I will not pretend these calls were easy. The caterer was professionally controlled but the financial discussion that followed was not brief. The tent company had already begun logistics planning and the conversation required patience. The florist was distressed in a personal way, having invested
considerable preparation in an event this size, and I apologized to her specifically and genuinely because she had done nothing wrong and was absorbing a consequence she had not created.
With each call I said the same thing: the event was canceled, I was aware of the contract terms, I was prepared to discuss compensation for work already completed, and I was not in a position to provide additional explanation at this time.
By eleven o’clock it was done.
I put the phone on the kitchen counter and went outside to trim the roses.
There are things you can only understand about a place by working it with your hands. Richard knew this before I did. He had grown up on a farm in the central valley and he had the particular physical fluency of someone who learned early that land communicates through work, that what a vine needs
from you and what it gives back exist in a relationship that requires presence. I came to it later, trained as an accountant, drawn to the precision of numbers, and I had spent the first years here at the desk rather than in the field.
Then Richard died and I had to learn the whole property from the beginning, and I found, to my considerable surprise, that the work did something for me that nothing else did. That the specific attention required by a rose that needs shaping or a vine that needs tying or a drain that needs clearing
was exactly the kind of attention that exhausted the part of my mind that otherwise could not stop.
I trimmed the roses for two hours.
When I came back inside, my phone was lit and stacked with notifications like a building that has had something thrown at it.
Fifty-nine missed calls.
Texts from Samantha. Texts from Greg. Texts from Greg’s mother, whose name in my contacts was Margaret Hollister and who had been carefully polite to me at the two dinners we had shared and whom I suspected, from those dinners, of being the origin of at least some of Greg’s opinions about what was appropriate and what was not.
