The Rental

The Arden orchard had been losing money since before Hollis was born, and it lost money the way a body loses blood: quietly, in a way nobody wanted to look at until the floor came up to meet them. Forty acres of apples on the shoulder of a hill above Ashford, New York, a cider barn with a roof that leaked in two places, and a farmhouse where the heat pump coughed on for a minute before it gave up and blew cold air instead. Gil Arden had inherited all of it from his father, and he had inherited, along with the trees, an arrangement his father's lawyer had drawn up in 1961 and never revisited: the land sat in a family trust, and the trust passed to the nearest male heir. Gil had five daughters. The nearest male heir was a cousin in White Plains he had met twice, a man named Preston Pell who sold annuities and sent a Christmas card every year with a photo of himself on a beach.

Faye Arden had made her peace with the trust the way she had made her peace with the heat pump, which was to say not at all. She mentioned it three or four times a week. She mentioned it that April morning at breakfast while the radio played the weather and Tessa buttered toast on her lap and Roxy was late, as always.

"Bellwood has been let," she announced.

Gil turned a page of the paper he was pretending to read. "Has it."

"For the season. To a young man from the city with money. His people made it in freight logistics, or freight software, or something with trucks. Nina's friend's hairdresser knows the Realtor." Faye had a pipeline of information running through Ashford that no one had ever been able to map. "His name is Julian Reyes. Twenty-eight. Unmarried."

"Twenty-eight and unmarried," Gil said. "A suspicious thing. There must be something wrong with him."

"Gil."

"There must be. No one stays unmarried at twenty-eight unless he is either very wise or very tiresome, and the wise ones are married young by the tiresome ones."

Sylvie looked up from her phone and smiled at her father the way you smile at a dog that has learned a trick. Hollis, across the table, did not look up. She was reading the cider tank gauge on her phone, and the reading was bad, and she had spent three nights lying awake doing arithmetic that always came out the same way. They could pick the windfalls and press them and sell the cider at the farmers market in Ashford on Saturdays, and they could make the mortgage or they could make the winter, and they could not make both.

"You will call on him, of course," Faye said.

"I will not."

"You will. Every decent man in this valley has called on every new family at Bellwood for a hundred years."

"Then let a decent man do it. I am not decent, I am tired."

"Gil." Faye set down her coffee with the particular violence of a woman who has been married long enough to know when she is being teased and to keep going anyway. "Five daughters. Five. On a piece of land that goes to Preston Pell."

"Six, if you count me," Gil said.

Roxy came in at that moment through the mudroom, eighteen, barefoot in April, her hair in a towel, and said, "Who is Preston Pell?"

"The answer to all our prayers," said Gil. "Ask your mother. She dreams of him."

Faye threw a dish towel at him. He caught it and went on reading.

Hollis finished her coffee and took her boots from the rack and went out into the fields. The orchard in early April was all bare wood and last year's grass, the rows running down the slope in long grey lines toward the creek, with the sugar maples along the fence line just beginning to show red at the tips. She walked the McIntosh block and checked for canker and thought, as she always thought, that the trees were more honest than anyone in her family: they told you exactly how bad it was. Then she went down to the barn and spent the morning with Petra, racking the last of the February cider into bottles, and when she came up for air it was nearly noon and her hands smelled like a cellar.

There had been an offer for the place in ninety-eight. A developer from the city had wanted the ridge for houses and had put a number on the table that would have set Faye up in a condominium in Poughkeepsie and put the girls through anything they wanted. Gil had said no. He had said no in a way he had never explained, and the girls had grown up inside the shape of that no: the patched roof, the truck with the door that had to be slammed twice, the winter boots bought a size too big in March. Hollis had been eleven at the time and had heard her mother say, once, through a door, "Then we are to be poor forever because you cannot bear to sell a hill." And Gil had said, "I can bear to sell a hill. I cannot bear to sell the only thing my father ever gave me that I did not break."

She thought about that sentence most days. She thought about it standing in the rows with the canker under her thumb: that the orchard was not a business, it was an inheritance of a particular kind of male stubbornness, and that she and her sisters were the people who would pay for it.

That evening Gil was sitting in the same chair, in the same light, with the same paper.

"Mr. Reyes has been called on," he said, without looking up.

Faye went absolutely still. "By whom."

"By me."

"You said you would not!"

"I said I would not call on him today." Gil turned the page. "I called on him this morning while you were on the phone with Nina. He is very civil. He asked after the orchard, which no young man from the city has ever done in the history of the world. He is coming to the welcome party at the Grange on Friday."

Faye made a sound between a laugh and a squeal and went for the phone. Sylvie, who had been reading, looked at her sister over the top of her book with an expression of pure and serene delight, the expression of a person who has always assumed the world would be kind to her because so far it had been.

Hollis, whose assumption was the opposite, wiped cider off her wrist with a rag and went to find out what was for dinner.