She smiles and shakes her head. “Yes. My grandfather officially changed his last name after he bought the property.”
“What was it before then?”
She looks at me with a straight face and says: “Banker.”
I burst out laughing. Her timing and delivery are perfect.
“I’m not kidding.”
“Come on! You’re telling me your name could have been Bernie Banker?”
“Laugh it up, McGovern. And don’t call me Bernie.”
“Why not?”
“Because. My parents named me Bernadette to offset the plain Jane-ness of Farmer, but they’ve always called me Bernie. I think if you make a deliberate choice then you should stick with it.”
“What if I deliberately choose to call you Bernie?” I don’t think I’ve had so much fun teasing a girl that I like since I was eleven.
She purses her lips and nuzzles Daisy’s face. “I think Daisy Farmer has a nice ring to it.”
If anyone’s taking someone else’s name, it’s you who will be taking mine, Bernadette.
That thought hits me like a Mack truck that came out of nowhere. I swerve a tiny bit. She looks over at me to see if I’m okay. I keep my eyes on the road, my thoughts on track and I remain quiet for about ten minutes after that.
I wait until we’re well into upstate New York before getting into the questions again.
“You wanna tell me about your parents?”
She empties her lungs and shuts her eyes. “I guess. I don’t know. I’m sure they’ll tell you all about themselves when we get there. They’re…”
Monsters? Weird? Unconventional? What?
“They’ve been madly in love with each other for as long as I can remember. And they were madly in love with each other long before I was born. But they work at it.”
“How?”
“You know. They think it’s important to connect deeply on a regular basis and talk about feelings.” She shudders. “All the feelings. All the time. Like expressing them through art or sex isn’t enough. They think it opens up the channels. I don’t know. It gives me hives. They’re nice, though. They’re really nice. They’re good parents, they just aren’t good at things like email or paying bills on time.”
“Because they’re so busy talking about their feelings?”
“Because they’re so busy being in touch with each other and nature and their art and the community.”
“Are they Amish?”
She laughs at that. “I wish! They’re their own brand of hippie. They just feel guilty because they had dreams of being famous, successful artists when they were young. They met in New York in the Eighties. They both had very middle-class childhoods and fled their suburban lives for New York and they were into the whole punk CBGB’s scene. They stayed at the Chelsea Hotel and partied hard and made terrible art with lots of black and white and reds, you know. But then they fell in love, ran out of money, and my grandparents left the farm to my dad. So they decided to be hippies instead. You’ll see. They’ll tell you the story, but it’s the version they want people to hear.” She slaps her own cheek. “That came out all wrong. I made them sound like asshats. They’re not. They’re just…probably really different from your parents.”
“My parents are total asshats.”
“Hah! I bet.”
To be honest, her parents sound incredibly interesting compared to mine.
She tries calling her mom and dad’s phones again, as well as the home phone, but nobody answers.
“Why don’t you call the hospital?”
She blinks, then looks at me like I’m a genius and she hates me for it. “Oh yeah.”