The Orchard in July

Then there was a week.

Faye did not speak to Hollis for two days and then spoke to her for five, and on the third day she came into the barn while Hollis was racking and stood with a basket of beans on her hip and said, "Fifty-five years old, and a house with a heat pump that blows cold air, and five girls, and one of them was offered the whole thing and said no." She said it every day for five days, and every day it was a different sentence with the same shape. She said Hollis was selfish. She said Hollis was unfeeling. She said Hollis was clever, and that being clever in a girl with no money was the worst possible luck; and on the fifth day she sat down on the porch steps with the basket still on her hip and cried and said she knew Hollis was right and could not bear it.

Gil, asked to intervene, declined in a form that became famous in the family.

"Your mother," he said, standing in the barn door with his hands in his pockets, "has married you to a man she has met six times because he will take the land off her hands in twenty years. I will not tell her she is wrong, because I have told her she is wrong every day for twenty-six years and it has not worked once. You have my permission to refuse him. You have had it since you were born. Now tell me about the tank."

"I refused him."

"I heard. I also heard you were rude about it, which I consider a separate and greater achievement."

"I was not rude."

"You were extremely rude. He called you poorly portioned and you called him a hedge. I have never been prouder." He looked out at the rows. "There is one thing you should know. If Pell marries one of your sisters instead, the trust does not care who he marries. Your mother will find him a wife, because your mother cannot bear the alternative, and the alternative is all of you."

"She will not find one."

"She already has. She has been on the telephone since Tuesday."

Preston Pell proposed to Corinne Nash on the ninth of July, in the afternoon, by the pump house.

Corinne came over the next morning and sat on the porch steps with Hollis and told her in the flat, unhurried voice of a woman reporting a business decision. She was twenty-seven. She was the smartest person Hollis knew and she had watched her own mother keep a house on nothing for thirty years and she had made a calculation and the calculation was this: Preston Pell had a salary, a pension, a house in Connecticut, and a patron who would advance him; Corinne Nash had a bedroom in her brother's house and nothing else; and a woman of twenty-seven with nothing else and considerable intelligence should marry for a house.

"I am not in love with him," she said. "I am not in love with the idea of him. I want a room with a door that shuts and I want to be able to buy a book when I want to buy a book. That is the whole of it."

"Corinne."

"I have thought about it more than you have thought about anything."

"You will be alone in a house in Connecticut with a man who sends nine hundred words about a boundary fence."

"I will be alone in a house in Connecticut with a door that shuts." She looked at Hollis and her mouth did something complicated. "And when you come to visit me, which you will, because you will not be able to stay away from the look on his face, we will sit in that house and drink his coffee and I will be exactly as happy as I am now, which is not very, and I will never have to go to my brother's wife's birthday again."

Hollis took her hand. "I will come."

"Twice," said Corinne. "I know you."

Preston Pell went back to Connecticut at the end of the month engaged, and wrote a second email of eleven hundred words about the duties of a wife, and Faye read it twice and said that Corinne had done extremely well for herself and that Hollis could have had all of it.