Granny Smith pared the peel off a soft, juicy Jonathan apple with her knife, then sliced and cored its off-white flesh into fragrant wedges. She loaded them onto a chipped green plate, spread them out in a fan-pattern, and turned to present them to the damp-eyed young colt behind her.
“Here ya go, Mac—”
They both froze at the sound of a wail emanating from upstairs. Granny’s eyes drifted shut, and a deep, heavy sigh left her muzzle. Her shoulders slumped, as if that breath had been the only thing keeping her upright.
“I’ll go get her this time,” Little Mac said, his sweet voice breaking only once into a deeper register.
Granny wanted to protest that that was her job, not his, but a twinge from her stiff left foreleg made her wince. Most of the time she didn’t feel her age, but it’d been a few decades since she’d last held a baby as much as she’d done in the last month. “All right, sugarcube. If you’re sure.”
“It’s no problem, Granny.”
She watched him trot off, and tried not to linger on how much he resembled his father, or how much of his mother’s kindness she saw reflected in him. Instead she plodded toward the pantry, wracking her brains about what kind of dinner she could pull together before the sun got too much lower.
A faint sniffle startled her. Granny turned to see Applejack seated at the table, wiping her eyes.
“S… Sorry, Granny,” Applejack said in a voice husky with tears. “Didn’t mean to spook ya.”
“It’s all right, AJ,” Granny said, silently wondering how long the filly had been sitting there. But no matter; she changed course and wrapped her twinging foreleg around Applejack. “I’m here, and I love ya to bits.”
“I… I know, and I’m… okay.” Her voice cracked as she said it, and Granny’s lips tightened at the obvious lie. “Just had a few things on my mind, was all.”
A glance at the table revealed several sheets of lined paper—of which only a few weren’t crumpled—and a pencil. “Been workin’ on a letter?” Grief stopped her tongue, as she considered the heartbreaking spectacle of her own granddaughter writing to parents who’d never read her words.
“Y… Yeah. I was thinkin’ of writing my pen-pal.”
“Of course.” Granny’s train of thought was summarily wrenched onto a different track. “Of course, ya met that filly a couple summers back…”
“Rara,” Applejack said quickly. “Or ‘Coloratura.’ Anymore, she signs it that way.”
Granny nodded, and eyed the pantry door again. “Well, I’ll leave ya to it. Sometimes it’s hard to find the right words, but sharin’ troubles with a friend can help.”
“Honestly Granny, I ain’t sure if I oughtta write her.”
“Come again?”
Applejack gestured at the papers, as if expecting Granny to make sense of them at a glance. “It ain’t that I don’t want to, just… something hasn’t been right for a while now with the way we write to each other. For a long time, we was tradin’ letters back and forth every month. But for the last year or so, she ain’t always kept up her end of it.”
“I wouldn’t worry, sweetheart,” Granny said, tapping into a familiar well of life experience. “I’ve seen plenty of friendships where one pony’s got more to say than another. Ain’t no harm in the chatty one talking; sometimes the quieter one is just happy to listen.”
“That ain’t it, though. Sometimes it feels like I’m the only one still puttin’ into it. Rara only talks about herself when she does write, but she don’t always answer my questions about her. She’s even missed a couple months of writing since the winter.”
Granny frowned. “Still might be worth trying, though.”
“Well, I…” Applejack squirmed in her seat. “I just… now I have the biggest thing in the world that I could ever write to somepony about, but I… I don’t know how she feels about the two of us as friends. And I don’t think I could bear it if she didn’t answer me.”
“Oh, AJ.” It was all that Granny could do to swallow a dry lump in her throat; behind it lurked tears that she could ill afford to shed with the afternoon waning and dinner not even remotely started. “I wish… I just wish… ya didn’t have this thing to share.”
“I know, Granny. And it’s all right. We’re facin’ this together as a family, like you’ve talked about.”
“AJ…” Granny winced as Applejack’s mention of family dragged the unbidden images of Bright Mac and Buttercup to the forefront of her mind again. “Thing is… of course… none of us knows how long we really got, or who might or might not walk by our side along the way.”
She was sure that she heard Applejack let out another few sniffles, but Granny somehow maintained her composure. “I guess my point is that you can end up regretting what you say to somepony, but you can end up regretting what you don’t say just as easily. And sometimes y’get it wrong, no matter how hard you’re trying.”
“W… Which would you pick, Granny?” Applejack gazed at her with misty eyes. “If ya had to pick between saying something and maybe getting hurt, or keeping it to yourself but knowing that ya hurt inside?”
