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The next weekend, Miranda arrived at the farmers’ market with a pie in hand. She had made two—both blueberry, Dix’s favorite. One for him, and one to give to the stranger who had given her a ring. The pies had used up a large portion of the fruit she had collected, on her knees, from the wild, low bushes full of small, sweet berries. She’d just collect more, she’d told herself as she was arranging the dough in careful strips over the top. Whatever the bears and birds leave behind. And the berry farm. There was always the U-pick berry farm.

She walked down the rows at the market, the still-warm pie carefully balanced in the palm of her hand. She began to feel lost. No, she told herself, stopping at the far corner of the field, she was in the right place. She stared and stared at the spot where she’d had a ring slipped on her finger the week prior, but there was only an empty area of lightly trampled grass at the end of the tidy line of card tables and identical pop-up tents where his ad hoc display and cotton tapestries on bamboo poles had been.

What do I do now?
she wondered.

She felt like she’d dressed up and arrived for a party on the wrong date. Silly. Confused. Embarrassed. She couldn’t bring the thing home again. Two pies. Such an extravagance. How would she explain what she’d done? She didn’t know why not, but she knew she could not. Dix would wonder what she’d been thinking. Why she hadn’t just frozen the extra berries. That was, after all, the only thing that made any sense. She’d have no explanation.

She had just passed a table offering raffle tickets. Raising money for the local volunteer fire department. Or maybe it was the library. A local family hit with unexpected medical bills. A child born with special needs or a man with a large family, no insurance, and now a rare cancer. There was always something, someone, in need around here. It wore her down and bummed her out, all these flyers and appeals for people who were so extremely unprepared for the inevitable disasters of life. She took the pie there, to the fund-raising table, told them she’d made two and her visitors were not coming in for the weekend after all, so they could sell it and keep the proceeds. Or add it to the raffle. She didn’t know why she made up this story. Another extravagance to justify the first extravagance. She didn’t have visitors that weekend, of course. Or any weekend.

Miranda felt more flustered than seemed warranted by the small mix-up in her intentions, the thwarting of her picture of how this little interaction was supposed to go. She had anticipated pleasure at the strange man’s imagined delight with her gift. She had thought he’d dig into the pie right there in front of her, magically produce a fork, make appreciative noises over her culinary skills and generosity. And now . . . now she didn’t know what to do. So after she freed herself of the pie, she left the market without buying anything at all.

The next weekend she came with a list she had scribbled with the intention of keeping herself on track. She avoided the aisle that had held the funny table, but then, while fingering some skeins of bulky yarn—she was trying to learn to knit—she saw in her peripheral vision the colorful cotton bedspreads draped over bamboo poles, and the head of thick, dark, wavy hair. Miranda turned to look, and as she did, she knocked a soft ball of wool off its perch and into the grass. She squatted to pick it up and realized that it was not him at the table after all. The wares were the same, but the hair belonged to a woman with brown eyes, dark in a way that had little to do with their color. Suddenly, Miranda felt that she’d imagined him. Not just then, but the other day as well. He was a dream, a fantasy. There were two other women at the table. One with graying hair falling in corrugations down her back and another with blonde hair roughly cut to just below her chin. It looked, Miranda thought, as if someone had gathered the woman’s hair into a ponytail and chopped it off with pruning shears.

She twisted the ring on her finger. He had to have been real, she thought. She had the ring to prove it.

She bought two large boxes of imperfect tomatoes and a bag of onions. They’d been grown in hoop houses, she figured, so they’d be less flavorful than what she’d get later in the season, once the summer was in its full hot-and-humid swing, but these would be fine for making salsa and sauce. She’d can a bunch for the winter. The task would keep her busy for a few days with chopping, cooking, boiling. She loved listening to the satisfying pops of the metal lids sealing themselves as the jars cooled. The sauce would be delicious with those thick, almost-obscene ropes of venison sausage.

The market was winding down for the day. The tourist season had been slow this year, the weather uncooperative, the blackflies brutal. The locals didn’t come much. They couldn’t afford to buy organic produce. Most people around here gardened organically by default—not because they cared about pesticides but because they couldn’t afford them. Miranda came back to the market only a few more times that summer. She didn’t really need anything. Picked up some yarn and a variety of squash she didn’t grow herself. More of that coffee that she liked. The stuff Dix called “fancy.” She never set up a stall herself. And the table with the twisted lids on jam jars and jewelry made from scrap did not appear again.

What Dix noticed was not the ring, not at first, but the new and nervous motion of Miranda’s fingers. Thumb tucked into the palm, pushing, twisting, fluttering as she spun the little metal spiral. He felt that Miranda was both unconsciously challenging him to notice and also counting on his not noticing. She thought he didn’t notice much. Especially when it came to her. This was a new complaint, fresh and sharp as the first cold snap of impending winter.

“There could be a bear in the living room and you’d walk right by without breaking stride,” Miranda had said recently, apropos of nothing.

“Not noticing and not minding are two different things,” he’d replied. “Besides, the bears around here find berries a lot more appetizing than me.”

