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“When she told you . . .”

“That she was the one I was gonna marry.”

I laugh. “When was that?” I know they got married pretty young, barely scraping by with Mom’s twenty-first birthday (and then bringing me along at the ripe old age of twenty-two). They’d been high school sweethearts, too, as far as I understood it. “What were you, twenty? Twenty-one?”

Now it was his time to grin beneath that big beard of his. “Hardly. I believe I was six.”

“Six?”

He pauses and puts up a finger. “No, no, we were in Ms. Tudor’s class. That was first grade, and I’d just lost both my front teeth in that sledding accident. I was seven.”

Seven.

Well, sure. Much better.

It sounds just like Dad, though, for this to happen. He’s one of those men who, while never bending his integrity, is happy to go along with most any plan of Mom’s. I could just see her now in her long braids and red ribbons, grabbing his hand and declaring they were going to spend the rest of their lives together happily ever after.

“Of course,” he continues, “I just sat with the plan until we were in tenth grade.”

“When?”

“When I asked her if she wanted a ride to the apple butter stirring at church. But yes. I was branded at the age of seven.” He sounds positively lighthearted about that plight of his. Like a sheep who never once considered rebelling against the farmer’s plans and going another way.

In a way, it’s jealousy inducing.

Sure, when I was growing up I’d heard the story of how he gave her a lift to the Maple Hills Apple Stirring Day at Maple Hills Chapel, and the rest was history, but I never paid too much attention to it before. And granted, I never really wished for a story like theirs when I heard it in years past. Now, however? After the wear and tear of adulthood, singed by the reality of taxes and electricity bills and bad dates, the idea of bebopping over to an overalled boy in your childhood who seems fairly well behaved and pliable to your great ideas, tapping him on the shoulder, and declaring that one day a decade in the future, he is to escort you to an apple stirring and provide you with a lifetime of wood fires and cheer sounds pr-et-ty good.

It’s funny how your mind can change after a few hard-hitting experiences.

“Well, seeing as I missed the boat on tagging my own seven-year-old in Ms. Tudor’s claim-a-mate class”—yes, the woman was still around—“you have any advice for me?”

“Don’t get invested until you thoroughly check up the family tree.”

Yes. The town is small. We all know the horror stories of those who accidentally dated second and third cousins.

“Besides that.”

“Don’t date anyone outside of Maple Hills.”

“Mom made you say that one. Next.”

He sighs.

“C’mon,” I say, “you’ve got thirty-one years together, forty if we’re going by the first-grade branding. Surely you have one or two pieces of advice.”

He sighs, rubbing his chin like he’s digging through decades of thought.

I level my gaze. “Seriously. I’m asking.”

“All right, Chloe,” he says at last, “I’ll tell you a story.” He pauses. Gives a hard look toward Mom through the kitchen window. And proceeds. “The fact is, there was someone, a man, in your mother’s life somewhere between first grade and married years.”

I could’ve dropped my book. “What?”

“I don’t know if your mom has ever mentioned him, in fact.”

“No, she hasn’t.” This is definitely news to me.

Definitely.