Page 20 of Broken Country

Gabriel is right: In the past few weeks I’ve spent more and more time at Meadowlands. Leo’s easy friendship—his quick laughter, his chatter, his curiosity—has consoled me more than anything else. It began with dog training. Before long I was pointing out wildflowers and teaching him to tell different birds apart, their colors, their sounds. All the things an urban child grows up without knowing.

“I wouldn’t like taking money from you.”

“You’d be taking it from the publisher, not me. I got a decent advance on this book, I’d want to be generous.”

Gabriel Wolfe as my employer, how would that feel? And how can I possibly expect Frank to agree to it?

He steps closer to me, so close I can smell the woody, cedary aftershave he’s wearing. I can see the muscles working in his jaw. “Can I say something?”

I nod, not trusting myself to speak.

“It’s made such a difference to Leo—and me—having you around. I only wish you didn’t feel you had to avoid me. I know it’s awkward with everything that happened. What I’m trying to say is, I’d really love it if you and I could be friends.”

“We are.”

“We’re not. You hardly ever come into the house. You always rush off as soon as I appear. You never stay for a cup of tea.”

“I have things to do here.”

“Beth. Look at me. Please.”

I do look and it becomes a kind of staring contest, the two of us gazing at one another long enough for it to become comical. Both of us smiling. In this moment, I feel like Beth Johnson, the farmer’s wife. There is nothing of Beth Kennedy, the teenager who once fell crazily in love with the man standing before me. I think,Perhaps we can do this. Perhaps we will be all right after all.

“I’ll have to talk to Frank. We decide everything together.”

“Of course,” he says. “And thank you.”

Over dinner Frank and I talk about the farm, its growing debt, a looming meeting with the bank that is worrying him. Smallholder farming doesn’t pay, it’s not something you do for the money. We struggle a little but never enough to sell up; the farm is our mutual passion, Frank’s and Jimmy’s and mine.

“Guess what I saw earlier?” Frank says. He’s watching me carefully, a look on his face I can’t quite read. “The kestrels are back.”

“They are not.”

“Yup. Didn’t have the binoculars so I couldn’t tell if the chicks have hatched yet, but I don’t think so. They’ve just arrived, I’m sure.”

We had nesting kestrels in one of our ash trees three years in a row, and Bobby was obsessed with them. Frank built him a hide opposite the tree out of a wooden stepladder with a beer barrel for its seat and he’d spend hours up there, binoculars trained on the nest, counting the chicks as they hatched. Every day after school we’d go to the hide, waiting for the male kestrel to fly off in search of food, which he always did, sooner or later. Our favorite thing was when the chicks were a little older, big enough that we could see them waiting for the male to return, pink mouths open. We were always sad when they left the nest at around six weeksold, thrilled when they came back the following spring. The year Bobby died the kestrels stopped coming.

“Tomorrow I’ll come with you and take a look,” I tell him.

We carry on eating, but the conversation we need to have is nagging away at me, until I can no longer hold it in. “I’ve got something to tell you and you’re not going to like it. But it’s money.”

Frank laughs. “If it’s money, I’ll like it.”

“Gabriel has asked me to watch Leo after school. A couple of hours each day. Sometimes I’d be at Meadowlands but I’d like to bring him here. He’d love the farm. He’s mad about animals.”

“No, Beth.”

The change in his face, I hate it. You spend years looking at someone night after night across a table, you know every inch of him. I know from the set of his mouth, the hurt in his eyes, what Frank is thinking. It’s a precipice we are on, I don’t need him to tell me.

“We don’t need his charity. I’m surprised you’d even consider it after everything that happened.”

“It’s hardly charity, it’s a job. If I don’t do it someone else will. But I’m going to do it. For the money, yes. But mostly it’s the boy. It helps me, Frank.”

“It’s dangerous what you’re doing,” he says, quietly.

And there is nothing I can do but nod.

“I don’t want it to come between us,” I say, but he shrugs.

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