The Peach Keeper (29 page)

She let that wash over her, warm and comforting. “I’ve missed you, too.”

“I know you haven’t had time to order furniture for your house,” he said.

“I’ve been too busy. It’s next on my list.”

“I had a bed delivered there today,” Sebastian said.

That made her laugh. “Are you kidding?”

“No.”

“Then I can’t wait to go home,” she said.

“I can’t wait to take you there. I have some very good memories in that house already.” He led her to the dais at the front of the room, then whispered, “Good luck. You’ll do great.” The quartet ended their tune. There was applause as she walked to the lectern, and Paxton watched as Sebastian took a seat at the table with Willa and Colin and Nana Osgood.

Her insides were shaking, and she thought for a moment that she couldn’t go through with this. But then she thought of her grandmother and Georgie, how everything about this house and the club had to do with them, with honoring them, and she knew it was the right decision.

She cleared her throat and said, “Welcome, everyone,
to the Walls of Water Women’s Society Club seventy-fifth anniversary gala.”

More applause.

“I wrote a speech months ago. Those who know me aren’t surprised. I’m such a planner.” Some people laughed. “The speech was about what good work we’ve done and how proud we should be of ourselves.” She paused. “But I tore it up this week, because I realized we’ve gotten it all wrong.”

There was a change in the air. Everyone seemed to realize something was up.

“This club was formed to help each other. Not others.
Each other
. As in, we’re all in this together. It wasn’t formed to set us apart from others, or to compete with one another. It was formed because seventy-five years ago, two best friends in the darkest moments of their lives said,
All we have is our deep and abiding love for each other. We can’t lose that or we lose ourselves. If we don’t help each other, who will?
I don’t know when it happened, and I don’t know how, but the Women’s Society Club lost its true focus. It’s not what it was, and I can’t bring it back. That’s why I’m stepping down as president tonight, and removing my name from the roster.” The room started to rumble. “I have not always been the best friend to any of you,” she continued, searching the crowd for Kirsty Lemon, for Moira Kinley, for Stacy Herbst and Honor Redford. “But I can promise that from this night forward, I will be there for you if you need me, anytime, anyplace. That’s the true nature of the club. It was never meant to be an institution. It was a pinkie swear among
teenagers who were afraid, and knowing that they could count on each other made them feel better. Our grandmothers knew they would be friends for their entire lives. How many of us can say that? How can we know the true meaning of charity if we don’t even know how to help those closest to us?” Paxton stepped back. “That’s all I wanted to say.”

She rubbed her forehead, squinting against the spotlight. The room was silent. Suddenly, everyone turned toward a small sound coming from a table in front.

Agatha was chuckling, the sound rusty, like a piece of machinery that hadn’t been used in years. “That’s my girl,” she said.

There wasn’t much celebrating to be done after that. Dinner was served, then awards were given out and some more speeches were made, but the ceremony had a hurried and awkward feel to it, and most were eager to leave. It would go down as a small disaster and a definite scandal, but it gave people something to talk about, which made them happy. Paxton didn’t care. It was the right thing to do, and she felt so much better now, even if her mother wasn’t talking to her.

Most people avoided Paxton as they left. She was sure everyone wanted to talk to one another about it first, to come to some consensus about how they all felt about it. One way or the other, Paxton knew that those who decided to stick with her would be her true friends. The others would just be scenery.

At the end of the evening, Paxton and Willa walked Agatha out to the nurse’s car, after Agatha had given them a blind tour of the Madam, pointing out by feel and memory everything she remembered about the house. She and Georgie sliding down the banister and their skirts flying up. Playing dolls in Georgie’s room. Having pineapple upside-down cake the Jacksons’ cook would make in a cast-iron frying pan, so that the brown sugar on top turned crispy. A slide-away secret compartment in the bookcase where they used to leave notes for each other.

“I’m proud of you, Paxton. This place smells new. Different. It’s a good place again,” Agatha said, wobbling slightly as Willa and Paxton helped her down the front steps. Paxton wasn’t sure, but her grandmother might have been a little drunk. “And what you did in there tonight, that took guts.”

“Thank you, Nana. Mama may never speak to me again.”

“Her loss.” Before Agatha got in the nurse’s car, she said, “You and Willa, I think you might have finally made him go away. Real friendship was the only thing he was afraid of.”

“Him?” Willa asked.

“Tucker. He’s been around these past few weeks. Haven’t you noticed? I’ve felt him. There’s been a strange sweet scent in the air. And you can’t tell me you haven’t seen birds acting strangely lately.”

Willa and Paxton moved in closer to each other as Agatha got in the car and the nurse reached over and
buckled her seat belt. “What really happened here, Nana? Did you really …” Paxton couldn’t finish the sentence, not with the nurse there.

“Yes, I did,” Agatha said. “Don’t forget.”

Paxton and Willa watched the car drive off, then gave each other odd looks. Just as they turned to walk back up the steps, the scent of peaches permeated the air for a moment, thick and cloying, before it faded into the night, crossing the moon in a wisp of smoke, then disappearing. Suddenly, the oak tree began to shake as dozens of birds took flight, their dark wings showing flashes of yellow like fireworks.

“Coincidence?” Willa asked, wrapping her arm in Paxton’s.

“There’s no such thing,” Paxton answered, holding on tight as they watched the birds fly away.

