Laugh (32 page)

Everyone leaned forward a little at PJ’s
babe
but he didn’t notice, because he was only noticing Lacey.

Sam thought,
Here is another love I missed.

Lacey’s love for this work, her finding her passion, her immersion in this clinic wasn’t just about showing him up, it was about her getting lost in the work of her life.

“What about you, Sam?”

“Hire me.”

“As a doc?”

“Yeah. I’m not smart enough to be a nurse.”

“Okay,” Lacey said.

“Great.”

“But the offer’s contingent on your license.”

“That seems fair.”

Then Sam and Lacey shook hands, and Sam felt better, for the first time in days. He’d have his patients. His exam room. He’d be helping, working for the people he loved in the neighborhood he loved, being a part of something.

If he was lucky, maybe he’d be a farmer, too.

He’d like that.

“Hey Father,” Sarah said.

Daniel looked up from a big bite of the pie. “Yeah?”

“Did you get my email about the wedding?”

“I did. Ready to go.”

“I feel like all kinds of shit is just all settled up,” Mike said. “I think this is fucking magic pie.”

Sam just looked at Lacey. The color in her face hadn’t gone away. She was tracing a pattern into the Formica of the breakfast bar. She wasn’t smiling, and she seemed far away.

So he looked at PJ, who said, in his new telepathic way,
She’s okay.

So Sam believed that she was. He believed that he had done the best that he could. The best you could do didn’t always work out, but it sometimes did.

Or maybe it always did, in some way.

It was okay though, it had everything he needed for the normal measure of faith.

His parents and his home had given him that much.

“What are you looking at?”

Tay was swinging in her chair hammock while Nina sat at her picnic table with her laptop.

“An email from my dad.”

“What about?”

“About how their farm evaluates the migrant workforce they use and all the regulating bodies.”

“I thought he was going to write about what it was like for him and your mom.”

“I don’t think he wants to, so he started talking about all of this stuff. It’s interesting, hearing about his management of the hands. There’s a way I can kind of read between the lines about his experiences in migrant labor by hearing what decisions he makes on behalf of the workers.”

“You think you’d ever let Paz Farms contract with guest labor?”

Nina watched Tay’s chickens forage around the edges of her patio for a long moment. “How would you feel about that?”

“I don’t know. I heard about a lot of seriously upsetting practices when I was with big ag.”

“I don’t know either. There isn’t enough support for guest workers, globally, for them to have protection, so then you’re depending on the word of independent contractors, and there’s too much power imbalance for the workers to speak up. I think my dad has it good because he can talk to a lot of people, has trust with the workers, and is in a supportive community.”

Nina read through her dad’s email again, looking less at the information, looking more for a story. She had started talking regularly to her mom again, without planning phone calls, just to talk, and while her mom was never one to talk about anything too serious, it was nice.

Nina was so many things to so many people.

It was nice to be a daughter again.

“Hey Nina?”

“Yeah.”

“I want to hire somebody.”

Nina looked up from her computer and Tay had spun in her hammock chair to face her. She had questions stuck in her mouth, but she stayed quiet. The insects sang in the meadow grass around Tay’s place.

For once it wasn’t too hot, but the cooler weather wasn’t why she had chills.

“If it would be okay. I should have talked to you, but I’ve already asked around. I’ve gotten a few responses. I actually know a lot of people, and of course you’ll have the final say, but I think I could find someone great. Someone who sees Paz the same way I do, as part of some larger system—a larger system of people and of the land.”

“I don’t want—”

“Oh, baby, I know. I don’t want it either. I thought I wouldn’t mind getting reports from Adam and going over them every night. Calling plays from the sidelines like the fat coach no one can bear to tell to go home. But I don’t. I don’t like it at all. It’s never what I wanted to do. I could never do what you do, talking to the producers and running all over the place, learning how to make those pivot table things.”

