“I thought it would just stay put,” she says.

All it takes is common sense, for God’s sake. She looks up at me with this apologetic gaze and when she sees that isn’t going to work she runs after the sheep herself. She lunges for the ewe, but doesn’t see the manure heaped onto the hay. Naturally, she falls, smack in the middle of it.

I didn’t mean for anything like this to happen, honest. I expected to have a little fun with her, make the ol’ Newton girl see what a working farm is really like, and then I was going to take her down to Joley. But now that it’s happened, really, it’s a riot. To keep myself from laughing, I catch the sheep and throw all my attention into shearing her. I rub the shears up the belly, across the hinds, between the legs, around the neck. I use my legs and knees to pin her on her side while I run the shears over her flanks, letting the wool roll off like a carpet of snow. It’s perfect, from the inside, white with only a few spots of lanolin. It springs back at the touch, crimped with natural oils from the skin. In a few minutes when I am finished with the sheep, I slap her lightly on her hind leg. She springs up, looking back at me once, a little angry. She bolts away, down into the field with the other sheep.

I walk over to where Joley’s sister is rubbing her back up against the split rail. She’s doing everything she can to keep from touching the stuff. That does it for me; I laugh in her face. She smells awful; even her hair is encrusted with manure. “Tough break,” I say. What I really mean is: I’m sorry.

She looks so out of place and incredibly miserable that I rediscover my conscience. I’m about to tell her who I am, and how I didn’t really mean for this to happen, when she undergoes this transformation. It’s a physical thing-her shoulders square up and her chin lifts and her eyes get very dark. All of a sudden she has this attitude. “I’m sure this isn’t appropriate behavior for a field hand,” she tells me. “When I tell Joley about this, he’ll report you to the person who runs the place.”

“I’m not too worried about that,” I say dryly and I tell her who I am. I hold out my hand, and then on second thought, take it back. The girl introduces herself. She’s laughing, which makes me think she’ll turn out all right. “Come on,” I say. “You can get cleaned up at the Big House.”

I show them their rooms, figuring it’s the least I can do after that fiasco, and tell Jane she’s welcome to the clothes my mother left in her closet. They’ll be big, but she can figure it out. She near about slams the bedroom door in my face, and I walk downstairs to Rebecca again, who’s peeking into each of the drawers of an antique apothecary chest that came from my mother’s mother. “Nothing in there,” I say, catching her in the act.

She jumps a few feet into the air. “I’m sorry,” she says, “I didn’t mean to be doing that.”

“Sure you did. It’s okay. This is your house now. For a while, anyways.” I pull open one of the drawers myself, and take out an Indian head penny, 1888. I wonder if she knows that means good luck.

Rebecca starts to wander into the other rooms: the parlor and the blue tiled kitchen and the library, with wall-to-wall books, mostly on exotic places, that I’ve picked up over the years. “Wow,” she says, lifting a coffeetable book on the Canadian Rockies. “You’ve been to all these places?”

I walk into the library behind her. “You know what a mental traveler is?”

“It’s what I was before this summer.” She smiles at me, real open, like she’s got absolutely nothing to hide. I like her.

“I’m just going to sit outside. You can check out anything you’d like.” I leave her staring at an antique sextant propped over the mantel. “It’s for navigation,” I say, on my way out. She moves closer after I turn away, the old floorboards sigh under her weight.

It’s warm out, but not oppressive: it’s been that kind of a summer. I stare at my watch, impatient, which isn’t fair. It’s only been about four minutes since I left Joley’s sister, and she has to wash off anyway, and when you get right down to it it’s my fault she’s filthy. I glance over the orchard, which you can pretty much see in total from the Big House, trying to find Joley or Hadley or someone else who can take them off my hands. I’m not much good with visitors; I never know what to say. Especially in this case; I don’t expect a California woman to understand my life any more than I could make heads or tails of hers. My eyes run over the roads that separate the different stocks in the orchard, noticing which groups of trees need to be sprayed, which need to be pruned. I’m staring at these even rows, but I keep seeing her. Standing in the closet, pulling off her shirt. I jam my hands into my pockets and start to whistle.

When she comes downstairs, she’s wearing my mom’s madras sundress. It’s all these crazy peach colors, like a hot muggy sunset, and Dad gave her so much trouble about it being an eyesore she left it behind when she moved. It’s true, it looked too showy across her wide hips, but on Joley’s sister it’s almost elegant. It pinches at the waist where she’s wrapped it with an old handkerchief-can that possibly fit around her? Her arms, which are kind of thin for my tastes, peek out pale from the too-big cap sleeves. And those peach colors show up again in her cheeks, which makes it all seem to match.

She’s holding all the dirty clothes. “What should I do with these?”

My voice is not my own. It’s hoarse and it comes out uneven. “Wash them,” I say, and I turn and walk down the path before she notices the way I sound.

They catch up quick enough, and I try to keep from holding a conversation by telling them about the orchard. As Lake Boon comes into view at the foot of the orchard, I tell Rebecca it’s great for swimming, and just in case she fishes, I let her know there’s bass. I catch Jane looking around at the thick older trees in this section of the orchard-the McIntosh stock-and then taking note of the pond. When I walk past her I can smell lemons and fresh sheets. Her skin, even this close, reminds me of the inner edge of a crab apple blossom, flawless.

“Hadley!” I say. He steps off a ladder behind a tree he’s been pruning.-When I introduce him, he does everything I didn’t do at the barn. He takes Jane’s hand and pumps it up and down; he dips his head towards Rebecca. And then he gives me this look, like he knows right there and then he’s already outdone me.

He immediately drops behind to talk to Rebecca-it figures, Hadley’s a pretty quick judge of character-leaving me to hold a conversation with Jane. I think about just walking the next ten acres without saying a word, but I’ve been rude enough today. Well, Sam, I tell myself, they’ve just come from across the country. Surely you can think of something pertaining to that. “So,” I say, “I hear you’ve done quite a bit of traveling.”

She jumps, just like Rebecca did when I caught her looking in the apothecary chest. “Yes,” she says, sort of guarded. “All across the country.” She looks at me as if she wants me to evaluate what she’s said, and then that look comes over her again, that haughty I’m-leagues-beyond-you look. “Of course I’ve also been to Europe and South America with my . . . my husband’s research.” That’s right, Joley’s told me about the whale guy, and why Jane left in the first place. “Why?” she asks, “Do you travel?”

I smile and tell her I’ve gone all over the place, at least in spirit. But I can’t tell what she thinks of that, until she asks me flat out why I don’t just take a real trip. I try to explain why running an orchard is different from running any other business, but she doesn’t understand. Not that I’d expected her to.

“Where would you really like to go?” she asks, and right away I have an answer. I’d love to go to Tibet, just because of what I could bring back. I know technically it takes months to import agriculture products, and I’d never clear customs with a tree, but if I got a small enough series of grafts I could hide them in my luggage without a problem. Can you imagine what it would be like to bring back an original Spitzenburg, or an even older stock, and make it come alive again?