The Tractor

You fall asleep around four with your phone on your chest, and when you wake up at six it's still warm.

You scroll up before you get out of bed. You don't mean to. The conversation is there, all of it, her messages in gray and yours in blue, the way she types in lowercase like she's trying not to raise her voice, the brackets. You find you're smiling at the ceiling like an idiot, and you make yourself stop, and then you do it again in the shower.

When you come downstairs your mother is at the stove and Fiora is at the kitchen table in the ball cap, eating a tortilla straight off the comal with her fingers.

"She was on the porch at five-thirty," your mother says. "Like a cat. I let her in, Ethan. What was I going to do?"

"I wanted to ask you something," Fiora says, chewing. "In person. It felt like an in-person question."

"Okay."

She swallows. Puts both palms flat on the table, very serious. "How do you drive a tractor?"

The tractor is a 1994 Kubota, orange gone to the color of a pumpkin left out after Halloween. Your father bought it used and swore at it in two languages for twenty years. It lives in the equipment barn next to the forklift and the old bins, and it smells like diesel and hay and a little like him.

Fiora walks all the way around it with her hands in her back pockets, like she's checking out a car on a lot.

"It's smaller than I thought," she says.

"It's a vineyard tractor. It has to fit between the rows."

"In the movie it was enormous. I was a farmer's widow. It was very sad. There was a lot of staring at the horizon." She climbs up onto the seat before you've said she can. "They had a stunt woman do the actual driving. I just sat on it while it was parked and looked brave."

"So you've sat on a tractor."

"I've sat on a tractor with great emotional depth."

You show her the clutch, the gears, the throttle, the lift for the implements, the brake. She listens with her whole face, the way she must listen to directors, nodding at each thing, repeating it back. Then she puts it in gear and lets the clutch out like she's dropping something hot, and the Kubota lurches forward eight feet and stalls.

She looks at you over her shoulder, eyes huge.

"Again," you say.

The second time it goes. The third time she gets it out of the barn and into the sun and onto the dirt road between the sauvignon blanc blocks, at roughly the speed of a brisk walk, and she lets out a sound you've only heard from kids on a roller coaster. You jog alongside. She's gripping the wheel with both hands and grinning so hard the dimple is a crater.

"I'm driving a tractor," she yells. "Ethan! I'm driving a tractor!"

"I see that!"

"Nobody's filming!"

"Watch the…"

She's looking at you instead of the road. The road curves left toward the barrel room. The tractor goes straight, toward the irrigation pond, which is green and cold and about six feet deep in the middle.

"Brake," you say. "Brake. Left pedal. Fee. Left pedal."

She stomps. The Kubota stops with its front tires a foot from the edge of the pond. A frog jumps in. Ripples go out across the green.

There's a long silence. Fiora is staring at the water. Her knuckles are white on the wheel.

Then she starts laughing, the snort laugh from last night, and she can't stop, and she slumps over the steering wheel with her shoulders shaking, and you lean on the big back tire because your legs have gone weak and you're laughing too.

"Don't tell anyone," she wheezes.

"Who would I tell?"

"I don't know. The Glare." She lifts her head. There are tears on her face from laughing, and the sun is behind her, and she's sitting on a rusted orange tractor in a flannel shirt with a hole in the elbow, and you think, without permission, that she is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen in your life. "That's a joke. I'm allowed to joke about it now. You said."

"I said that?"

"Last night. More or less. You said a lot of things last night." She tilts her head. "Some of them were very sweet. Some of them were about shower plumbing, Ethan."

Amadeo finds you at the crush pad an hour later, while she's back up on the hill with your mother, learning the difference between a leaf and a cluster for the third time.

He stands next to you while you hose down the press. He doesn't say anything for a while. That's normal. Amadeo can go a whole morning without speaking, and when he does, it usually means something.

"My granddaughter," he says finally, "has a poster of her. In the bedroom. Next to the horse."

You turn off the hose.

He doesn't look at you. He's looking up the hill at the two figures in the pinot, the small one with the silver braid and the tall one in the cap. "The lighthouse movie. She watched it nine times. She cried every time."

"Amadeo."

"I don't know anybody's name," he says. "I'm old. I forget." He puts his straw hat back on. "She's a good worker. Bad with shears. Good worker. Tell her to wear gloves."

He walks away. That's twenty-eight words, which for Amadeo is a speech.

At four you drive into town for gloves and the mail.

Valle Rosa is quiet in the afternoon. The light is going gold, the way she said, the hour that makes people want to live here. You park in front of the feed store and get a box of women's work gloves, size medium, and then a box of large because you're not sure, and then you stand there feeling stupid about it.

You go next door to the café for coffee. There's a man at the counter you don't know.

Valle Rosa is small enough that you know everybody, and everybody knows you, and anybody you don't know is either lost or selling something. This one is lanky and sunburned across the nose, maybe late thirties, in a fishing vest with too many pockets. He's got a camera bag on the stool next to him. A long lens sticks out of it, black and heavy, the kind people use at football games or on birds.

He smiles at you like you're old friends. "You local?"

"Born here."

"Great. Great." He sticks out a hand. "Wynton Farrugia. I'm a photographer. Freelance." He doesn't let go of your hand quite fast enough. "Maybe you can help me. I'm looking for someone."

He pulls out his phone and turns it toward you. It's a photo, grainy and zoomed in from far away. The Valle Rosa gas station. Pump number two. A gray hatchback with Oregon plates. A tall woman in a navy ball cap and a men's flannel, head down, sunglasses on, paying at the pump.

"Seen her?" he asks.