That’s why Julie and Mark were driving. Unencumbered, Liz could have flown away alone, once she realized how incurable was Pete’s vision and how inescapable were his arms. But Samantha plus luggage was too much for Liz to manage. She and Julie had snuck a dozen other calls by then – Liz’s email wasn’t private – and Julie felt compelled to help. Rescuing Liz and Samantha seemed much more rewarding than trying to solve her own problems. Julie had enough enemies at work and co-dependents at home that lately her life made her sputter; she loved the clarity of Liz’s trouble. And she expressed that love so enthusiastically that she prevailed on Mark to help.

They were halfway there and surrounded by cherries. They didn’t realize when they started that Oregon was the heart of sweet cherry country and that late July is the height of the season. They didn’t read till they were near Salem that a man named Henderson Lewelling had loaded root stock onto oxen in Iowa in 1847 and hauled it there, or that a farmworker called Bing was responsible for the name of the black-red fruit.

They knew they were hungry and they pulled into a roadside café. “Au Temp Des Cerises” was painted in yellow and blue on the streaked wooden arch they passed under to enter the place. They were escorted through four dim rooms to the back porch and seated before a laden grove of cherry trees. They could see the Pick-and-Pay signs near the edges.

Julie was eager like a child. “Let’s pick some” she urged. But Mark was focused on the meal; he smiled at her and opened his menu. On the inside cover was printed:

Life is just a bowl of cherries.
Don’t take it serious, it’s too mysterious.
You work, you save, you worry so,
But you can’t take your dough when you go, go, go.

So keep repeating it’s the berries,
The strongest oak must fall,
The sweet things in life to you were just loaned.
So how can you lose what you’ve never owned?
Life is just a bowl of cherries,
So live and laugh at it all.
                                                  – Lew Brown and Ray Henderson (recorded in 1931)

There was also cherry trivia, including some medical claims. They read about a study at UC Davis, not far from home, which involved cherry breakfasts for some lucky women. Each ate 45 pitted Bings every morning (Julie offered that she would have been quite willing to pit her own) and enjoyed decreased levels of uric acid for at least five hours afterward. That meant less gout, or less general inflamation from arthritis. Julie thought she had arthritis in her neck already (more than just stress anyway), and if she didn’t have it now she was bound to have it soon, so her desire to eat cherries was justified and heightened.

She contained herself while they dined. She ate a portobello mushroom burger and salad; Mark consumed calamari. She had a beer and she teased him till he added vodka to his cranberry juice. Then she talked him into slowing their travel so they could pick cherries.

“Rapunzel can wait one more day,” she said, and he understood her. They had agreed to think of Liz as locked in a tower with only Samantha to cuddle and only Pete to visit. They were halfway to that tower and determined to topple it.

They weren’t in love but they were together. They snacked while they picked and they gorged when they stopped.

Two travelers rested on a shaded seat
ingesting cherries purchased where they grew,
that grew too perfect to delay to eat:
cascades of flavor so intense they knew
no other sense. They paused to look at one:
a globe of purple ballasted within,
its roundness gleaming in the midday sun,
its ripeness offering to split the skin.
She wondered: is there any way to catch
a cherry just like this, in words or art?
To choose an indigo and have it match
the sparkle in his palm? with ink impart
the ready strength? No words can capture quite
the pop that cherry made beneath her bite.