Chapter Twenty

July, One Year Later

I pressed my feet into the floor and rocked back, hoping the gentle sway of the chair would soothe the baby nudging me from within. No luck.

“Start the rolling pin at the center of the dough and roll outward,” I said. “Never back and forth.”

“That develops the gluten. Makes a tough crust,” Margaret added from the chair on my left.

Sarah pressed the wooden pin into the dough and rolled it away from her, brought it back to the center, and rolled it back.

“Perfect. Now just turn the dough a quarter turn.”

A little muffled snore escaped from Dotty, who was asleep in the rocking chair to my right.

Margaret stood up to inspect Sarah’s work. “Make sure you have enough flour under there so it won’t stick. But not too much.”

Sarah looked across the table at me, her eyebrows raised, and tentatively dusted the table with more flour.

“That’s it,” Margaret said, and went to put the kettle on to boil.

Sarah was baking her own entry for the Coventry County Fair apple pie contest. Margaret and I each planned to enter our own pies, and we were harboring a serious fantasy of the Sugar Maple taking all three ribbons. “It would be great advertising,” Margaret insisted. Not that we needed it. The Associated Press had somehow picked up the story the Coventry County Record ran, and several larger newspapers had published it. By the time the piece in Food & Wine came out, Margaret and the Sugar Maple were already all over Facebook and Twitter. Margaret handled herself with grace in every interview that followed and never once mentioned Jane White in the retelling, no matter how tempting it must have been. I’m pretty sure that’s why Margaret sent me on an errand every time a reporter came by.

Salty nosed his way into the kitchen, followed by a crawling Maggie, who was never far behind, and then her father. Martin swooped down to pick her up, and she squealed in delight. He stood behind my chair and kissed the top of my head as he deposited Maggie in my lap.

“Not too rough, Mags. Don’t hurt your baby brother.”

Maggie rested her head on my belly, which had just started to show.

“Hey,” I said, looking up and back at Martin’s upside-down face. He leaned down farther and kissed me once on the lips.

“Hey,” he said, one hand on my head, the other on Maggie’s. “I’m on my way to the house. Do you want me to take her with me?”

Margaret reached over and lifted Maggie off my lap and onto hers. “We’ll mind her.”

After the fair, Martin and I had moved in with Dotty, at her insistence. She acted as if we were doing her a favor, but that couldn’t have been more untrue. Dotty taught me how to take care of a baby, which ended up being much scarier, in my opinion, than actually giving birth, and I wasn’t alone while Martin finished the U.S. leg of his tour. Margaret joined us for supper most nights, and usually a few members of the extended McCracken family would wander in. Martin and I still slipped away to the sugarhouse from time to time, in search of some privacy, not having had much time for it to be just him and me. That explained Henry Junior, due on Christmas.

“Livvy, what do I do when the dough tears?”

I rocked myself up and sat down on Tom’s stool, propping my foot on Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase. “It’s okay, you can patch it, especially if it’s the bottom crust. Just try to roll it a little thicker next time.”

Sarah carefully folded the dough into quarters and pressed it into the pie tin. She was proving to be an excellent baker. After our double win at the fair, Margaret and I had been discussing the best place to hang our ribbons when she asked if I wanted to be part owner of the Sugar Maple. I said yes without hesitation, complete in the happiness of knowing that I could keep my family—my whole family, Margaret and the McCrackens, and Alfred and Sarah too—close at hand. Margaret taught me how to do the bookkeeping, and I still did almost all of the baking. Margaret took over the pies, of course. We couldn’t take her apple off the menu.

Just as Sarah closed the oven door, her pie safe in the oven, Salty gave a deep woof at the back door.

“I should head back. He needs a walk and she’ll be waking up soon.” Maggie lay sleeping on Margaret’s chest. I reached out to pick her up.

Margaret looked over at Dotty. “Why don’t you walk him back? I’ll run her home when they’re both awake.”

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I whisper-sang, kissing Margaret and her namesake on the cheek.

Salty and I burst through the back door and into the apple orchard. The branches were heavy with ripening fruit. Honeybees flew in lazy patterns among the trees under the warm late-afternoon sun. Salty bounded ahead when the sugarhouse came into view, waiting on the porch for me to catch up and then following me into the maple grove, tail high and wagging. A few leaves had turned a faded yellow, but the canopy above still glowed green. Salty herded the squirrels, which squawked back up into the trees. The air was cooler here and felt fresh against my skin. I ambled along, enjoying the rare moment of being with just Salty. For years I had thought it would always be just the two of us. Wife and mother were two roles I had never thought would be mine, but now I couldn’t imagine not being both. Not to mention a business owner, an aunt, and a sister-in-law. But it was being a daughter again that I found the most surprising. Margaret and Dotty teased me and comforted me and pestered me like I was one of their own. I knew both Henry and my dad would have approved. Wherever they were, I hoped that they had found each other and spent their days swapping tunes.

We walked the carriage path up the hill. The maples thinned, replaced by oaks and pines. When we came to the clearing, I sat down on the grass and Salty scratched at the ground, turned three circles, and lay down next to me with a sigh. Puffs of cloud moved across the deepening blue sky overhead. Before us lay the farm, now so familiar, white farmhouse dwarfed by the big red barn where the cider was kept, a shaggy vegetable garden that Martin, Dotty, and I had planted in the spring. Mabel and Crabapple in a pen. Home, I said to myself, the word still new on my tongue. I stood and patted my thigh with my palm. “Come on, Salt.”

Salty sprang up and brushed past me. I watched as he bounded toward the farmhouse, racing with abandon, his long legs outstretched, ears flying back, nose in the air. I followed him across the green grass and into the field, the hay high and ready for reaping.