Last Updated 10/24/2025

“On The Contrary Darling, You Can’t Afford To Ignore Me”

Jack’s morning had been going so perfectly until that damned car pulled up. She’d woken up before her alarm, done a preliminary walkthrough of the orchard, taking notes of any necessary maintenance, picked some of the less pristine apples to use in baked goods, and made it back home before Chris had even crawled out of bed. By the time her brother made it downstairs, Jack already had half a dozen apple strudels in the oven ready for the few customers who stopped by on the way to work for a morning treat.

“Mornin’,” Jack called through the pass window into the main dining area, as chipper as she could manage while still half asleep. Chris, closer to three-quarters asleep, nodded at her before making his way into the pantry to pull out a box of cereal.

“We’ve got a trellis out of order,” Jack said. “I’ll need your help fixing it while I’m minding the counter this morning.”

Chris sighed as he pushed through the swinging double doors into the kitchen in search of milk. As he moodily shuffled back into the dining area and slammed his bowl down a little too hard on the wooden table, Jack felt compelled to remind him that the orchard was the only thing keeping that bowl full, but she stopped herself. She’d grown up with the specter of the family business hanging over her head. She’d do her best to prevent Chris from feeling that same pressure. Instead, Jack made her way back into the kitchen to check on the pastries.

There was a time, not all that long ago, when Chris wouldn’t have had to tear through his cereal at one of the wooden benches and have it cleared before any customers showed up, but after their parents had gone they’d been forced to make a choice: keep the house, or keep the orchard and move into the small living space above the restaurant and gift shop. Seeing as the orchard was their only source of income, it hadn’t been much of a choice.

A crack like a gunshot from the parking lot announced Grauntie Bella’s run-down old pickup as she turned off County Road Q into the orchard’s large gravel lot. Their grandfather’s sister had initially been reluctant to leave the reservation in Green Bay, but the prospect of working the land had attracted her to come south. After all, the reservation had never actually been their ancestral land, and since nobody seemed eager to give them upstate New York back anytime soon, Bella saw growing crops on any land occupied by the settlers seemed like a revolutionary act.

At least that’s what she said, but she’d been largely reluctant to do any of the actual work maintaining the land. Instead, she’d decided to sell off the animals for the petting zoo and convert the barn into a cidery. Jack had initially assumed her great aunt wanted the cheap booze but was impressed by how quickly Bella had made deals with local bars and restaurants to serve it. As much as she missed the goats, Jack had to admit the cider business was more lucrative than the petting zoo, and a mite less smelly.

“Can’t Bella help you with repairs?” Chris said hopefully, glancing up from his corn flakes. Jack frowned, shaking her head.

“You want to send Grauntie up on those ladders? Besides, you know she’ll be out in the barn working on the cider most of the day.”

Chris grumbled unintelligibly. Jack raised her eyebrow at him.

“What was that?”

“I’ll fix the trellis” Chris said more clearly.

“Thank you,” Jack said, satisfied.

As Chris finished up his cereal, and Jack pulled the pastries out of the oven, the jingling of the front door preceded Grauntie Bella’s idea of a greeting.

“You won’t believe the morning I had coming over here, the way people drive in this town it’s a wonder I wasn’t killed—” Bella stopped herself short at the grim look on Jack’s face. Her eyes flitted from her grandniece to the picture of the young woman’s parents that stood over the mantlepiece.

“I’m sorry, you know I didn’t mean anything by it,” Bella said, pulling off her jacket and hanging it on one of the knobs next to the door.

“It’s alright,” Jack said, and meant it. She spent every day living with the burden of her parents’ untimely death, so the mere mention of how it happened caused her little additional pain.

“Well, if the accidents don’t get them, I’ll kill them myself,” Bella said, any sense of decency having been assuaged by Jack’s easy dismissal of her initial offense. “I swear, you’d think the speed limit was 25 the way these people drive.”

“The speed limit is 25 Grauntie, all through town,” Chris said. He’d started driving on his learner’s permit with Jack since he’d turned 15 in April.