EIGHTEEN
The Peach Keepers

1936

T
he first time it happened, Georgie woke up, suddenly freezing. She didn’t know why. It was so hot that summer that she had to sleep on top of her bedsheets, and she still melted every night. But that night she woke up to her perspiration freezing and cracking on her skin. She shivered and looked to the window, expecting to see the world frozen over. The world was changing, she thought sleepily. It had been changing for months. And now that Tucker, with his charming smile and magical ways, had moved into the Madam with them, Georgie felt the changes even more. There was a lot of hope in the air, hope that their financial problems would soon be over with this peach orchard they were planning. And her father, who ignored her on good days and blamed her for her mother’s death during childbirth on
bad ones, even seemed happy to see her at dinner now. He was happy to see her because Tucker was happy to see her. Tucker changed people that way. And because of that she ignored the way he would brush up against her in the hallways, how he was always around when she got out of the bath. She ignored his restlessness and the way his temper would flare up sometimes. Agatha had told her she was being silly, anyway, and that she had no idea how lucky she was. Tucker had changed Agatha, too. She’d once been able to tell Agatha anything, but now Agatha burned with something hot every time she saw Georgie, and Georgie didn’t know why. Georgie had felt very alone lately. She didn’t realize just how alone she was up here on Jackson Hill until her friends stopped coming to see her. And at parties, they ignored her. So Georgie spent most of her time in her room now, mending dresses so she could wear them one more year, or rearranging the dolls displayed in her cupboard, brushing their hair and ironing their aprons, and dreaming of the day when all these changes would be over and they could all go back to being normal again.

There was the smell of smoke and peaches around her that night as she sat up, shivering in her bed. She was used to that, the peach smell, anyway. Tucker carried it on his skin. It followed him around wherever he went. That’s why he said birds bothered him so—because they liked the way he smelled. Georgie had never argued, but she’d always thought the birds swooping down on him seemed angry, not enamored.

She looked around her dark room, and that’s when
she saw a small orange light by the door. The lit end of a cigarette.
Someone was standing by her closed door
. Her heart leapt in her chest. It felt like a fist striking her from inside.

Tucker walked out of the shadow. He put the cigarette to his lips and took a puff, brightening his face and making it glow. He dropped the cigarette to the floor and stepped on it, and everything was dark again.

When he came to her, she didn’t understand what was happening. When he finally left, she stayed in her bed for the rest of the night, too afraid to get up. She heard him come back down from his attic bedroom in the morning, pause by her door, then walk away. When the house was quiet, she finally got up and washed, but then she propped a chair against the doorknob and wouldn’t let anyone in until her father demanded she join them for dinner. A week, two weeks, passed, and Tucker made no move toward her again, and she thought that was it. She’d actually begun to recover. Her world was no longer the same, but she knew she would survive.

But then he came back.

It went on all summer. No matter how many times she reached out for help, no one listened to her. He made them not listen. She couldn’t see an end to it. It was going to go on like this forever unless she stopped it. But she wasn’t that brave. She’d never been that brave.

Until the day she finally accepted that she was pregnant.

That day, she took the cook’s frying pan to her room
with her. And when night fell, she stood behind her door and waited.

After she hit him, an odd thud that sounded like something being dropped in the next room, she just stood there, as if waiting for everything to go back to the way it was. She began to tremble. Nothing was different. She was still pregnant. And she had just hurt Tucker, maybe even killed him. Her father would never understand. No one would understand. Except …

“Show him to me,” Agatha said after Georgie had run to her house in the mist, tripping and falling along the way so that when she finally got to Hickory Cottage she was covered with dirt and scratches. She knew the way into the house that led to the back stairs, the stairs they’d used to sneak past Agatha’s parents many times. She’d woken Agatha up and begged her to listen, begged her to help. She trusted Agatha more than anyone in the world. And what had happened this summer couldn’t possibly have erased a lifetime of friendship. It didn’t just go away like that. At least, she prayed it didn’t. She’d lost so much already.

Agatha was strangely quiet as Georgie led her back up to the Madam. Tucker was right where she had left him, on the floor of her bedroom. The frying pan was sitting on his chest, like a weight keeping him from floating away. Agatha knelt by him, muttering something Georgie couldn’t understand. She put one of her hands on his head, then jerked back as if she’d been burned. She stood and said, “We have to do this quick. He’s not all gone. And he’s angry. We have to dig a hole close by. We can’t carry him far. It has to be in the yard
here. If we do it on the hill, it’ll wash. Hurry, Georgie, let’s get started.” This was what Agatha was so good at, taking charge, organizing, breaking things down into manageable bits.

They worked by candlelight. In the kitchen, Georgie sifted together pepper and sawdust the carpenter bees had created when they’d burrowed into the porch. The cook had once told her that if you sprinkle sawdust and pepper in front of a door, no one would be able to leave that room. She put it in front of the doors to her father’s and brother’s bedrooms, hoping it would give her and Agatha time to do what they needed to do.

They dug in the yard for hours, as far away from the house as they could but not so close to the precipice that the hill would give way. She would never forget how quiet it was. The mist below them hid the town from sight but also muffled everything. It felt as though they were the only people in the world, two young women about to bury the symbol of their helplessness, as if that’s all it would take to make them whole again.