He had said that hoping to make her smile. Something that seemed harder and harder to do.

“Anyway, if there was a bear in the living room, it would probably be just looking for one of your delicious pies.”

She stared at him, hearing his words but not taking them in. There was that sheen of sadness again, a spill that she sometimes blinked back and that other times seeped over the entire surface of her eyes. This was a new sadness. It hadn’t been there that first month, when she lived in the cottage, when he’d have expected it, after all the tragedy had come and gone and left its path of quiet destruction behind. It wasn’t there when she started spending more time with him in the house, sharing the meals she cooked as a thank-you for the cottage. It wasn’t there that first time he’d kissed her, which was the last night she’d slept in the cottage. It wasn’t there when her mother died, in the deepest part of the winter. She’d seemed sad then, of course, but also relieved that the woman was out of her misery. And that Miranda was also out of hers. No, it had come into her eyes a few months ago. A darkening of the light that had once and always seemed to radiate outward from her pale blue orbs. It came on with the spring, an inverse of the season.

“You mean not caring,” Miranda said, her thoughts lingering back before his joke.

“What?” he asked, not following her train of thought.

“It’s not that you don’t notice because you don’t mind,” she said. “It’s that you don’t notice because you don’t care.”

He wanted to tell her that not caring was not necessarily a bad thing in a lot of situations. Caring about inconsequential things took up time and space and energy that could be used for other, more productive things. Like adjusting the sagging barn door so it would close properly this winter.

“I care about you,” he said. “I care about you very much.”

He hoped this statement, true and sincere, would bring her to him, send her into his arms. But instead, she turned her head away, frustrated that he would not argue with her, and left him there at the kitchen counter, alone, where they had been standing side by side, sipping tea.

Dix wondered if she was mad at him for something. He mentally skimmed over his behavior and their interactions recently, and he could find nothing obvious to point to, nothing tweaked in the companionable rhythm they had eased their way into. He figured, at some level, this moodiness was her understandable, if delayed, melancholy working its way out, a splinter that had dug itself in under the skin and was starting to erupt, carried forward on a small wave of pus. He also thought she was trying to provoke him, punish him somehow for something that was not of his doing. Because who else was there to punish for all she’d been forced to bear? Everyone else was dead. He forgave her. Over and over, he forgave her.

There was also the pregnancy. Or the lack of a pregnancy. He didn’t understand why she was in such a hurry. At first they’d just been careless with birth control. They had been so hungry for each other. It was as if, after all those years of knowing each other from a distance, hired hand and employer’s daughter, they had some kind of catching up to do. They spent hours in bed, exploring each other’s bodies, discovering the parts of each other that had been kept hidden. Miranda started joking that if they weren’t more careful, there’d be little Dixes running around. She had moved very quickly from teasing to disappointment, though. She started wondering if something was wrong with her. She became fearful that she’d never be able to be a mother. He soothed her and made love to her and told her to stop worrying. It didn’t help. She insisted he get tested. She insisted she get tested. There was nothing wrong with either of them. He was excited by the idea of becoming a father but was in no hurry. He kept reminding her that they had plenty of time, that she was so young, just twenty-four years old. The doctor said the same thing. But she was impatient. An impatience Dix felt had to do with more than just waiting for a child to come. He was afraid she wanted a child so badly to replace the family she’d lost. Or, perhaps worse, to give herself something to do. To find a way to fill the emptiness of her days and postpone the more difficult quandaries of deciding what she wanted to make of her life, of figuring out who she wanted to be. She was young, he reminded himself. Again. The same excuse he used for her over and over.

He didn’t understand her increasing irritation with him. He knew he was somewhat maddeningly un-provoke-able. He tended to walk away from arguments. He didn’t much mind about the twisting tunnels of feelings that so many people got tangled up in. If a person wanted to get lost in the dark passages of her own emotions, well, fine, but he had no time for such things. He also did not know what to say or do to fix other people’s feelings or those sorts of things. His practical experience told him that when you tried to repair something without fully understanding how and why it got broken in the first place, you tended to make things worse. He thought he knew how Miranda had gotten out of true; he’d seen the events that warped her emotions, but he did not know how to help her get realigned.

So he watched and waited, and Miranda’s face did what it often did these days. It got still and flat, and in that stillness, he knew there was some particularly female sort of pain he might never be able to comprehend. He watched as she began to fret over all those things that not only didn’t matter to him but hadn’t ever mattered to her, either. Things like a few flecks of mud falling from the bottom of his pants to the floor. Another chicken killed by a fox. The tangy smell of manure that wafted through the valley when the farmers spread it on their fields. These were all just normal country things. Things she used to laugh about.

And there were those other things she worried herself over now. Why the Simpsons hadn’t asked them back after that one party. Whether she should serve fish or just put burgers on the grill for the two of them on a Sunday night. Should she volunteer somewhere or take a class? If the people at the local garden center would be mad that she hadn’t come to buy hanging baskets this year, like she had the previous spring.

“They won’t care,” he said, confused. “They won’t even realize.”