Fields of Yield

Kristina pulled her Honda onto the gravel lot at eleven sharp. She was sixty-two years old, retired from forty years of bookkeeping, and she did not do things late. She did not do things sloppy either. She parked straight, gathered her folder of tax guides, and got out.

The place was called the Robertson Family Pumpkin Patch and Gallery. She'd read the flyer twice. Free tax-assistance workshop, hosted in the converted barn, first Saturday of the month. That sounded like her kind of thing. Numbers, forms, a useful way to spend a morning.

Except the barn didn't look like a workshop.

It looked like a party. String lights ran along the eaves. There was a table of cider and a woman selling painted gourds. A fiddle player in the corner. Maybe thirty people milling around, none of them holding a T4 slip.

"Uh," Kristina said, to nobody.

"You the accountant?"

She turned. A man came across the yard with his hand already out. Big shoulders, sun-browned face, maybe forty-five, flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled. His handshake was firm. Not crushing. Just firm, as if he had decided how firm it was going to be before he walked over.

"Kristina Marsh," she said. "I'm here for the workshop."

"Warren Robertson. Yeah, about that." He glanced at the barn, then back at her. "We should step outside."

"We're already outside."

"Further outside." He tipped his head toward the fields. "Trust me. There's a version of this conversation that happens in that barn, and it goes bad."

Kristina had spent four decades not going anywhere with strange men. She looked at the fiddle player. She looked at her car.

Then she looked at the flat fields running toward the lake, all that open sky, and something in her chest said, well, why not.

"Fine," she said.

They walked along the edge of the pumpkin field. Rows of orange, hundreds of them, and an airstrip cut into the grass off to the west. A small yellow plane sat at the end of it.

"You fly that?" she asked.

"I do. Crop dusting, mostly. Family land, family plane." He stopped walking. "Okay. Straight story. I put out a flyer for a tax workshop because I needed an accountant, not because the county needs one. There's a man, Duane Pell, who wants to buy this property. Investor type. He keeps showing up here, being friendly, being nosy, and every time I tell him I've got things handled, he doesn't believe me. He thinks a single guy running a pumpkin farm and an art barn is one bad month from selling."

"So you needed a bookkeeper."

"I needed a bookkeeper. And then I saw your name on the sign-up sheet and I had a worse idea."

Kristina crossed her arms. "I'm listening, but I'm already not liking it."

"Pretend to be with me. My girlfriend. For a few weeks. Duane takes one look at a settled couple running this place together and he stops circling. It's not fraud. It's not money. It's just a story, told to one annoying man."

"That's dishonest."

"It is," Warren agreed. "Fully. That's why I'm telling you the whole of it before you say yes or no, and why you can walk back to your car right now and I'll still owe you a consulting fee for coming out."

"I don't want a fee."

"Then you want something else." He looked at her, steady, no smile. "What is it you want, Kristina Marsh? Because you drove an hour on a Saturday for a fake workshop. Retired, by the look of you. Sensible car. Sensible folder. And you still came."

She didn't answer right away. The fiddle carried faintly from the barn. Forty years of ledgers. Four decades of being the woman who never caused trouble. One brief string of dull dates in her twenties, then nothing, just work, work, work, and a quiet condo with one chair worn down at the cushion.

"I want to do something reckless," she heard herself say. "That's what I want. I'm sixty-two and I've never once done anything reckless."

"Then say yes to the story, if you want to."

"Fine. Yes. But I have conditions. I'm an accountant. We do conditions."

"I'd expect nothing less."

They stood there in the pumpkin rows while she listed them off on her fingers. One, nobody touched her without asking. Two, no lying to her family, meaning she'd tell her sister the truth eventually. Three, either one of them could end it any day, no argument.

"Agreed," Warren said. "And one from me. If either of us says the word 'redline,' everything stops. Whatever's happening, however small, it stops. That's the safeword. It only counts if we both respect it."

"Redline," she repeated. "Like the engine."

"Like the engine. I spend my life watching gauges." He put his hand out again and she shook it, and the deal was made in a pumpkin field between two adults, settled before anything else could get tangled into it. No money, no obligations beyond the story itself. The books were a paid job either way, he said, and the story was a favor she could drop whenever she liked, and neither one was a trade for anything else between them. He said so plainly and she believed him.

* * *

The first staged date was two days later, a Monday. Warren picked her up in a borrowed van, not his plane, obviously, and they walked the pumpkin field at sunset like a couple. She'd worn actual jeans instead of slacks. Felt like a costume.

"He's usually around by sunset," Warren said. "Duane. So we practice. Walk like you like me."

