Peaches (4 page)

Leeda glanced behind her. Birdie’s magazine was opened to “Three Things Every Guy Craves in Bed.”

Two minutes later, they were both standing in the entry to Uncle Walter’s office, which was a tragedy—with piles of paper leaning like towers, and unwashed plates stuffed into crevices of shelves, and bills spread out with big red stamps at the tops of each one.

“Hey, Uncle Walter?”

Uncle Walter looked up from his desk and gave Leeda a heartbreaking smile, because she was Leeda and people treated her like velvet, and smiled at her when there was no reason to be smiling. He looked ten years older than he had the last time she’d seen him.

Birdie brushed past her and began trying to organize some of the papers, looking self-conscious. The whole scene, with Birdie included, made Leeda’s question freeze in her throat. The bold-type notices on the papers were things like
Past Due
and
Account Frozen.
Leeda pretended like she didn’t notice. Walter was still looking at her expectantly. “Uh, do you mind if I sleep at the dorms?”

It was easier than she expected. Walter didn’t even consider it; he looked back down at his desk. “Sure, honey, that’s fine.”

It had taken a few seconds for Leeda to take it all in and realize something that for all her thoughtful slowness, Birdie didn’t seem to recognize at all.

The Darlingtons and their orchard were perched on the edge of disaster, and Birdie didn’t even know it.

When Poopie Pedraza arrived at Darlington Orchard in her late twenties in search of work, she looked to the sky and saw the shape of the Virgin Mary in the clouds. Poopie took a picture that appeared in the paper the next day. People flocked to the orchard hoping for more holy cloud sightings, until, on closer inspection, it was determined that the cloud in Poopie’s photo actually looked more like a potato. After that, the miracle cloud was completely forgotten by everyone but Poopie, who wasn’t sure she believed in miracles, but who waited for another sign.

M
urphy woke up to the sound of a bird chirping.

She pulled her pillow over her head and then pulled it away for a moment. “Shut up,” she yelled, and pulled it back.

The bird went on chirping, its shrill song drilling right through the glass and the fabric of her pillow. He was doing it on purpose. She knew he was.

Murphy shot up to a sitting position and looked outside. It was just after dawn. There he was, a blue jay, right next to her window, looking at her insolently from a drooping branch. A chickadee two branches above appeared to be ignoring him.

“See, nobody likes your stupid song.” Murphy slapped her pillow and staggered out into the hallway, pulling on a thin navy blue sweatshirt. She’d heard people moving about a while ago and had stayed in bed, praying no one would wake her up. Blessedly, they hadn’t. One of the women, Emma, she thought, rushed by her with a baseball cap. Then slid to a halt, backed up, and gathered Murphy into the crook of her arm. “
Es tarde.
You are late.”

Murphy shrugged. “I’ll catch up.” Whether she understood or not, Emma hurried on down the hall.

Murphy returned to her room, smell-tested the armpits of her Craig Nicholls T-shirt, and changed into that and a pair of shorts. A few minutes later she straggled into the bright spring sunshine. The air felt warm and cool in patches, like it hadn’t yet evened out, and it was full of the sounds of different critters buzzing, chirping, legs rubbing together in the trees. Murphy could see that a group of people had gathered up at the house.

Pulling a Doral out of the pack in her pocket, she walked around behind the dorm to smoke, promising herself that if the blue jay was there, they’d have a good talk and she’d threaten him with cigarette burns. Instead she saw a guy crouched about fifty yards away, doing something in the dirt where the orchard began.

Curious, Murphy walked a little closer, admiring his butt. She knew you always had to be careful about checking out guys from behind. Then they’d turn around and be ugly and you’d feel all grossed out.

Murphy walked closer so that he’d hear her and turn around. He did. It was the guy from the lawn the day before.

She could see now it was a fledgling tree he was working on. He was tying a white band around its tiny trunk, which was skinny as a baby’s wrist. His hands worked deftly at the twisting. Murphy had the impulse to look away, as if she’d walked in on something intimate and private. Instead she took a long drag of her cigarette and stared at the guy’s knuckles. He was older than her, maybe by a year or two.

“Are you our tree nurse?”

He turned back toward her. “Aren’t you supposed to be working?” he said, nodding up to the farmhouse.

Murphy nodded. “I guess so.” She thrust out her breasts
slightly, because he didn’t appear to have seen them. “What’s that white stuff for?”

The guy looked at her for a moment, as if she were Dennis the Menace, still not taking in the breasts. “It protects the baby tree from the animals. And it shelters the trunk from the insecticides we spray for the bigger trees. It takes them three years to grow big enough to bear fruit.”

Murphy shrugged. “I’m against insecticides.”

The guy smiled at her, as if he was in on some joke she wasn’t. “Right.”

Murphy frowned. She intentionally took forever to finish her cigarette, letting the silence work its way out and kicking the toes of her sneakers, which were damp, into the dirt. The guy didn’t seem to notice.