“Adam said that—”

“Yeah, he had the same look on his face that you do right now. I know you guys want me to just do things that make me a placeholder in my own life, but what I’ve realized is that that isn’t my life anymore.
This
is my life. Learning about my body and taking it through this war. It’s what I’m supposed to be doing. I want it to be what I
am
doing, and that doesn’t make any sense, but I do. It’s a process I need to fully participate in.

“Adam is a process I need to fully participate in. I want him to call me because he saw a bird on my bird list or has gossip about one of our friends or was just thinking about me. I don’t want to talk about Paz and culverts and new scales for the farmer’s market.”

“Tay,” Nina said, but she couldn’t continue now that her voice was full of tears and anger, too. She hadn’t planned for this either. She thought about her conversation with Adam about the pepper field, her indecision. Thought about when Tay had told her she had told Adam
yes
and something inside of her hadn’t wanted it. Hadn’t wanted any of it. To make the decisions.

To
have
to make the decisions.

Yet here it all was anyway. All of it. Everything kept moving whether she planned or made decisions or turned away from them.

There wasn’t a present; it was all future, until it wasn’t, until it was taken away.

“This is my life, Nina. Please be my friend in this life.
Please.
I want to find the joy in this life, too, I don’t want my joy to be nothing but hope and wishes and a kind of yearning that I get back to some other thing. I don’t want my only joy to be that my life is something to be made the best of, mostly for the benefit of other people. I’ve watched people I love live a life like that.”

Then Tay leaned over and put her hand over Nina’s. “If I live the life I have been given, Nina, I will
live.
If I
survive
, I might find that what’s on the other end of survival isn’t something I wanted, anyway. Let me live, please, Nina. Be my very best friend in this and Let. Me. Live.”

Nina got up and lurched into the hammock chair with Tay, put her arms all the way around her, put her
face in her neck, and let Tay comfort her, because in this, Nina had no idea. None. She had no idea. She had no ideas. She didn’t have the ideas that lit the way out.

Trust. She would have to trust this woman like she had never trusted her, not even with her fields or her livelihood, all the pieces she had put together with her life.

She was trusting Tay with life, and that she would live a life with joy in it and that she
had
joy in her life.

“I’ve never done this before” was what Nina finally said.

“I know.”

“No, I mean I have never done this thing where I believe that there is joy, I have never done that thing, I have never believed that thing. I have never done this.”

“Shh,”
said Tay. “I
know.
”

“Why does it hurt so much to think about? Why don’t I want
joy?
”

Tay laughed and put her strong hands in Nina’s hair. “I think it’s because joy is easy, Nina. It’s easy, so we think we haven’t earned it, or that it’s not for us. We don’t have the muscle that lets us feel it. You know the first time I thought of this?”

“No.”

“When I told you and Rachel, that day in the café, what the doctors had found and you both got up and put your arms around me. I wasn’t crying because I was sad. I remember looking down at both your arms crossing over each other’s protecting me and my body, and it made me cry because I was so joyful I had all that love in my life, that I had arms around me. I felt joy, and it was a creaky, rusty, uncomfortable feeling. I wondered how good it would feel if I gave in. If I started to get used to it. Look for it.”

“I love you,” Nina said.

“I love you, too. Get used to hearing it. All the time. Let me get used to hearing it from you. Let everybody get used to hearing it from you.”

“I love you. I love you.”

“I love you, too, Nina Paz.”

They swung back and forth in the hammock chair for a long time. Toeing the ground and spinning, slow.

It took all the time for Nina to feel like she could breathe, and not trip over tears, but even when she cried more, Tay just squeezed her.

“Hey, Neens?”

“Yeah?”

“Can you help me out with something else, before you go?”

“Of course, whatever you need.”

Tay laughed. “It’s gonna be fun.”

* * *

“Oh shit.” Sam leaned back and almost fell of the stool.

“That’s right, baby, it happens.”

“But that is a lot of shit.”

“Just keep going, don’t lose your rhythm.”

“I can’t help it, every time I look at you, I lose my rhythm.”