Granny’s muzzle pulled tight with a frown. “I ain’t the best at figurin’ what-ifs, sugar. What I feel is what I feel, but I’ve still gotta keep this place runnin’. You know it, I know it, and the whole rest of the Apple clan knows it. Ain’t got nopony else to open up to more’n that.”
“What about Mom’s side of the family?”
The words hit Granny like a slap across the face.
“I mean, she never told us much about ’em; only that she loved ’em, but it made her sad to think about ’em much.”
“It’s… somethin’ I would’ve rather let her tell you about when she was ready,” Granny said carefully. “You kids are Apples though, through and through. The ties she had before she married your pa were broken. I don’t even know if her old family would care about what happened.”
Applejack’s face pulled tight. She sniffled. Wetness sprang to the corners of her eyes. “H—How… could they not care that she’s… she’s…”
Granny took a step back, turned her eyes from the sobbing filly, and studied the floor she hadn’t swept in days, as if its dust and errant hay would give her answers to that greatest of unknowns: How would Grand Pear take the news? He didn’t say a peep about Little Mac or Applejack being born…
She swallowed, realizing that Buttercup hadn’t even had the chance to write to him about Apple Bloom yet. And now she never would.
Don’t every parent deserve to know they’ve lost a child, or gained a grandchild? Wouldn’t it weigh less on my heart to know I’d done right by that?
“Granny?”
She groaned in a mixture of frustration and grief, before steering the sound into something more like a pained sigh. “Your words hit me harder than ya know, sugar. I reckon sometimes we all struggle tryin’ to figure out what to say to the ones who’ve got a place in our heart. And sometimes the ones who’re in there ain’t who we wish they were.”
“So do you think you’ll write to Mom’s family, then?”
“I…” The chill uncertainty that stabbed Granny’s gut left her unable to hold Applejack’s gaze. She turned away, and fumbled back toward the counter for her paring knife. Her muscles ached for the familiar motions of cutting, but as her eyes fell on Little Mac’s discarded apple core, she saw there was nothing more to cut. “I… I’d… write the letter to your friend there, AJ.”
“Maybe I could write to her and Mom’s—”
“No!” Granny whirled on Applejack, and saw shock mingled with fear on her sweet, tear-streaked face. It was only then that Granny realized she was still holding the knife. She dropped it to the floor without really thinking, and muttered something that she hoped sounded apologetic.
The moment that passed between herself and Applejack felt to Granny like an eternity. The pain of losing a son and daughter-in-law was acute, but the burden of raising three foals by herself at the cusp of what should’ve been her retirement felt like a field so vast that it could never be fully seeded. Exhaustion gripped her shoulders, pulled her head low, and left her feeling ashamed to put any of that burden back on a granddaughter just trying to find her way.
“Y’all write a letter,” she said slowly. “But don’t you do it ’cause of her, or even ’cause of you and her. You write it ’cause of you. Whether you like it or not, I reckon you got a great big heart, AJ. And I reckon you’ll be better off opening up and maybe gettin’ that heart hurt by sayin’ what you need to say, just because I know you need to say it. I can’t see how a single thing is gonna be right for you ’til you do.”
Applejack considered this in silence. One moment stretched into several. Heartbeats came, went, changed tempo, and vanished again. By the time Applejack finally rose to her hooves and started gathering the sheets of paper, Granny felt even more exhausted. “Reckon I might think about what to say to Rara in my room, then, if that’s all right?”
Granny held her tongue and nodded.
She felt sure that she heard Applejack let out another sniffle as she exited the kitchen. That was only natural. She hoped she’d said the right things. A lot of times, she didn’t know what “right” was anymore.
Still though, one way or another, somepony needed to get food started if they were going to eat at a decent hour.
Granny turned toward the pantry, but stopped, letting her gaze drift back to the table, and to the few crumpled papers and pencils that Applejack hadn’t cleaned up. She wondered what would happen if she picked them up and took a stab at writing to Grand Pear. “Dear no-good snake-in-the-grass,” she muttered, still staring. “Y’all ended up getting three beautiful grandchildren ya never cared to come see, and lost a daughter who’d at least want ya to make amends at her graveside, if only for your own sake.”
A deep, familiar, and abiding disgust welled up in her gut. Family was family. Sometimes they might move away; sometimes they might go off where you couldn’t see them for years at a time; but they never actually left. To leave was to break that bond. And there’d been far too much of heartbreak over broken bonds already.
So with a final sigh, Granny reached for the leftover stationery, hoofed it up, tossed it in the trash can, then bent down and picked back up the paring knife again.
Potatoes could be a good start to a meal. They hadn’t eaten too many potatoes yet that week. And the peels would help cover the garbage they’d thrown out of their lives, even as the food itself nurtured their family forward.