“Well, I’m Murphy. I’ll see you.” She reached out a hand toward him, just to show him she wasn’t intimidated.

He reached out and shook it, the dirt from his fingers rubbing off on hers.

“Rex,” he said. “See you.”

Murphy rubbed the dirt between her fingers and walked, putting a little more swing in her hips in case Rex was watching.

Up on the porch, Walter Darlington was speaking in a hopeless monotone, with Birdie on one side and a dark-skinned woman on the other, talking in unison with him in Spanish.

“We want to thin ten percent of the trees. That’s one in ten peaches we want to knock off. We have about a hundred acres and about eighty-five trees per acre, so that’s a lot of peaches to knock down. Those of you who don’t know how, watch the ones who do.”

Murphy raised her hand and interrupted. “Don’t we
want
peaches to grow?”

Everyone looked at her and muttered. Walter frowned. “You missed that part, Murphy. You’ll need to ask someone later.” Walter cleared his throat. “Birdie oversees the dorms, so if you have any problems with the living space or if you need something like charcoal for the grill, cooking supplies, or toilet paper, let her know. She’ll be by to check on everyone every day.”

Birdie fidgeted where she stood beside Walter. Murphy grinned. It was hard to imagine Chickie overseeing much of anything.

“You won’t get cell reception. There is one phone, over in the supply barn. It takes quarters. This”—Walter gestured toward the Latin American woman standing next to him—“is Poopie Pedraza. She’s in charge when I’m not around. And she…”

Murphy tuned him out and looked around her at all the brown faces. How did these people do it? All spring and summer, working in the sun. Her eye caught a movement back toward the dorm and then a sight a lot like a leprechaun. Leeda Cawley-Smith emerged from Camp A, her blond ringlets a-frazzle, dark circles under her eyes. She wore silky pajama pants and a pair of slippers and walked carefully across the grass, watching the ground as if something might jump out and grab her. Leeda came closer and closer, finally hovering on the edge of the crowd to listen to Walter with everybody else.

When Walter was finished, the workers—about twenty in all—fanned out among the trees. Murphy straggled after them into the outskirts of the orchard. Now that Murphy really looked, she could see that in addition to the budding leaves, the
trees were covered with small green buds, about the size of Super Balls, clustered out along the lengths of the limbs.

Murphy watched the other workers begin to yank at them and drop them onto the ground, letting out tiny
thud thuds
as they landed. Then she looked back over her shoulder. There was Leeda, right behind her.

“Hola,”
she said when she saw Murphy looking at her.

“Oh God.”

Leeda squinted at her, the circles under her deep-set, fluffy-lash-rimmed gray eyes crinkling. “You speak English?”

“I’m in your bio class.”

“Oh, you’re right,” Leeda said, tossing back her hair with one hand. “Do you work here during the summers?”

“No.”

Leeda nodded. “Oh. Well, I don’t work here either.” She looked around at the other workers, as if she were slightly embarrassed. “Walter’s my uncle.”

Murphy stuck her hands into her pockets, fingering her empty cigarette pack. “Wow,” she said flatly.

Leeda faltered, seeming unsure of whether Murphy was teasing her or not.

“You’re staying in the dorms?” Murphy hadn’t seen her last night.

Leeda nodded. And yawned, covering her mouth. Her fingernails were bubble-gum pink. “What’re you doing here?”

“Got caught on the premises. Having wild sex. It was so good I didn’t hear anyone coming.”

Leeda stiffened before Murphy turned and walked several yards down the row.

The trees were set up like checkers—in every direction you looked, they made a straight line. They were just Murphy’s size—short and full, each ending at the same height. But within that uniformity, the trees themselves were as unique as snowflakes—their small trunks and limbs zigzagging, messy, awkward knots of wood marking the unexpected turns of growth, as if the trees themselves hadn’t known which way they were going to grow and had started one way and changed their minds.

To Murphy, they appeared miniature and delicate, and when she looked up and around, the collective impression was so vast that it made Murphy feel far away from everything—from the dorms, definitely from home. Like she’d stepped onto the checkerboard and out of real life.

She tackled a tree, swatting at the raw peaches. The branches bent like rubber bands, bouncing back at her after every swat. Murphy shrank back, startled.

Someone giggled behind her. Murphy turned to see Emma, the woman from this morning, laughing at her.

“What?”
Murphy asked, defensive.

“You angry at trees?”

Murphy huffed. “Nooo.”

“Here, you pick gentle.” Emma tugged at a cluster of peaches and set them falling to the ground—
thud thud thud thud thud.

Murphy watched her, then glanced at Leeda, who was down the row picking one peach at a time and then ducking to lay them down on the grass, agonizingly slowly.

“Maybe you should go help her instead.”

