After the incident in the Tunnel of Love, Danny wasn't sure whether his invitation to dinner at Josh's place was still good. He considered calling or texting just to confirm, but that felt awkward, so he just put on jeans and a clean shirt and waited to see what happened. He needn't have worried. At six o'clock on the nose, a battered blue pickup truck pulled up in front of his studio and the farmer climbed out and knocked on the door.
"Hey, Josh. Right on time!" Danny stepped forward to kiss his visitor, but the man stepped back, grinning.
"Whoa! Down boy. I'm not who you think I am."
"What? Josh?"
"Joe."
"What?"
The visitor laughed. "I'm not Josh. I'm Joe. His brother. The straight one."
"Holy mother of pearl. Josh told me he was a twin. I'm sorry."
"Not a problem. You'd be surprised at how often it happens. Josh needed to wrap up a chore at the farm and get himself cleaned up, so he asked me to come get you." He held out a hand and Danny shook it, blushing.
"Well. I'm certainly pleased to meet you, Joe."
On closer examination, there were a number of differences between the brothers. Joe was heavier, more obviously muscular, than Josh, and his face was broader, his jaws more prominent. For someone less familiar with Josh's face and features, however, making a distinction between the two men would be extremely difficult.
"Josh has a tattoo on his butt," Joe said as they climbed into the car. "Mine is just under my collarbone."
"I guess I should have checked your butt before I tried to kiss you," Danny observed.
Joe laughed. "That would save some confusion, sure, but by the time we got to that stage the question would have been academic."
The Bridges' farm occupied about five hundred acres of sandy, gently-rolling land four miles outside of Bancroft, south of the Old Town limits.
Adam Bridges had bought the property back in the days when nobody wanted to have anything to do with Bancroft and its environs, so he got the land, a house, and a barn for what he would have paid for a two-bedroom condo in Tampa. Adam overhauled the buildings, cleared scrub and invasive weeds off the land, and started farming, niche products like leeks, Japanese eggplant, and kohlrabi, which he sold to gourmet food shops in Miami and Atlanta for absurdly high prices.
While Adam Bridges was carving out a place in the "foodie" market, actress and model Rose McCann was being nominated for -- but failing to win -- an Academy Award for her role in a movie adaptation of Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage." By that point, the award would have merely been icing on the cake, since McCann was the most in-demand actress working at that time, and had already been described in GQ magazine as the most beautiful woman in the world.
Adam and Rose met when the actress's best friend, celebrity chef Tanner Mitchell, took her along on a three-week road trip, visiting restaurants and boutique farms all over the eastern half of the country. An afternoon visit to Bridges Farm stretched into two days, and a month later Rose returned on her own and spent two weeks on the farm.
Two years later Rose announced her retirement from acting, and she and Adam Bridges married. The tabloids roared, and there was a consensus that Rose would be back in New York in a matter of weeks, but a year and a half later she gave birth to a daughter, Susannah, and two years after that, she produced twin boys, Joeseph (the eldest by twenty-three minutes) and Joshua. All of the predictions had been wrong. Rose embraced her new life with both arms.
Then tragedy struck. During a father-daughter road weekend just as Susannah was about to start school, an eighteen-wheeler veered across the line in a heavy fog and struck the car just ahead of theirs. The car flipped, and was itself struck by another vehicle. Susannah and Adam were both killed instantly.
Rose and her four-year-old sons grieved, and then Rose -- defying expectations once again -- took control of the farm and of her life.
Thirty years later, Bridges Farm was a successful and highly efficient producer of organic vegetables and specialty dairy products, and Rose Bridges, Danny found, was still an amazing woman.
"How is it that we haven't met?" Rose asked over dinner. She was tall, taller than Danny, not curvy but lean and graceful, like a dancer. Her long red hair was streaked with gray but it was still lush and luxuriant. Her mobile, expressive mouth was her best feature, and it was a feature that Josh had inherited from her.
"I don't know," Danny replied. "If I had ever so much as seen you from across the room I'd remember it."
Rose laughed. "Flatterer. I don't get out much these days. I've got Joe and Josh and Toni, and our little circle of friends, and that's about as far as I get." Toni was Joe's wife, the skinny bridesmaid at Mary Anne Culverson's nude wedding.
"Now he's been introduced," Josh commented, "he'll have no reason not to become part of the circle."
"That's true, Josh. I hope we'll see you often, Danny. Josh speaks highly of you."
"Josh has only known me for three days. I could have all sorts of weird skeletons in my closet that he hasn't seen yet."
Toni, a slim, dark-haired girl a little too sharp-featured for beauty, but with an interesting smile, laughed. "This family doesn't scare easily. You'd have to have some pretty impressive skeletons to make much of an impact. Odds are, Rose would just figure out how to market the bones at Trader Joe's and make you rich."
After dinner, while the last of the daylight was still hanging on in the western sky, Joshua took Danny for a stroll.
"I'd give you the grand tour, but it's getting dark, so I think we'll focus on the barn this time," Josh said with elaborate casualness.
