And Tom thought—he is a much better person than I am. If Tom fell in love and got married, he wouldn’t want his wife in another state. If he was newly married and about to deploy in a few months, he wouldn’t be happy about his wife not being around. Proving that he’d really screwed up by directing the conversation to her dead husband, she fell silent. He wasn’t sure what was worse, the silence or the conversation about drug trials and expense accounts. Finally he pulled into the square in Arcata and found a parking place.

“The only sushi place I know about is crappy and, I guessed, probably beneath your standards. How do you feel about Mediterranean?”

“Wonderful!” she said, beaming, quiet mood gone. And she held her place in the car until he came around and opened her door for her.

Darla seemed pleased with his choice of restaurant; she appeared to be back to her bright-eyed self. After they’d ordered drinks, an appetizer and their entrees, she reached across the table and took one of his hands. “Thank you, Tom, for being such a good host, good date.”

“I am?”

“You really are.” She laughed. “I look forward to these weekends with you. I hope you’re enjoying them as much as I am.”

“Totally.”

“I researched your orchard last week, in between other assignments for my class. It’s very well-known, you know.”

“Is it? Well-known to whom?”

“That’s what I love most about you—you’re so modest,” she said. “You have a laptop—search Cavanaugh Apples on Google sometime. The foodie sites love you. You’ll learn a lot about yourself.”

He lifted his eyebrows. “Is there anything I don’t know about myself that I should know?” he asked.

The drinks came, the stuffed grape leaves. And Darla laughed at him. “I’m not sure. Do you know you have forty acres and two hundred and fifty trees with roughly twenty-eight types of apples? You’ve been the primary supplier in the county for twenty years. And most of your forty acres are still undeveloped and what’s considered to be prime real estate. And you have a very successful local cider business going on there. Cavanaugh is leading the pack in cider. You have quite a successful business.”

“Well, Maxie does,” he clarified.

“I was under the impression it was a family business,” she said, sipping her wine.

“It seems to be—it’s been in the family a long time. I had to make a choice between the Marine Corps and the orchard. Maxie can’t run it alone forever. Afghanistan helped me make the choice pretty easily.”

She sipped her wine thoughtfully. “Have you ever considered selling it?”

He devoured the stuffed grape leaves; Darla was apparently satisfied with one bite, half remaining on her plate. Funny, he was getting used to that—how she barely ate. “It was going to eventually come down to that, unless I made the decision to come home and run it. Maxie won’t retire till she’s on her last legs, but I’m not oblivious to the fact that she’s getting older. And a little slower, though not mentally,” he stressed. “We had a major showdown about the ladder last year. Junior, our foreman, brought to my attention that she’d fallen a couple of times. Even though she hadn’t been hurt, he could smell disaster coming and had no influence in convincing her to get an employee to climb the ladder if there was something she wanted done.” He laughed to himself. “Maxie’s been up on tripod ladders since she was just a kid, pregnant with my dad. She doesn’t really think she needs to slow down. And it probably keeps her young.”

“It’s a shame,” Darla said. “She deserves a much more relaxing retirement!”

“Like?” Tom asked, taking on the rest of the grape leaves.

“Like a low-maintenance home where people do all the hard stuff for you. In a nice place, like near the ocean. Where there are lots of people and activities and life is finally about fun rather than back-breaking work. But if anything should go wrong, like a fall or illness, there are trained professionals nearby. At the orchard, if Maxie falls off a ladder, it’s only you or Junior to help her. Or if she, God forbid, had a stroke…”

He stopped chewing and stared at her. He had never thought of that. In this place, in the country, people got old on their land and, unless they moved away to live with their children or grandchildren, they often died on their land. If they had an accident or got sick, their family took care of them.

Darla picked up the last piece of her stuffed grape leaves and popped it in her mouth. “We put my grandmother in assisted living last year. She didn’t think she wanted to go, but now she loves it. She’s the community poker champ, can you beat that? And it’s in a really beautiful Colorado Springs valley with glorious views, near enough we can visit her and bring her to visit us for weekends, where there are walking trails and all kinds of fun things for the residents to do. She’s so grateful now.”

“Is she,” Tom said in passing. Many things about Darla made him wonder. And then at the risk of slowing the conversation again he said, “I have such a hard time picturing you as the wife of a career marine… .”

To his surprise, Darla laughed. “Career marine? What gave you that idea?”

“Well, Bob gave me that idea when he said that was his intention… .”

“Was,” she stressed. “When we got married he had pretty much given up that idea. I had a job all lined up for him—my dad has a golf buddy with a soft water conditioner manufacturing plant who wanted to add to his management team and Bob, being a smart, decorated marine, was perfect. Good salary, too.”

Tom wondered if Bob just talked about a career in the Corps in front of his boys to encourage them when in fact he was planning to exit and get a civilian job in a factory. But Bob didn’t seem like that kind of guy.

And the dinner arrived.