Emma looked at Leeda. “She do okay. You…” She nodded to
the tree. It had knobs in several places and branched out at strange, crooked angles.

Murphy picked a few the way Emma had. Finally Emma stood back and smiled.

“Okay, thanks.”

Emma walked back to her own tree. Murphy watched her for a moment, then swatted at hers again a few times. All she knew was that it seemed backward that you had to thin a tree to get it to make fruit right. Still, the next hour or so passed without Murphy noticing the time. What she did notice was the way the air cooled and heated up depending on where she was standing. The trees didn’t offer much shade, but the tiny dips in the land did. Murphy had the kind of hungry brain that noticed these things, and surprisingly, it didn’t find itself bored all morning, until she remembered why she was here and that she didn’t want to be. She swatted at another branch, and it bounced back and stuck a twig into her thick hair, clinging to it.

When Murphy had extracted herself, her mood was worse than when the day had started, and she suddenly felt tired. The expanse of trees felt endless. All she really owed Walter was a quarter bottle of crème de menthe.

She looked around to make sure nobody was watching, then she walked the two hundred yards to Camp A, climbed the two sets of stairs, and crawled into her bed.

When Emma knocked on her door to invite her to eat lunch, the smells of Mexican cooking wafting in through the cracks in the door, she pretended she was sleeping and held the pillow tighter over her head.

The Darlingtons had always invited the workers to dinner on the first night of thinning to celebrate the start of the season. This year, though, Walter had opted for a quiet family dinner instead, and now he, Poopie, Birdie, and Leeda sat around the kitchen table alone.

On the chalkboard beside the refrigerator Poopie had written down the phone messages for Walter. It used to be that Walter or Cynthia would see them, take care of them, and erase them. In the weeks since Cynthia had been gone, they had collected and stayed there, glaring at everyone all day long. Now the neglected board listed calls from Horatio Balmeade, Bridgewater Savings and Loan, and Wachovia.

Next to Birdie, Honey Babe had his short little legs on her cousin Leeda’s calf and was trying to jump up to sniff her crotch. Birdie tugged him gently by the tail.

“Get in your place, Honey. Go on, get in your place.” Honey stared up at her mournfully for a second, then pranced over to the corner by the olive green stove and lay down, tapping his paws in a gesture of contained restlessness that Murphy would have been able to empathize with had she been invited to dinner.

Leeda, though, wore a wrinkled nose and a frown and held her hands tight over her skirt. Why she’d brought skirts to wear to the farm was anyone’s guess. Birdie shot glances at her over Poopie’s signature rib eye steak, feeling resentful. She hadn’t asked Leeda to come in the first place. But here Leeda was, wrinkling her nose and obviously judging. Judging Birdie’s room, her dogs, her house’s out-of-date kitchen. Birdie tucked a forkful of sweet corn in her mouth, wondering why she still cared so badly what Leeda thought. It had been this way since
they’d hit puberty and drifted apart. Birdie had always wanted Leeda to be her friend, and she still had no idea why.

“Birdie, why don’t you keep your elbows off the table? Look at Leeda.” Walter nodded in Leeda’s direction.

Birdie looked at her dad, who hadn’t said so much as a word through dinner so far. Then at Leeda, who sat with her legs crossed and her wrists resting at the edge of the table like a china doll, occupying Cynthia’s old chair and yawning occasionally. Birdie pulled her elbows to her side. From the corner, Honey Babe let out a tiny squeaky sympathetic howl. Everyone chewed loudly.

Exhausted from the day, which was always one of the most challenging of the year, Birdie snaked a hand shyly across the table and patted her dad’s fingers. Since her mom had gone, Birdie had noticed the ways it mattered that her mom wasn’t around, and today—with all that Cynthia would have been doing to help get the season moving—had been a major day for that. The big ways Birdie missed her mother were expected. The little ways were hard for their own reasons, because they took her by surprise. Birdie knew her dad felt it too.

“That software I got is great, Dad,” she said, referring to the program she’d bought a couple of weeks ago at Wal-Mart to help organize payroll.

Walter merely sawed on his steak, so halfheartedly that he barely made a slash through it. “Did you bring the old bottles down to the cider house?”

Birdie shook her head. “Not yet.” Actually, she’d done extra chores in other areas to
avoid
the cider house. So far, she’d managed to avoid Enrico completely. Which, on a small farm, was actually quite a feat.

“I’ve renewed all the insurance stuff except for natural disaster.” She changed the subject. “That just came today.” She stared at Walter. No response. “But I’ll do that first thing tomorrow.”

“Don’t bother. We won’t renew this year.”

“Really?”

Walter didn’t reply. Nobody spoke for several seconds, and in that time Birdie wolfed down several pieces of steak.

Poopie looked from Birdie to him and back again and rolled her eyes. Poopie was a better communicator than either Birdie or her dad and had said many times that the two of them together were like two mimes talking, except she called them “mines.”