Delta Girls (17 page)

“I’ll give her some oomph,” said Nathan, and Karen felt a little thrill.

“Hold your horses, lover boy,” said Deena. “She’s still seventeen, remember?”

“Just for another couple of months,” said Nathan, and Karen had to walk in circles around her room to get all the excitement out of her legs. When she heard footsteps on the stairs, she held her breath, wondering if she should open her door, wondering if she should let Nathan know she heard him, wondering if she looked too much like a little kid in her thermal shirt and plaid pajama pants. But by the time she poked her head into the hallway, Nathan’s door was already closed.

O
UR DAYS STARTED TO HAVE AN EASIER RHYTHM ONCE
I knew the other workers’ stories.

They must have felt the shift in me. They didn’t say anything, but some of them started to offer me bites of their breakfast as we rode out into the orchards on the backs of the trailers—egg burritos and
pan dulce
, toast with peanut butter, pieces of banana, sips of thermos coffee. Sometimes the foreman tossed a box of doughnuts into the back and we jokingly fought over the maple bars. Otherwise, we didn’t talk much, but it was a companionable silence. We looked out at the rows of trees as they went by, noticed the different patterns that emerged, the dizzying uniformity of rows that you could look at forwards, sideways, diagonally, the spaces between them regular as gaps on a peg loom, pears blinking everywhere, growing heavier by the day, waiting for our hands.

———

MR. VIEIRA HAD
tried to recruit local high school kids to beef up our numbers, but working at McDonald’s in Rio Vista was much easier. You have air-conditioning in McDonald’s. You don’t have to lug hundreds of pounds of fruit.

“Them high school kids will eat our pears,” Mr. Vieira had said, “but they won’t lift a goddamn finger to get them off the tree.”

“I’ll pick your pears,” Quinn told him, but he just ruffled her hair and told her she’d have to wait a few more years. Still, when she found some decent ones on the ground, she put them in the sorting bin.

THAT EVENING, WE
sat on the deck and slapped at mosquitoes as we ate some pear bread topped with slabs of jack cheese and potato chips. My muscles rang like glass bowls with exhaustion, but my mouth enjoyed the mix of sweet and salty, soft and crisp.

“Maybe we could build a gentle robot,” said Quinn. “One that could pick pears but not hurt them.”

“That would be a cool thing to develop.” I peeled a potato chip off the top of the cheese and crunched it alone. “As long as it doesn’t replace people, just helps more pears get picked. Maybe that will be your claim to fame, a gentle pear-picking robot.”

She looked pleased by that idea. “What’s your claim to fame?” she asked, tossing bits of bread to the ducks paddling by.

The question made sweat break out all over my face. I wiped it away and said, simply, “You.”

T
HAT THANKSGIVING, DEENA BROILED SOME SKINLESS
turkey breasts, sprayed butter-flavored Pam over green beans with slivered almonds, cooked raw cranberries with Sweet’N Low, and smushed some boiled cauliflower to resemble mashed potatoes.

“Couldn’t we have some real Thanksgiving food?” Karen pushed the white goop around her plate, stirring up its old-sock smell. It was 4 p.m. but already dark outside, the sky lumpy with rain clouds.

“We can’t afford you getting carb bloat so close to Nationals.” Deena took a decisive bite of turkey. She was already on her third glass of wine; maybe her fourth.

“Nationals is still two months away,” said Karen. “I could work it off in plenty of time.”

Deena turned to Nathan. “Karen has a fat face, don’t you think?”

“I hadn’t thought about it.” His mouth was full of cranberries, red and glistening, like entrails.

“As slim as she is,” Deena said, “people look at her face and know it wouldn’t take much for her to balloon out.”

“It’s my face, Mom! God!” Karen dropped her fork on her plate. “What do you expect me to do about my face?”

“I thought the nose job would help,” Deena said, as if she were talking to herself. “But it only accentuates the problem.”

Karen turned her head away from Deena’s boozy scrutiny. The rain was hammering against the windows, drops bouncing off the back patio, a mad frenzy. Karen tried to imagine it turning to snow, blanketing everything in pure, quiet white.

“It’s probably just baby fat,” said Nathan, and tears stung Karen’s eyes

“If it was baby fat,” said Deena, “it would have been gone by now.”

“Well, happy Thanksgiving to you, too.” Karen threw down her napkin and stomped up to her room.

WHEN SOMEONE KNOCKED
on her door an hour later, Karen assumed it was her mother, attempting an apology. She swung the door open, shouting, “What?”

Nathan jumped back. His sweater sleeves were rolled up, a bit wet at the edges; he must have been helping clean the dishes, unless he had put his hands outside to feel the rain. “Sorry,” he said. “I can come back later.”

“No, no, it’s okay,” she said, and he stepped through the doorway.

He had never been inside her room before. She hadn’t pictured it like this—her with red puffy eyes, in old sweats, him with low-fat gravy spattered on his chest. When she had pictured it in her mind, they were dressed up like they had just gone to a ball, her hair swept up (which he would let down), pearls wound around her neck (which he would unclasp, his bow tie hanging crooked, like a door on a bad hinge). He was sitting at the foot of her bed, as she had imagined, but she couldn’t bring herself to sit
next to him. She sat on her desk chair instead, facing him, their knees close to touching.