“And since when did people decide to follow the law?” Bella asked incredulously.

Jack knew better than to try and correct her or pick a fight about anything. Grauntie Bella had said herself that she was “past the age of learning new things,” one of which seemed to be patience. Jack always laughed when she saw Native American women in movies depicted as stoic and spiritual, thinking of her fidgety and impatient old Grauntie who would sooner tell someone to “get fucked” than to “get in touch with their spirit animal.”

Jack had just started smiling to herself, imagining Bella telling Daniel Day Louis to eat shit, when the car pulled into the parking lot and ruined her morning.

Nobody in River Grove would drive an Aston Martin, especially not a bright yellow one. Even the wealthier families that lived in the town’s gated community, Hybernia, tended to drive more modest vehicles. Jack wouldn’t even have recognized the logo if Chris hadn’t recently become enamored with luxury car brands. Jack’s younger brother whistled as a short, slender woman stepped out of the car, though Jack couldn’t tell if it was directed at the sports car or its driver. Either way, she didn’t like it.

“Get out there and fix that trellis,” Jack snapped.

“Aw, come on. Don’t you know who that is?” Chris asked.

“Yes, I do. Now get.”

Grumbling, Chris made his way out the back door and into the orchard. As he did, Jack turned to her great aunt.

“Bella, take over the register, I’ll be in the kitchen.” Jack didn’t wait for a response, instead she pushed through the swinging double doors into the kitchen and tried to tuck herself as far back from the pass window as possible.

More jingling from the front door told Jack that Evella St. Clair had entered. As the town’s one and only celebrity approached the counter, Jack reluctantly thought that nobody had any right to look that good this early in the morning. She must’ve gotten up even earlier than Jack to put on a full face of makeup and curl her jet-black hair ever so slightly.

Evella cleared her throat softly before addressing Bella in the affected Mid-Atlantic accent she’d been forced to use in beauty pageants so often that it had simply become second nature to her.

“Hello, my dear, would you be able to tell me if Jacqueline Dumont is in today?”

“Who’s asking?” Bella asked, her suspicion evident in her tone.

“Well, me of course,” Evella said, her forced laugh dying after she was met with nothing but silence. “Evella St. Clair, me and Jack were friends when we were younger.”

Jack frowned. “Friends” didn’t seem like the right thing to call them. After all, was someone really a “friend” if they stopped talking to you altogether without warning? Left for Los Angeles and never looked back? Jack didn’t think so. Still, she didn’t trust Grauntie Bella to know the whole story. After all, she’d never mentioned Eve, and her great aunt hadn’t come around much when Jack was younger. Bella had still been a full-time activist, and it left her little time for much else, especially something as frivolous as tracking her grandniece’s decade-old high school drama.

Deciding not to risk Bella selling her out, Jack ducked out the back door in the kitchen and made her way out into the fields. She decided she’d check on Chris while she was out here, to make sure he was actually working. Chris hated giving up his weekends to help out around the orchard, and he often found excuses to avoid finishing his work, even if it only prolonged the time Jack forced him to spend at home. If he only did his chores like she asked him, he’d be able to go out much sooner.

Unsurprisingly, Jack found Chris sitting on one of the lower rungs of a step ladder, watching a video on his phone. Jack clenched her jaw and counted to 10 before approaching, not wanting to fly off the handle at Chris. She’d been working on her patience, though her brother seemed determined to test it any chance he got.

“Fix that trellis already?” Jack asked, trying her best not to use an accusatory tone, even though she knew there was no way he had in the few minutes he’d been out there.

Chris jumped at her voice, quickly pausing the video he’d been watching, though not before Jack overheard a man saying the word “females” with the same tone one might say “rats” or “horse manure.”

“It’s fixed,” Chris said defensively, though Jack noted that he avoided claiming to have fixed it himself.

On closer inspection, Jack was surprised to see that the trellis she’d marked as broken that morning was in order. Based on what she’d seen, she knew there was no way Chris had fixed it, but she also had no idea how it had magically fixed itself between her morning rounds and now.

