The Probable Future

She clearly couldn’t walk up to people and tell them whatever future she saw for them. Honesty was like a stone, dropped and irretrievable once it was spoken aloud. But a lie never stayed put, it spread in a slinky circle, a puddle of deceit. There were straight-out lies and crooked ones and ones left unsaid. There was the unspoken lie about taking Matt’s thesis, and the veiled lie, for although Jimmy Elliot threw rocks at her window most nights and he came up to her bed, she wasn’t technically sleeping with him.

When Jimmy had told Stella about her mother wandering around in the middle of the night, Stella wanted to know if Jenny had seemed happy or upset.

“I don’t know.” They’d been under the quilt and Jimmy was burning hot. The last thing in the world he wanted to do was talk about Stella’s mother, but he had only himself to blame for bringing up the subject. “She looked confused.”

Confused, exactly how Jimmy himself looked when he stood outside in the dark, waiting for Stella to throw him the key. Confused when she kissed him, when she told him to go, when she said she never wanted to see him again, when she told him to come back. Stella knew what that was, which is why she left without bothering to say good-bye to her mother. One lovelorn individual per family was more than enough.

“DID YOU SEE HER HAIR?” was the first thing Jenny said when Will came by later. “I’m sick over it.” Liza was closing up the kitchen and everyone else had left for the day.

“Where’ve you been? Everyone in town has seen her hair.” Will helped himself to a bottle of water. “Just like everyone seems to know you’re sleeping with my brother.”

“That’s not fair. Your brother is in crisis.”

“The missing thesis, yes. Big deal. Actually, he’s never seemed happier, Jen, so maybe that thesis of his was just a substitute for real life. Now he has what he’s wanted since we were kids. You.”

“Since you were kids?” Jenny leaned her elbows on the counter-top, pleased. For a giddy moment, she forgot about propriety, lost manuscripts, daughters with dyed hair.

“It was his idea to sleep out by the lake that night. You knew that, right? He was crazy about you even back then. I had that goddamned bee allergy even then—I hated the countryside, but I couldn’t let him win. Not at anything. Not at you.”

As for Matt, he’d given up hope that his thesis would be found, and had finally set to work taking down the old tree. He might never get his master’s, but his life had taken such an unexpected turn he didn’t know what to think. Everything that had once been important barely mattered to him now. He understood now why people pinched themselves to make certain they weren’t dreaming. Real life was much stranger than any of his dreams, on this Jenny Sparrow agreed. When she slept beside him, Jenny experienced his dreams of the history of Unity, the everyday details of a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years ago. He dreamed of his work, as well, of lilacs and lilies, of tangled bittersweet that was so invasive some of his clients had acres of their land covered by it, hiding evergreens and beech trees until they resembled camels cloaked with green fabric. Impossible to know what’s beneath all that bittersweet. Nearly as impossible to get rid of it altogether.

On the day he began to work on the oak tree, Matt found himself whistling, for no reason or for every reason, he wasn’t quite sure. The hive in the dead section of the oak was enormous; the bees were bound to be somewhat disturbed, but Matt hoped to take the hive out into the woods, or down to the dairy farm in North Arthur where the owner might be willing to let him set up in return for some of the honeycombs. There were fields of red clover in North Arthur, and half a dozen strawberry farms. Strawberry-clover honey would be a treat, and hopefully the bees would make the transfer to their new location without too much stress.

The two lowest dead branches had already been cut off and Matt had begun to saw the first of the huge limbs into manageable logs that he could cart away. He was supposed to have a helper on this day: Jimmy Elliot had been assigned to him to serve extra community service. It kept piling on, hour after hour, but Jimmy Elliot, it seemed, had other things on his mind. He continued to be drawn to the tea house. As he stood out in the road throwing stones at the window one night, Robbie Hendrix, the police chief, happened to be driving by in his cruiser. Hendrix, having forgotten all the trouble he himself had been in as a boy, had stopped and ticketed Jimmy. Public nuisance, that’s what he was.

“What’s wrong with you?” the chief asked as he wrote out the ticket for Jimmy, scratching out the twenty-five-dollar fine and writing in: Public Works—10 hours. See Matt Avery. “Are you out of your mind? Don’t you know glass breaks?”