Tom Lake

by Ann Patchett

You could spend years in a New York apartment never knowing the people who live two feet away from you, but live on an orchard in Michigan and you will use the word neighbor to refer to every person for miles.

It’s as if the genetic material from which these girls were made diminished with every effort, so that the eldest daughter is strapping and the middle is middling and the youngest is a wisp.

Nell doesn’t dominate a room or stand on a chair to sing. She is the one who watches. She has the kind of naturalness Ripley often accused me of having, an ability to be so transparent it’s impossible to turn your eyes away. She works at her craft constantly. Even picking cherries, I swear I can see her thinking about how other people might pick cherries. And that is the difference between us: I was very good at being myself, while Nell is very good at being anyone at all.

who wasn’t so much playing a part as she was right for the part she was playing.

I lift up my hand to the lushness of trees. “Look at this! Look at the three of you. You think my life would have been better spent making commercials for lobster rolls?”

In this summer which can at times be mistaken for the end of the world,

always leaving and coming back, until they come back with kids of their own.

taking in a deep breath of northern Michigan in the summer, the smell of the trees, of these three girls. Nothing will ever be like it.

want to tell her she will never be hurt, that everything will be fair, and that I will always, always be there to protect her.

my worldly possessions amounted to the contents of these two bags, more or less. I hadn’t had any real success but every one of those high school girls knew about my life, and as much as they may have had the story wrong, they wished they were me.

crazy. We don’t have the time or the money to blow on some princess fantasy I never had in the first place. So why can’t we just get married on a Thursday after lunch and then go back to work? Done. I love Benny, you know I do, and I want to marry him. I just don’t want to be a bride.”

But I have been here long enough to understand the difference between daughters and mothers and daughters and fathers. We promise to wait. Secrets are at times a necessary tool for peace.

Of all the things in life that have changed, Joe has changed the least.

mustard, all of us. “I had two lives,” Joe says, unwrapping his lunch. “Maybe more than two. I got to do everything I wanted. Who can say that?”

we remember the people we hurt so much more clearly than the people who hurt us.

It’s not that I’m unaware of the suffering and the soon-to-be-more suffering in the world, it’s that I know the suffering exists beside wet grass and a bright blue sky recently scrubbed by rain. The beauty and the suffering are equally true.

and I felt like the children would eat me. Nell was eating me, still at my breast, and the other two rushed to crawl in my lap whenever I sat down. I thought, Joe will come home and find the three of them framing out a playhouse with my bones.

She meant for me to do something with my life, the kinds of things she hadn’t been able to do herself. But when I think about what those years away added up to, I would rather have spent them with her.

“We weren’t particularly interesting,” I say. Good marriages are never as interesting as bad affairs.

I wanted to go and open up every bag and dump them out because didn’t they know the leaves were the nice part?

Joe, the greatest good fortune of my life, these three daughters, this farm, I see it all and hold it for as long as I can, my hand on Nell’s head.