“Well then, head back inside and help Grauntie with the pastries,” Jack said, trying her best not to sound discomforted by the unharmed trellis.

Chris grinned and jogged a little too eagerly back toward the orchard’s main building.

“And don’t go sniffing around Evella St. Clair, she’s more trouble than she’s worth.”

Chris gave no signs of having heard her. Once he was out of sight, Jack turned back to the trellis. Not only was it completely fixed, but there was also no sign that its wires had been repaired recently. Deciding that she must have noted the wrong spot earlier, Jack decided to take another walk around the fields in search of the broken trellis she’d spotted on her initial walkthrough.

Jack made her way through each row of trees, becoming increasingly disconcerted as each one revealed nothing but functioning trellises. She was just about to head back to the house when the sight of someone at the end of her current row stopped her dead in her tracks.

Evella St. Clair was doing something to one of the apples on the tree at the end of the row. The first thing Jack noticed was that Evella looked different than she had remembered. Jack had been sure that she’d had a large scar on her neck from a spider had bite, but perhaps Eve had covered it up with makeup, or else used her TV money to get some fancy Hollywood surgery and cover it up.

The next thing Jack noticed was what she assumed to be Eve struggling to pick an apple, but that didn’t make any sense. Even a spoiled starlet had enough strength to pluck an apple from the branch. After a few moments, Jack realized that Eve was trying to balance an already picked apple back on the branches of the tree. Once she got it to sit there, she turned to leave.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Jack called out, unable to stop herself.

“Trying to get your attention,” Eve said, smiling infuriatingly. “Last time you just ignored me, so I figured I’d do something that I knew would make you mad.”

“Oh, well, so long as you were trying to piss me off, that’s fine then. Here I thought you were just stealing from me.”

Eve let out an exasperated “pffft.”

“Steal from you? When you’re charging double the amount per pound that I’d pay at the grocery store for apples?”

“You’re paying for the experience,” Jack said angrily. “And for the people who don’t know how to do things proper and cost us apples. Just put that in your basket and pay for it at the front, and I best not find it out here when I come out later.”

Jack turned to leave but was surprised to feel a hand gripping her upper arm after just a few steps. She turned to find herself face-to-face with Eve, whose wide desperate eyes had started to well up with tears. Unbidden, Jack’s heart began to race, though she forced herself to sound calm when she spoke.

“Eve, I don’t know what’s going on with you, but I’m going to need you to let me go.”

“I can’t,” Eve said, sounding distressed, “at least not until you hear what I have to say.”

Up close, it was easier to see the girl Eve had been and not the woman from all those cringeworthy ads for her recently canceled CBS show. Jack almost let her guard down, after all, how long had it been since she’d had someone outside her family to talk to. Then she remembered that Eve was partially to blame for that. Eve had basically disappeared after Jack’s parents passed, and now suddenly here she was, and only because she needed something?

“I can’t think of anything you could say to me that I’d care about,” Jack said coldly, wrenching her arm free of Eve’s grasp and beginning to stomp away.

“On the contrary darling, you can’t afford to ignore me,” Eve said with such confidence it gave Jack pause.

“Spit it out then.”

“Well, not here, I’ll be honest, it’s going to make me sound a little crazy, and I’d rather we talked somewhere more private. Maybe that little tool shed where you set up that quiet space for yourself?”

Jack frowned.

“How did you know about—”

“I will explain everything, I promise, come on.” To Jack’s surprise, Eve began walking directly towards the shed that she should have no business knowing about. It hadn’t been there last time Eve had been to the orchard, and nobody knew that Jack had dragged an old loveseat in there for when she needed to hide from everything for a little while.

“You have five minutes,” Jack said flatly, following Eve.

“Oh please, for a story like this? I’ll need at least—”

“Five minutes. And start from the beginning. I don’t want any of that fancy Hollywood crap where you start in the middle.”

Eve pursed her lips, looking indignant. But eventually, she nodded.