“Oh, my God,” Darla said, looking down at her Greek salad. “Have you ever seen so much food?”

Tom knew there would be a doggie bag, and not for Duke. But that was after he had a satisfactory taste of Darla’s uneaten dinner.

She lifted her fork, poised over her salad, and asked, “So, Tom, if you sold your orchard and looked for another line of work, what would you do?”

Tom had chicken kabobs—looked wonderful. He stabbed his fork into a wonderful cube of chicken and said, “Just out of curiosity, what do you have lined up for me?”

She laughed merrily. “You’re so funny.” She lifted one lovely light brown brow. “Well, there’s that manufacturing job, still open…”

He didn’t find that particularly funny. “There is nothing else I want to do.”

“But it’s exhausting,” she counseled.

“And if it ever becomes too much work at the harvest or the planting, there are lots of people around here looking for work. But if Maxie can last seventy-four years, I can last longer.”

“You could actually invest the money you earn from the sale of the orchard, watch it grow, take care of Maxie in high style and begin another career.”

He chewed and noticed that she grinned excitedly. What had her parents invested in that smile? It was simply beautiful. He was also curious about her br**sts, so large and high and delicious-looking—he wondered if he would touch them and find them not real. That wouldn’t be an issue if he was in love, but he was beginning to realize he was not even close to in love. Still, he was curious.

Finally he came back to the present. He looked at her levelly and said, “I’m going to work the orchard till I drop dead.”

“Why?” she asked almost desperately.

“Because I just love apples.”

She made a gak sound in the back of her throat. And Tom laughed.

* * *

The drive back to Virgin River was a revisit of the drive away—a lot of talk about vacations, bonuses, expense accounts, perks. There was a little about drug trials and prescriptions thrown in there. Tom thought about introducing the topic of national health care but frankly he was tired. So he drove.

She asked him if he was happy living in an older home; she had purchased her home new with lots of upgrades like granite countertops, slate floors, cherrywood cabinetry. She could open her garage and turn on her hot tub from blocks away.

He told her he loved that old house. “I’ve never seen a really proper porch on a new house.”

Then they came to the orchard. Tom jumped out of the car, opened the gate, pulled in, jumped out and closed the gate, and as they were driving between the groves Darla said, “Tom, I want you to know how grateful I am for your friendship. If I didn’t have these little escapes to the orchard on the weekends, I don’t know what I’d do.”

“Huh?” he said.

“I’m lonely, so far away from my family. And with Bob gone…”

“Oh, man,” he said. He’d been so busy falling out of like with her, he’d forgotten she was lonely and widowed and all that. “Well, I’m glad it’s relaxing for you.”

“It’s a godsend, seriously. Like a rescue. And there’s all the other stuff—going out, which I haven’t done in so long. Home cooking. Fresh fall air. It’s all just wonderful. I look forward to it all week. I’ve been out on a few dates, but I hadn’t really expected to end up seeing a handsome, successful man with his own rather impressive business.”

“I grow apples,” he reminded her.

“Very popular apples,” she reminded him. “If you chose to sell that orchard to a commercial grower like Del Monte, you could really make a killing. But I hope not too soon—I love coming up here every weekend. It’s so lovely and quiet.”

He wondered if she knew his net worth. He didn’t, but he wondered if she did.

“Um, Darla. Next weekend might not be as relaxing. For a couple of weekends every October we open up the orchard for people to tour, visit, buy apples and other products. It might not seem like such a big deal, but the place is swarming. People come from everywhere. Typical of Virgin River—most of the town comes out. They shop, pick apples, bring their own ladders even. They bring their dogs, their kids, sometimes their grills. It’s big business.”

“Is it lucrative?” she asked.

He paused before he said, “It works for us. But it’s madness. And there is no home-cooked meal, no going out to dinner, no walk in the moonlight between the groves.”

“Oh, it must be so exciting!”

“You would hate it. It’s not fancy. It’s not prestigious. It’s a bunch of county people on ladders, picking, tasting cider and pies and throwing softballs around. It’s barking dogs, small children, shouting and laughing people, swarming all over the orchard, in the barn, in the house…”

“In the house?” she asked.

“They’re our friends,” he said. “They’re the town.”

“Wonderful!” she said. “Well, if the invitation stands, I’ll see you Friday late afternoon.”

* * *

Tom was up and in the orchard office by five-thirty and even though it wouldn’t be light for some time yet, Nora was there by six.

“Good morning,” she said. “I guess I thought you’d be sleeping in or enjoying one of those big country breakfasts. You do have company.”

“I’m sure she’s having sweet dreams,” he said. “What are you doing here so early on a Sunday morning?”

“Getting an early start. I’m planning to leave right at lunchtime if you’re sure you can spare me. Jed will be coming to the house. We were talking about a picnic, but with this weather…”

He smiled. “Still Jed, is he?”

“I’m working up to Dad, but it doesn’t come easy.”