At thirty-two, she knew she should be over the betrayal. And she wanted to forget about the Donor, but, even after all these years, she could never forgive her.
“Didn’t keep?” her dad said, and pointed to where she had flung the branch. He stood in the doorway of her second-story workspace, his lanky frame outlined by the warm June sunlight behind him. Einars wore his usual work jeans and a lightweight long-sleeve work shirt over a tee. The vitality that had been notably absent during his nap vibrated off him now.
“No,” she said. “Not the ones I had in the house, or the ones I stored out here. All dead wood.” She had hoped to graft these twigs onto the root stock she’d been saving, to see if she could foster new trees from the heirloom stock in the back of the orchard. “I was able to graft the Honeycrisps and Galas with sticks I harvested the same day. I don’t know what else to try.”
She threw the twig and a Ziploc full of dead sticks into the large garbage can, then leaned against the counter to face her dad. Her large workbench spanned an entire wall in the mostly empty main room of the orchard’s barn. Later in the season, she’d share the space with giant crates of apples for the visiting tourists shopping their farm stand on the lower level. This early in the season, though, the wooden crates were empty, leaving space for her towers of waiting carboys—the five-gallon glass jugs she used to make her hard cider. Adjacent to her workbench was a refrigerated room and walk-in freezer, where she stored the juice she had pressed during the previous season in neatly labeled freezer bags and five-gallon buckets. Still waiting along one of the walls was the much larger press and new tanks her father had purchased this year, silent judges of her failure. She’d been trying for two years to sell her small-batch hard cider, but only a few locals seemed interested. Instead, the cooler overflowed with her finished products, carefully sorted according to batch.
Einars plucked the broken twig out of the garbage with long, thin fingers speckled from sun and age. He’d be seventy soon, but he didn’t act like it. He could spray a row of trees, trim branches, and make a delicious apple dessert all before one in the afternoon. They worked hard, but Idun’s Orchard thrived under their care—perhaps not as well as when the Lund population topped their meager two, but well enough they could support themselves. It was a decent life.
“You kept it hydrated? But not too wet?” he asked.
Sanna stared back.
“I take that as a yes.” Einars let the twig drop. “Maybe we need some fresh blood around here. You can’t expect the trees to give their best for just the two of us.”
“Pa, we don’t need more people complicating our system. If it’s not broken and all that. Besides, the trees don’t know any better.”
Einars looked out the window behind the workbench at the orchard below them.
“You’d be surprised. They say plants respond to singing and the moods of their owners, why not trees?”
Sanna returned her grafting tools to their proper places and pulled out beakers and measuring cups.
“I’m not singing to the trees.”
Einars stretched his fingers a few times, like a pianist before a solo.
“I need to get the spraying done in the Earlies. Can you run to Shopko to pick up some toilet paper and ibuprofen—just get the store brand.”
Sanna played with her necklace, a flat wooden circle strung on a silver chain, the wood worn smooth from years of twisting it with her fingers. Her mind sought the solitary peace of work to pacify the shock and failure of the day.
“I can’t today, Pa.” She opened her journal to where she had left off. Maybe creating something new would ease the disappointment in her chest. “I need to blend a new cider. I’ll see you at dinner.”
She disappeared into the walk-in cooler to get the juices she would need. When she emerged, her dad still stood next to her bench, now with the bag of sticks in his hands, pulling each one out and inspecting it.
“What if we clipped fresh twigs and did the grafting now?” he asked, then dropped the sticks back in the bin.
“I tried that last year, and they didn’t take. That’s why I used clippings that had a full season of growth in them. I thought they might be more robust.”
Sanna set the frozen juice blocks on the counter, already considering her dad’s proposition.
“How did you graft them?”
“Whip graft.”
“Let’s try the cleft graft on the understock you have, and a few side grafts onto some older trees. Maybe the scions want a more mature tree to grow with. What do you think?”
His idea could work—Sanna wanted to try it. She needed to know she could make more of those trees, that they wouldn’t die out under her watch after living for over a hundred years.
“What about the Earlies?”
“I can spray them tomorrow—this seems more important.”
That was good enough for her. She grabbed her grafting tools and led the way out of the barn, determined to be successful. She would discover the secret to grafting these finicky trees.
CHAPTER TWO
Dad, come look. I think I can see California.”
Isaac Banks looked up from the magazine cover he’d grabbed downstairs from a line of free travel brochures. He’d gotten himself and his son to the Midwest and wasn’t sure where to go next. Sebastian—Bass—had hopped up on the sloped ledge to get his face closer to the glass in the observation deck of the St. Louis Arch. Twenty other people crowded around the panes to see the sprawling city below them.
Isaac tucked the magazine under his arm and joined Bass at the window.
The horizon blurred in the distance.
“I’m not sure that’s quite California, Guppy.”
“How do you know?”
“Logic. We’re too far away.”
Bass hopped off the ledge, already bored with the view. Keeping a ten-year-old boy entertained required stamina and creativity, especially when going on the third week of a cross-country road trip. Stamina, creativity, and a fair bit of patience.
“That’s just sad,” Bass said.
“Geography is sad?”
“If we’re this far up, we should at least be able to see the Rockies. It’d be cool if we could see Pike’s Peak. Those trams were boss. And the sheep with the big horns bonking their heads together.”
He held his hands to the side of his head as if holding giant cinnamon rolls over his ears while a new batch of tourists joined them in the already crowded space, jostling them into the wall.