4
“What am I going to do?” She stared in horror at her sister. The message sat heavy in the air, as though someone had made an off-color joke in church.
Iris reached over. “Watch and learn,” and then she pressed the delete key. “Andhotforyouis no more.”
“I’m not sure I’m cut out for this,” she wailed.
That earned her a pat on the shoulder. “Maybe give it longer than three minutes before making a final decision on online dating.” Then Iris rose. “I need to pee, which is something I’m saying a lot these days. Then let’s sit and have some more of this tea, which I wish could be wine.”
They sat for ages chatting. Marguerite lost count of the times she saw her sister’s hand slip to her belly almost as though she could feel the new baby growing inside her even though, of course, it was far too early.
“Are you thinking you might find time to get married?” Iris and Geoff had been engaged for months. At first, they’d planned to have their wedding in the summer, while Geoff was off school. But somehow the wedding hadn’t happened yet. Iris had claimed that opening her second bakery/café kept her too busy to plan a wedding.
Iris put on a fake smile. Marguerite had known her forever and could never remember being treated to it before. “Oh, we’ll get to it. But Geoff’s so busy with school. Can you believe the Fall Fair is almost here? I feel like we barely got cleaned up from the Fourth of July fireworks! Where does the time go?”
The Chances were not a traditional family, not by anyone’s standards. Not even by Oregon’s standards. When Daphne and Jack had met in the late 1970s, on a Greyhound bus, nineteen-year-old Daphne had been pregnant. And Jack, who at that point was basically a drifter with a good heart, fell in love with her. Maybe it wasn’t anyone’s dream to experience passionate romance on a Greyhound bus, but Marguerite had always found the story romantic. Jack and Daphne had come here, to this very property, owned at that time by Daphne’s great aunt Mildred who had taken them in. They’d married, as young and ill-equipped as they were. Gone on to build their family. Marguerite sometimes thought of the Chances not so much as a family, but a tribe. Some of the eleven of them were Daphne and Jack’s natural children and the rest were strays, picked up along the way.
Jack and Daphne were passionate about many causes, but their main one was that no child of theirs would ever feel inferior to another child. They went so far in refusing to distinguish between their adopted children and their birth children that the kids themselves didn’t even know who was who. The older ones had a pretty good idea about the parentage of the younger ones, but it was an unbreakable rule in their house that no one shared their knowledge, either within the walls of the house or outside it.
As far as she could tell, every one of them had honored that rule and been bound by it. The deal in the family was that at sixteen a child could ask. If they wanted to know, Daphne and Jack would tell them as much as they themselves knew about the child’s parentage. Iris had discovered she was adopted and taken steps to track down her birth parents. It hadn’t been a happy story.
Marguerite had never bothered to ask. She didn’t really care. She was as connected to this land as she was to her family. This was home. Maybe when she got to the point, like Iris, where she was going to have a child, she’d want to know about her background. Until then, it wasn’t relevant. Jack and Daphne were her parents as much as this place was home.
Iris had always been more concerned about things like parentage. She’d shown strong nurturing instincts from the time she was a child and had always wanted to be a mom herself. Geoff lived in a rental apartment, while Iris owned a pretty house in town with plenty of room to raise a family. So why was Marguerite not being asked to help pack boxes, or lend a hand in moving Geoff in? Why was Iris not even talking about their future together? It didn’t make sense.
She rose to more rain. It was too cold this morning to sit outside on her porch, so she set her rocking chair by the window looking out on the garden. Normally, this was her favorite time of the day, as she looked out on her life’s work and began to plan her day. But she still felt uneasy.
When Geoff had arrived in Hidden Falls last year he’d brought some emotional baggage with him. He’d come to teach high school in the middle of the year, after his marriage had broken up. When Iris met him he wasn’t even divorced yet. At the time, Iris had been skeptical that Geoff was ready to move on but his baggage had turned out to be pretty light. Whatever anger and drama his marital breakup had entailed, she got the sense that his first marriage had been a mistake and in Iris he’d found the woman he’d always dreamed of.
She put herself through her usual morning routine of yoga. As always, the familiar stretches and moves helped calm her, but the tiny niggle of worry about her favorite sister didn’t disappear.
She ate a breakfast of eggs, laid by her own hens, and toasted whole-wheat bread that she got from Iris’s bakery. For fruit she ate her blueberries and some of the raspberries that were still ripe on the vines.
Then, feeling like she was doing something slightly risqué, she decided to see what was going on in the world of online dating. As she turned on her computer she told herself that if all she got was solicitations for naked pictures that she would delete her profile. She’d gone into this with trepidation anyway, the last thing she needed was extra stress.
However, when she pulled up the site she found that she had several new messages. The first was from a man who sounded very nice, was also a farmer, but sadly lived in another state. He was clearly looking for a farm wife and, while she wished him well, she explained by return message that she had no desire to relocate to Iowa. The second message was from a guy who posed with some sort of motorized vehicle in every one of his pictures. An ATV, a motorcycle, a speedboat, and a truck with the wheels jacked up. She politely declined his offer to “Maybe hit the road with me one day.”
Iris had insisted that she be somewhat vague about her geographical location purely as a practical safety measure but the result was that she was getting replies from people pretty far away from Hidden Falls. One guy lived about an hour away from her but she liked his style. In his email he told her how much he liked her profile pictures and that he was a committed vegetarian. His handle was Vegeman. Marguerite tried very hard not to be judgmental about people who ate meat. Most of her family did. Most of her friends did. But she had to admit, since she was a vegetarian herself, that it would be a little easier if she dated someone who shared her food preferences.
She messaged him back telling him a little bit about herself. A little more than was in the profile. One other message made her laugh.
For a woman who digs in the dirt all day, you clean up real nice. I find earthy women fascinating. Tell me more? –Maybesomeday
The man was a little younger than her, and very vague about his profession, if he had any, but his pictures showed him climbing, cycling, and hiking. She decided that a man who could make her laugh first thing in the morning had to have something going for him. She sent him a cheerful message in reply:
You look pretty earthy yourself with all your outdoor activities. As for me, I stay in shape but I’m not sure I could keep up with you. Tellmemore…
–Lovetogrow
Maybe she’d stick with the online dating thing for a bit longer.
The site had an area called match-ups that selected profiles supposedly tailor-made for her. She was curious to see what partners a computer would match her up with. Idly, she began scanning through profiles. They ranged from men who were much older than she to men who were barely out of their teens, guys from all over the map. If the things she’d said about herself had led the computer to find these particular matches for her, than either she, or the program, was pretty wacky.
She decided to believe it was the computer. No, she did not want to meet the tattoo artist who listed extreme fighting as his hobby.
She was flipping through her supposed matches, feeling like she was playing an unwanted game of ‘hot, not hot’ when there was a knock on her front door. To her surprise, her early morning caller was Iris’s boyfriend. Her first instinct was concern. Geoff did not call on her in the early hours of the morning. In fact, he’d never been here without Iris. She put a hand to her heart. “Is everything all right with Iris?”
“Yes! Iris is fine,” Geoff replied. “Well, I guess she’s fine. She’s already at work.”