"I don't have to act that hard. You gave me cider."

He laughed, a real one, and then his hand settled on her lower back as they walked. Just resting there. Warm through her jacket.

Kristina shivered. All the way up her spine, a full-body thing she couldn't have hidden if she'd tried.

Warren felt it. She knew he felt it because he slowed his step, and his voice dropped a little.

"Okay if I keep my hand here?"

"Yes," she said. Quicker than she meant to.

"And that shiver. Tell me about that."

She stared at a pumpkin. "I've been in charge of every single thing for forty years. Ledgers, deadlines, my mother's care, the condo board. Every person I've ever met got the sensible version of me." She took a breath. "And when you put your hand there, my first thought was, finally, somebody else can hold this for a minute. That's not a normal thought for me."

"It's a thought I understand," Warren said. "I run everything here too. Land, plane, barn, family name. I know what it does to a person." He stopped walking and turned to face her, his hand still on her back. "So here's me being honest, because the deal was honesty between us. I like being the one who leads. In all things. If that's a hard no for you, say so and we stay pretend-friends and I still pay you for the books."

Kristina looked up at him. Sixty-two years old and her heart was loud, and it wasn't fear.

"It's not a no," she said. "It's maybe the opposite of a no. But I've never... I don't know the rules."

"That's why we make them. Slow. You set them with me. We talk about everything before it happens, every step. Nothing surprises you. You say redline, we stop, full stop, and that word holds forever, not just for the night. Deal?"

"Deal." Her voice came out low. "Wow. Okay. Deal."

He walked her back to the van with his hand never leaving her back, and Duane Pell, who turned out to be lurking near the barn door, took one long look at the two of them and left without buying a gourd.

* * *

Thursday morning, Warren called her at nine.

"So here's a thing," he said. "And it's a real thing, not an excuse."

"Those are my favorite kinds of things."

"My cousin's bakery botched a batch of bread. Forty misshapen loaves, perfectly good eating, ugly as sin. There's a buyer in Manitoba who takes the rejects cheap. Somebody's gotta drive them out there. I borrowed Brett's van for it." A pause. "It's a two-day drive. Three, maybe, with the weather."

Kristina sat down at her kitchen table. One chair worn at the cushion.

"You're asking me to come with you."

"I'm asking you to come with me. Two adults, two days, a lot of empty highway. Duane doesn't need convincing this week, so this isn't the story. This is just me wanting the company." His voice went quieter. "And maybe wanting the time. Private time. Where nobody performs anything for anybody."

"Warren."

"Yeah."

"Ask it plain. I'm an accountant. I like plain."

He laughed once, short. "Alright, plain then. Come with me, Kristina. Not as the fake girlfriend. As you. And we'll see what happens when there's no audience at all."

She looked out her kitchen window at her tidy yard, her tidy life, the whole tidy grid of it.

"Yes," she said. "I'll pack tonight. Pick me up at seven."

"Seven," he said. "Bring the folder. I actually do need the books done by Manitoba."

She laughed all the way to the closet to find a bag.

The highway out of Ontario was flat and gray and Kristina talked herself into circles for the first hour. Warren let her. Then he reached over and turned the radio off.

"Rest stop coming up in ten miles," he said. "When we get there, I'm gonna give you an instruction. Before I do, remember the deal. You can say no to anything and nothing changes."

"I remember the deal. I wrote half of it down."

"I know you did. You made notes." He grinned at the road. "Okay. Here it is. When we stop, I want you to kneel on the grass by the van and wait. I'm going inside for coffee and the washroom. Maybe five minutes. Maybe eight. You just kneel there and wait for me."

Kristina turned in her seat to look at him. "Kneel. On grass. At a public rest stop."

"Small one. We timed it, it's the quietest stop on this stretch. But yes, public if somebody walks by." He kept his eyes on the road. "Say redline and it never happened, we get coffee like two travelers, done. Or say yes. Only if you want it."

Her stomach did a slow roll. Sixty-two years old and here she was, weighing kneeling in the dirt against the memory of forty years of sensible.

"If I say yes," she said, "I'm saying it because I want to, not because you're driving."

"I know. That's why I asked while you still had the door open."

The rest stop was two picnic tables and a strip of grass going brown at the edges. Warren parked, killed the engine, and looked at her.

"Well?"

"Yes," Kristina said. Her voice cracked on it. "Yes, alright, I'll kneel."

"Good girl. Right there by the tire. I won't be long."

He got out and walked toward the building like a man buying coffee, which he was, and Kristina Marsh