Along comes an Ed in plump cheeks and slim chest and pants ready for wash a year before, two. He arrives in Ada’s hand, the girl all limb and pink and teeth and them mice through the vineyard’s gravel, its grass Finn took a scythe to, her initial hesitation growing minutes to an hour’s half to the full hour while she considered all that broad mattress: for game, the hawks’ hunting grounds, a pit-stop for varmints who’d built tunnels in the soil and surfaced in the clotted darkness, faces twitching with new air.
Her tool she found rusted and leaning in the pumphouse, and a day the week prior she quit her apologies and put her head down and thwacked, until a brother came to buzz her ragged job flat with a mower, him switching it off and dismounting in an hour to meet Finn ready with a jar of water, a biscuit made the night before, poor in shape and retention of self and so, in one bite, disintegrating to the brother’s beard where all its pieces reminded Finn of pictures of people in small overseas towns, bodies leaned out windows to watch a street’s action, to catch the news. She’d impulsively grinned.
Said the brother: I’ve learned to leave baking alone. He’s the god in there, this brother said, and his easy mouth thrilled Finn, to hear him speak so they felt familiar. Well, said Finn. He better get selling so I don’t cause anymore wrecks.
This brother nodded, his overalls bags about his legs, his chest, all of him fatless and taught. Watch your porch, he said, and narrowed an eye briefly, then turned back for the mower, mounted, cranked it, and returned across the road.
Finn remained jar-and-crumb-handed in the gravel drive whose weeds – queen anne’s lace, clover, thistle, dandelion, radish – she’d beaten that morning. The borders were still wild, tips and tops of trees, mostly, that Finn could see, surviving it all. She clucked. Don’t get comfy, she warned aloud, thinking this and mine and here and I at once, a manifestation of warmed pockets in the joints and breast of her, a crush of home.
Now, after silent seconds behind Finn in the grapes working, here’s Ada finally using Finn’s name, a first, Finn will think later, once recovered from the logistics of them there, right behind her so suddenly, Ada’s usually soft single-note voice a new and urgent Finn, as if needing Finn awake, as if fire or alarm.
Whoa! yelps Finn and throws hands in the air, pruners slick in the handles and quick from her grasp and the suckers she’s been at kept in her fist, As if, she’s able to think, I’ll use them for a switch. Unbalanced, she sprawls at their feet, squinting sky that’s bright owl down, the two youth nimble with tossed shears, boy stepping back to give them space to land beaked where he’d been.
We come in peace, he mocks, hands out like Finn’s the something new and unpredictable.
Ada’s quick to squat at Finn’s head, hair cropped to the line of her chin where the day before it had been long, a twin of Ara’s while Ara’s twin Al wore a head worked in a brother’s clippers to fuzz. Just be a boy, Ara had said at a table Finn sat with the sisters and brothers and bowls of baby greens and roasted beets and chilled potato soup and a wild loin cut to pretty pink dials on a juicy board. Be a sheep, Al had replied, and Ara had set her mouth to its wordless mode for the remainder of the meal.
Finn says now, Always a treat, and pushes to her elbows, then to sitting, then takes Ada’s hand to finally stand. Finn, she says, offering to shake which Ed accepts, his hand as slight as hers, long and bony fingers, all his flesh, Finn thinks, up in those cheeks, perhaps the caps of his knees she thinks, then thinks to not think of his knees, her heart erratic, her face roasting.
Ed’s a friend, says Ada, and Finn nods inelegantly because here she is snorting, cackling, acting like another sister, one older who Ada’s never had to navigate, protective in indelicate ways. There: Ada’s blush.
You got your work cut out, says Ed, lifting his chin. His lashes glow white, eyebrows pale too, and his hair beneath its grime is coarse, his last touch a twist still peaked front to back. Finn quits him for the yard, the plants, their rows beginning to show more than not, her days out causing order, her hands first timid, wringing, then less so, then firm, those pruners found and oiled and worked at the base of each trunk or in the canes’ thick web, Finn feeling as if both creating and crossing off the list as she went.
What’s your work? Finn asks.
Nothing, Ada blurts, and Ed’s eyes roll and he gives the girl’s shoulder his hand briefly, then slides it down that arm a way to make Finn recall her hand like that back in all those lakes, their damp and bug swarms. She swallows.
School was, says Ed, nodding now. But I’m done and didn’t try for anywhere else, you know?
You’re feeling things out, Finn offers.
I’m feeling things out.
Liar, blurts Ada again.
Coyote, thinks Finn.
Ada, he shakes.
Ed, she snipes. He’s with us—
A. Da.
—and the brothers’ll need him but you could use him over here, too. He’s useful. You’re smart, she says.
Don’t worry about it, he tells her and Finn watches him not grab any point of Ada now, curving instead a fist to knock his own thigh while up high his jaw beats.
Finn shrugs. I wouldn’t be doing you any favors. I can’t pay you beyond what company I make out here, which isn’t much. I haven’t had to talk to anyone longer than this in a month, and I’m good at it, the quiet, and I like it.
Ed grins at his feet, his mouth someone, almost, we see him nearly, those short and square and gapped teeth too familiar when paired with those cheeks, how, beneath his draping shirt are pants hanging from bones we know we’ve been shone or spied upon before, edges we’ve wanted for ourselves when we were an Ada age as our people before us, a witness of cells, and if we wait enough to see him act we think with Ada we might see, too, his mark like the mark that we know sat a similar waist, oblong and fawn and furred, the shape of a dressing, as if covering wound which it’s not but we think that perhaps, just maybe, beneath there is some gate, some crossing to the when we think of, those accordion years.
Coins whisper in Ed’s pocket and he removes one, tosses it, catches and smacks it on the back of his hand. Tails, Ada and Finn call in tandem, and their near shoulders draw nearer and press. The boy’s bent mouth cracks each watching chest and undresses all knees of suspension. There go Ada and Finn, leaning.
He removes his palm and all of them look and he says, Heads, nodding his own.