Sam adjusted his hold on the goat’s teat, and tried for another compression and a pull, his brow wrinkled.

Nina ran her hand over the smooth skin of her scalp and grinned at him, how serious he looked.

“You don’t like it?”

Sam looked up and squinted at her, and stopping made the doe shove her bony hip back into his shoulder so he would keep going.

“It makes your eyebrows look like they take up your entire face.”

Nina laughed. Sam looked at her again and laughed, too. Then shouldered the goat’s butt back away from his body.

“She likes you.”

“I like her, actually, but this is taking for fucking ever. I’ve had surgeries take less time than this. You milked yours in the time it’s taken me to figure out how to sit on this stool without falling over.”

The little milking shed was warm, even with the door open to the alley. Laverne and Shirley’s goatherds were on something they called “a babymoon” in Jamaica, and had asked Nina to milk their city goats while they were gone in exchange for extra shares of the cheese and milk they sold to Paz Farms.

It seemed like a good job for an out-of-work doctor to do.

She heard a hard stream of milk hit his sterilized bucket.

“Hey! There you go, Opie!”

“Yeah, baby. I’ve got this. Fucking boss of goat milking.”

The funny part was that he
was.
Once he got the feel of it in his hands, he looked like he’d been doing it his whole life. Shirley leaned against him and dozed, and if a goat could smile, she was doing it.

Sam stood up, carefully pulling out the milking bucket, and held it up, triumphant.

“You see that, farmer? Make me some fucking cheese.”

Nina laughed and took the bucket from him, and showed him how she strained it, decanted it into another sterilized jar.

“I’ll let it cool down in their fridge, and tomorrow we’ll take everything we milked today and put it through their cream separator. They separate their cream out to control for fat levels in their cheese.”

“We have to be here at three thirty in the morning again?”

“You don’t have to, if you don’t want to.”

“My idea is that we just fuck all night, and then we don’t have to get up at all.” Sam kissed her in the middle of her close-shorn head.

“Watch your language in front of the ladies.”

Sam leaned back against the counter while Nina put away the milk. He looked like that surfer boy again, had been looking like him more and more over the last month as they transferred the clinic to Lacey.

She liked her farmer-doctor surfer boy.

Loved him.

“Thanks for showing me this today, Nina. You said, but I can’t believe there’s goats right here in the middle of the city.”

“Chickens, too.”

“Oh, yeah. Those chickens. We should visit them, they probably miss me.”

“Kate told me you already visited them. That she caught you in her yard,
cuddling
them. She almost called the police.”

“Nah, she’s a nice lady. She wouldn’t’ve called the police.”

“She said she fed you lunch. That you said you were going to start coming by to help her with the chickens sometimes.”

“You jealous, baby? Worried I’m gonna charm chicken ladies all over town?”

Nina put her arms around him. “As long as you come home to your farmer every night, I guess I don’t mind.”

His body stilled in her arms, and she laid her head against his chest, smiling. When he recovered, he squeezed her close. Her shaved head felt strange with his breath against it. She hadn’t even looked in the mirror, though Tay had taken pictures of them. When she found out the chemo drug that targeted the kind of cancer she had would make her lose her hair, Tay had wanted to make sure to avoid what could be a frustrating and sad experience and replace it with something fun.

Nina found out and, looking on the internet for the best way to cut off and shave Tay’s dreads, also found out that there were places that would take her long, cut hair as a donation to make wigs for cancer patients.

It
had
been fun.

“You know, this is probably going to grow back in all gray.” Sam put a hand on top of her head, and she got goose bumps from the big, warm feel of it against the newly sensitized skin.

“I came by all my gray honestly, so I don’t mind.”

“I’ll miss your braids, but you’re beautiful no matter what.”

“I’ll have braids again. Long gray ones.”

“Silver vixen.”

She leaned back and kissed his chin, his throat. “Yeah.”

“You have time to come someplace with me after we take care of these ladies tomorrow?”

She looked at his face, and it was serious.

“Of course.”