“Do you want to come visit my dad with me tomorrow?” he asked.

“He’s still in the hospital?”

“They moved him to a permanent care facility.” He looked down, bunched her pink comforter in his fist.

“I’m sorry,” she said, flashing on Nathan as Tristan, dead on the ice.

“His body was bound to give out eventually.” He shrugged and yanked the bedspread, making all the stuffed animals on her pillow fall over.

Maybe his dad was an athlete and had trained too hard, she thought. Maybe he was like her mom, someone with a promising career who blew her knees out and had to retire too early.

“Sure, I’ll go.” She inched her leg forward, let it briefly graze his. A blue bolt of static electricity zipped between their feet.

He stood, his hair rising in places from the shock; she was tempted to rest her head against his stomach, let her hair stick to his sweater. Part of the comforter still poked up where he had grabbed it, like a little tent. The satin edge of her inner blanket was exposed by the headboard; it looked racy, somehow, as if her bed’s underwear were showing.

“We should go in the afternoon, after weight training.” He walked to the door, chest more puffed out than before.

“Cool.” She hoped the word sounded casual, grown-up, coming from her mouth.

“By the way,” he said from the hall, “there’s nothing wrong with your pretty little face.”

When he was out of sight, she toppled onto her bed and breathed in the heat his body had left behind. The rain on the roof sounded like fans stomping their feet on metal bleachers, waiting for their star to return.

W
E WOKE JUST BEFORE DAWN TO A HORRIBLE CLANGING
.

“What is it, Eema?” Quinn clung to me.

“Maybe it’s the guy here to clean the septic tank,” I said. We had been in the orchard when he had come before—it was hard to imagine that would be such a loud job, but I couldn’t think of what else the racket could be. I sat up, hands over my ears, and looked through the window. A small Coast Guard boat floated nearby. A few people dangled pipes into the water and banged on them with metal sticks, like a demented kindergarten music class.

I stumbled out onto the deck. “What’s going on?” I asked.

A woman held up her hand to get everyone to stop their clanging. “Sorry to wake you,” she said. “We’re from the Marine Mammal Institute. We’re trying to drive some whales back to sea.”

“We saw them.” Quinn appeared next to me, blinking the sleep from her eyes.

“When?” the woman asked.

“Over a week ago,” I said.

“And you didn’t report it?” She looked incredulous.

I shook my head.

“You would have been the first,” she said. “We received our first sighting yesterday.”

I felt a little surge of pride that the whales had waited so long to show themselves to anyone else, but when a man said, “This makes it even more urgent. They need to get back to the salt water, where they can feed,” I felt sheepish. I had had a chance to help them, and I hadn’t done a thing.

“They can’t eat here?” asked Quinn.

“We think the baby is still nursing,” said the woman. “A little old for that, but it appears she hasn’t weaned. We’re worried the mom is getting depleted, though.”

The water began to churn. A large black hump, the center spine jutting like a sharply folded napkin, rose out of the water, then slid back under. The people on the boat yelled and started to bang their pipes again. Quinn jumped off the deck onto the pier. Abcde was standing on the levee in a nightgown, no doubt composing a poem in her mind: A big clatter. A baleen congregation. A blistering cacophony. She and I both rushed toward Quinn on the pier. I was pleased that I got there before Abcde climbed down the metal stairs.

“Did I see what I thought I just saw?” Abcde asked, her dark nipples showing through the thin fabric. Her body odor was sharp and yeasty, like a garlic bagel.

“Whales,” said Quinn, and I felt as if she had betrayed our secret even though it was no longer a secret at all.

AFTER THE SUN
rose, a small inflatable boat puttered up to the pier; a woman with auburn hair jumped out and knocked on the door of the houseboat.

“Mind if I come in?” she asked. She must have used about a 700 SPF sunscreen—her skin was alabaster, her eyes a clear pale green, like sea glass. “You guys have the best seat in the house.”

She introduced herself as Sam, a member of the animal care team from the Marine Mammal Institute.

“Is it okay for us to be here?” I asked. I was still in my pajamas, still groggy; she looked wide awake, jazzed, even at that early hour. Somehow she made her blue windbreaker, her khaki pants, her orange life vest, look fashionable, as if she was born to wear them. I wondered what it was like to have that kind of confidence, that kind of ownership of your life.

“I’ll have to talk to my supervisor,” she said. “But as long as you don’t turn on your propeller or do anything to spook the whales, you should be fine. They’ve had some bad run-ins with propellers already.”

She walked out to the deck, leaned over the railing, her hair lifting around her head like fire.

“What are the whales doing here?” I asked.

“No one knows for sure,” she said. “Some of my colleagues think it’s disorientation from Navy sonar, illness, maybe toxic algae. Others think they followed a school of sardines into the river, maybe tried to go someplace safe to heal their wounds …”