’t know me—she was nicer than she had been since my wedding day. She patted my hand and called me Hank and asked me to read her a few obituaries. Hank was happy to oblige. It was the first time in months I’d felt welcome in this house.
The retention-rate issue was becoming hard to ignore. She’d weakly asked Mary every day for two weeks why we’d bought “that five-dollar pepper” until it was finally drilled into her head that it was “Peter’s fancy pepper.” She watched the weather forecast on the news at least two times a night and still acted surprised when it snowed the next day. If the oxygen wasn’t sufficiently reaching her brain anymore, how much longer could the rest of her body survive?
I phrased the next question carefully. “Why would you invest in a whole new business when we’re only here on a temporary basis?”
She didn’t say anything and, to be honest, I already knew. The answer was right in front of me.
“You’re not just here for Elsa.” I dropped into one of the kitchen chairs and stared at her profile. She didn’t confirm or deny. “You like it here. You’re not going to move back to Minneapolis when she dies, are you?”
Still she didn’t speak. She just kept washing dishes, her hands idly squeezing the rag over a saucer as she gazed out the kitchen window into the abyss of white.
“Dammit, Mary, answer me. I think I deserve an answer. Have you been planning this since before we moved?”
She rinsed a dish and set it in the rack, then slowly pulled a coffee cup out of the suds. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Clearly I don’t. How can I understand what you won’t say?” I crossed my arms, determined not to leave this room until she came clean.
“It’s . . .” She stopped, shook her head, and started again, moving the soapy cup from one hand to the other, still staring absently through the glass framed by faded gingham curtains. “I don’t know how to say it. It’s like the trees.”
“What?”
“In the city you can’t see them.” She paused, thinking. “They’re all squished together, tangled into each other until you can’t tell where one tree stops and another starts. Their branches are sawed off so they don’t hit power lines or roofs. Some of them have those red spray-painted death rings around their trunks and they’re chopped down when their roots grow too big under sidewalks. They’re sad to look at, all contorted and disfigured or pruned down into nothing.
“But here, here you can see the trees for what they really are. My whole life I watched them growing at the edges of the fields like cross-stitches holding a quilt together.” Her gaze focused on the pines behind the garage and her voice lost that hardened edge she’d acquired around me.
“They stand tall in windbreaks around the farms and you can really see them. You can trace their silhouettes, follow how their branches bend and curl. Some are craggy. Some are thick and strong. Some are stooped like old men against the wind. You can understand their nature here. I didn’t realize it until we moved back and I felt myself breathing again. I was walking home from Winifred’s one day and I just stopped and stood there studying the shapes of the trees on the horizon. They were like portraits, each one of them, and it was the most beautiful thing I’d seen. I knew then that I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t breathe in the city; I was suffocating more every day.”
“But we live in the city.” I felt compelled to make some stab at an argument. “Our lives are there. Our friends, your job. Your boss said you could come back anytime.”
Logic was all on my side. I knew it, could taste it on the words, but they felt hollow against Mary’s eloquence.