The Letter from White Plains

The email came on a Monday in June and Faye printed it out and put it on the kitchen table like an artifact.

It ran to nine hundred words, and it was addressed to My dear Madam, and Hollis read it standing at the kitchen table with cider on her boots:

It has long been a matter of the keenest regret to me that a misunderstanding of so trivial an origin — I refer, of course, to the affair of the north boundary fence, which I have never fully understood and which I am prepared, in the interests of Christian amity, to regard as closed — should have kept two branches of one family apart for so many years.

Having lately been appointed programs director of a charitable foundation in Connecticut, I propose to pay a visit of reconciliation to Ashford in the first week of July, and I remain, my dear madam, your affectionate kinsman.

The remaining seven hundred words were about the fence.

"He wants the orchard," Gil said.

"He wants to be reconciled."

"He wants to see what he is going to get. He has been wanting to see it since his father died. Give him the north bedroom and hide the good knives."

"Gil! He is family."

"He is an annuity salesman named Pell who has been my father's revenge on me for thirty years. My father put the land in trust so that it would go to a man like this instead of to you and to five girls who have worked on it since they could walk. That was the point. My father wanted a Pell."

Faye folded the printout and put it in her apron pocket and went out to the barn to find Hollis.

Hollis read it standing up, with cider on her boots.

"If he is coming to make peace," she said, "he will want to make peace with someone in particular."

Faye's whole face changed. It changed the way a sky changes when a front comes through: the light went out of it and then a different, harder light came in behind. "Hollis."

"No."

"You do not know what he wants."

"I know what the trust says and I know what you have said about the trust every week since I was nine years old, and I know that a man who writes nine hundred words about a boundary fence has thought about this orchard for a long time. If he wants to marry one of us he will take whichever one he is offered."

"Hollis Arden."

"Offer him Tessa," said Hollis, and went back to the tank.

But when Preston Pell arrived on the second of July in a sedan with a dealer plate and a windshield sunshade, it was Hollis he looked at first, and it was Hollis he asked about at dinner, and it was Hollis he followed out to the barn after dinner with his hands folded and his shoulders back, walking the way a man walks when he has rehearsed the walk.

He was thirty-six. He had a round pink face, a suit in July, and a way of speaking in complete sentences that made every sentence sound like a memo. He admired the orchard, he said, with a genuine and terrible enthusiasm; he had driven past it twice as a boy and he had known even then. He spoke of the family, of reconciliation, of the Christian duty of the generations to one another, and of the very great comfort it would be to his cousins — to all of them — if the property could be regarded as settled. Then he asked her, at some length, whether she had given any thought to her future, and when she said no he said that he had given a great deal of thought to hers, and that he was prepared, on the strength of a fortnight's acquaintance and in full view of the cider barn, to make her an offer.

She refused him. She refused him three times, and the third time he explained to her that she did not understand the situation, which was that a woman of her prospects — a woman with a father who had mismanaged a property for thirty years and a mother with no family and five sisters and no portion — could not reasonably expect a second offer.

"You are mistaken," she said. "I can reasonably expect nothing at all, and I would rather have nothing at all than have you."

"You will reconsider when you have spoken to your mother."

"I have spoken to my mother. I am speaking to you."

He went in. Faye met her at the door.