What’s wrong with the grocery store?”
“People care about where their food comes from.”
Dad shook his head, muttered something about hippies. Which was hilarious. Mom had been the one to suggest he start a CSA. In her own practical way, she was the biggest hippie in New Benton. “Has he let you look at the CSA profits?” Dad said to Charlie, jerking his head toward Dell. “They’re pretty dismal if you ask me, but I’d like to know your take.”
This time Dell did scowl. He jammed his baseball cap on his head in the hopes it’d hide most of his expression. His brother might be a VP of sales, but he didn’t know a damn thing about Dell’s business. “Charlie hasn’t once set eyes on my spreadsheets. He sells crap, not food.”
“You should let him look. I don’t like what I’m seeing. Maybe we need a second opinion.”
“He’s not a farmer.”
Dad rolled his eyes. “More power to him.”
Dell didn’t know how many times they could have the same conversation. Run in the same loop. Probably over and over and over, since neither of them could understand the other’s point.
“Do I have to remind you you’re a farmer?”
“I wanted something better for my sons. Look at Charlie. He went out and made a name for himself. Didn’t get tied down to this burden. You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”
Charlie had the decency to look uncomfortable, but he didn’t speak up. Which was how things always seemed to go. Charlie was the great doer of what Dad and Mom wanted. Dell would forever be a disappointment.
If it meant the farm, he supposed he’d just have to suck it up and accept it. “I fell in love with this burden, Dad. This place. This work. I don’t want better.”
“Farming isn’t love.” Dad shook his head. “It’s hard work and dirt and hell on a body.” He drained his Thermos. “Head in the clouds.” He walked back to his truck, shaking his head.
How could he feel that way? How could he still work this land and feel that way? Dell didn’t understand it, wasn’t sure he ever would.
In silence, he and Charlie slid into Dell’s truck, drove up to the vegetable shack and loaded the truck for market. When they got back in and drove off Wainwright property, Charlie made a big production of tapping his leg, fidgeting in his seat.
“Spit it out.” He’d rather hear all of Charlie’s complaints than watch him try to keep them in.
“Look, Dell, you’re not dumb.”
Dell scowled at the stoplight in front of him. “I know I’m not dumb.” Of course, Charlie had read at a kindergarten level at the age of three. And solved for x in elementary school. While Dell had enjoyed remedial reading and math all through middle school.
But that didn’t make him dumb. Not in the areas that mattered.
“So, the thing is, you could have more than this.” Charlie waved at the farmland on each side of the highway Dell merged onto. “I know you like it, maybe you’re even good at it, but how much longer is small-scale farming going to be a lucrative career?”
“I don’t want more than this. This isn’t some compromise or slacker job. It’s what I want. It’s important. I don’t need lucrative.”
“You need to survive. And are you so certain it’s not that you want it just because Dad doesn’t want you to do it? Remember how you didn’t have any interest in playing basketball until I tried out, then suddenly it was all you wanted to do? And once I quit, so did you.”
Dell shifted. “It’s not the same.” It wasn’t, but he knew he couldn’t convince Charlie of that. First, because Charlie thought Charlie was always right. Second, well, he wasn’t about to admit he’d just been trying to get his older brother’s attention.
He’d given up on that. Charlie was always going to look down his nose at him. They were too different, and for some reason Charlie didn’t see the farm the way he did. Didn’t feel the history in it, the belonging to it.
Charlie didn’t say anything else, just shook his head and looked out the passenger-side window.
Dell watched as farmland morphed into suburbia. Tried to imagine living here, in a house all piled on top of another house, with nothing but streets and strip malls and perfectly manicured lawns.
He didn’t belong anywhere here, even less so in the packed-together city Charlie lived in. He belonged on that farm, where he could look out a window and see the swell of the hill, hear his own footsteps, dig in the land and grow something. It was his heart, and the work he did was important. Someday Dell would just have to accept he was the only one in his family who believed it.
* * *
MIASATIN the driver’s seat, working on not hyperventilating. Some positive self-talk, some reminders that, in this space, people looked at her as a professional, knowledgeable businesswoman, not Mia, Queen of the Geeks, whose verbal diarrhea always meant saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.
“Mia, get out of the car.”
“I will.” She nodded. Her feet ignored her.
Cara slammed her door shut. A few seconds later she jerked open the driver’s-side door. “Get out, young lady.”
“I’m older than you.”
“Mia.”
“Just give me a second.”
“Mia, look at me.”
Reluctantly, Mia met her sister’s fierce stare.
“Do you think you’re ugly?”
Mia frowned. “Well, no.” She wasn’t a bombshell, but she certainly wasn’t ugly. Decent haircut, no more acne, body in good shape. She wasn’t ugly. Didn’t mean she was comfortable being seen as anything other than background noise. She’d worked so hard at being background noise since coming home from Truman four years ago. Worked on quietly doing what she needed to do, not babbling, not embarrassing herself.
This step seemed to scream, “Look at me,” and as much as she wouldn’t mind some male attention, she wasn’t ready for the screaming insecurity that went with it. If she was ready for that, she’d probably have had a date by now.
“Then, suck it up, sister. You’re cute. No one’s going to look twice at you except people who know you and wonder how you hid that body for so long. You look like a normal twenty-six-year-old woman. Of course, if a guy comes over to buy something, I’d make sure to bend over.”
“Cara—”
“Just be you. Forget what you look like or what people think. That’s how you’ve gotten this far, isn’t it? You learned to stop worrying what people thought?”
That was true. Not an easy lesson to learn, or even one she’d mastered, but Cara was right. Who cared what people thought? She was wearing tight jeans and a T-shirt, for heaven’s sake. Not a G-string and some tassels.
She certainly wasn’t stripping, unlike some people.
Mia sneaked a glance over her shoulder at Dell. He hadn’t taken off his shirt yet, but it was unbuttoned all the way. Moron.
With a deep breath, Mia hopped out of the truck, earning her a back pat from Cara. “Thanks.”
“Anytime.”
Squaring her shoulders, Mia focused on setting up the booth, including their newest tactic: free coloring pages and crayon packets for kids. Next week Anna was going to do face painting. If Dell was going to go the man-ogling route, she would go the family route.
Pants that fit and a low-cut T-shirt just meant looking less like the crazy, isolated farmer she was. It