The Secrets of Peaches (7 page)

Murphy Jane McGowen.

Age?

17.

She read the two lines over to make sure there were no typos. Nervous excitement coursed through her.

She hadn't said it right to Rex. To her, New York wasn't just leaving behind what she didn't want to be. It was the chance to have everything that she could never have.

It was her glass egg.

“Y
ou ready?”

“Yes, Bird.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, Birdie.”

The morning after homecoming, Birdie stood next to the blue post office box on the wide, empty street outside the Bridgewater post office, her brown eyes twinkling, her soft cheeks flushed. She held Murphy's large white NYU application envelope an inch into the slot.

Thwuff.
Birdie pushed the envelope all the way in and let it go, listening intently as it landed with a muffled rustle. Then she shimmied around the box, kicking her legs out like an elf. She circled it not once but three times.

“What are you doing, Birdie?” Rex had his arm slung around Murphy's neck.

Birdie paused, giving them a “duh” face. “Good luck dance. This is for early admittance….” She did a knee-toe kick all around the box. “And this one's for getting the moolah…” she said, doing the shimmy.

“Wow, I didn't know you were the financial aid fairy too.”

“Money, money, money,”
Birdie sang, rocking back and forth.

“You're lucky community college is cheap,” Murphy said.

Birdie stopped dancing, looking slightly deflated.

“What do you want to do now?” Rex asked.

“Vomit.” To have her application out of her hands was both a relief and a new stress. Now, over the next several weeks, she'd have to wonder where it was, who was reading it, what they thought. She envied Leeda, who'd turned in her early application to Columbia a week ago. Which was typical.

Birdie turned worried. “Are you okay, Smurphy?”

“Murphy Jane does not enjoy handing the controls to someone else,” Rex said, yanking Murphy's hand to kiss her on the knuckle. He'd seen her middle name on her application this morning. She could kick herself for leaving it lying around.

“All the name-calling is killing me,” Murphy said flatly.

“Are you gonna take good care of her in the big city, Rex?” Birdie asked innocently. Murphy rolled her eyes, but then she looked at Rex, a little breathless.

He smiled at her, easy. “If she's lucky and she prays real hard.”

Murphy grinned at him dryly, but inside, she bucked. More and more, she wanted to hear he was coming with her. “Luck's my middle name,” she said cavalierly.

Rex laughed. “Okay, M.J.”

Murphy heaved a dramatic growl, ignoring him. “Let's go get Leeda and celebrate.”

Murphy summoned her inner frigid diva, pretended to be Lucretia, and called Leeda out of school, which she herself was
already skipping. Leeda appeared in the school parking lot in pink, her blond hair wild and soft, reminding her friends all over again she was, without a doubt, the most beautiful girl in Bridgewater.

Minutes later, they were stacked in Birdie's truck heading down Route 75. Birdie crept along in the right lane, staying at exactly the speed limit. From the passenger seat, Murphy watched car after car pass them. “Bird, if you drive any slower Miss Daisy is going to catch up with us.”

The trees at Mertie Creek drooped over the bar in smooth arches of orange leaves. Rex went in and got them a pitcher of beer. Behind the bar the girls pulled the rough-hewn benches around the fire pit. They
cheers
'ed Murphy and her application. The trees had started to lose their leaves, and the creek was visible now, snaking behind the bar. Murphy and Leeda flung old bottle caps they dug out of the gravel at each other, trying to make it between the other's hands. Birdie curled over her civics textbook, which she'd had behind her seat in the truck.

“Hey, Bird, is Laurens Community College really that rigorous?” Murphy prodded her.

Birdie looked wounded for a moment. “I've just been really busy with work at home.”

Murphy squinted at Leeda's fingers, gauging the distance. Leeda wiggled her thumbs mockingly. “Poopie jobs?”

Birdie shrugged.

Every time Murphy called Birdie, she was washing the curtains or scrubbing the windows or waxing the floor: all stuff Poopie would have normally done. She'd spread green manure among the new peach plantings and laid out new fruit for the bats.

“Maybe Poopie thinks now that you're all grown, you don't need her anymore,” Leeda offered. “Just tell her you still need her.”

Birdie had her chin in her hands. “The bats still haven't come to roost. I even thought I'd put Poopie's Saint Jude out by the hole, but I can't find him. I've tried everything else.”

“Maybe you should dress up like Count Chocula,” Murphy said.

“I'm supposed to do a ribbon cutting at the nature preserve where all those bats are,” Leeda said.

Birdie looked distraught.

“Good one, Lee.” Murphy leaned back. “That's like pouring lemon juice in her wounds.”

“I kind of like cutting the ribbons.” Leeda scowled at Murphy's disgusted look. “
What.
I'm having…a good time.”

“Blah.”

“I'm telling you.” Leeda fiddled with her nails, smoothed out the pleats in her knee-length Burberry skirt. “My mom's…into me or something. Maybe now that I'm leaving. Or that she's sick. Or something. She calls me, like, three times a day. She's not so bad right now.”

“Not bad relative to Satan?” Murphy quipped. Birdie snorted, covering her mouth. And then she stopped laughing immediately and looked around as if lightning might strike her. She always got a little wigged at the word
Satan
.

Leeda went stick straight and closed her lips tight. But Murphy couldn't help it. She had seen the million ways Lucretia had broken Leeda's heart. It showed in little things Leeda did, like how she spent so much time on her hair or how she went
all stiff when everyone around her was relaxing. In Murphy's opinion, it showed in all the ways Leeda didn't know how to just
be
.

Murphy looked over at Birdie, who was staring up at the sky with her mouth half open, blinking like an idiot. “Counting peaches, Bird?”

Birdie blushed. “No.” She leaned in, elbows on the table, and held her hair in bunches on top of her head, like mouse ears. Then she flung herself forward dramatically, turning to look up at Rex sheepishly from where she lay. “I'm dying,” she murmured.

“Here we go,” Leeda said.

“He's just so…just…a…”

“He's a
café con leche
love biscuit,” Murphy said. They all knew Birdie was talking about Enrico by the stupid goofy look on her face. Rex let out a short choppy laugh.

But Birdie just sank deeper against the table. “You know what? I even like the letter E better now,” she said despondently. “I always thought it was a boring letter. You know, not like X or Q. I can't believe I'm going to see him in fifty-four days.”

Murphy slumped against Rex, pretending to be passing out. Birdie let her arms flail forward in obvious capitulation to patheticness.

At four, music started playing from the speakers under the eaves. Rex pulled Leeda up to dance, singing the words to some cheesy song to make her laugh. Murphy lay back and watched them, content. Rex kept stealing glances at her over Leeda's shoulder.

And then she felt it. An ache. It was like it fell out of the sky
and landed square on top of her. She wanted to know so badly what was going to happen. It hurt how much she needed him. She swallowed and touched the hollow of her throat.

Birdie sat up and rubbed her eyes.

“If Enrico wants to go to second base, do you think I should?”

“Second base?” Murphy laughed. “Birdie, what are you, from the fifties?”

Birdie bit her lip thoughtfully and shrugged, doe-eyed as usual, her hair in silky tangles from where she'd been pulling on it. Murphy shook her head wonderingly. “Second base,” she muttered, and took another sip of beer.

“I told Poopie I'd cook Thanksgiving dinner.”

“That's frightening,” Murphy replied. Birdie was a notoriously bad cook. Her mind drifted off too much. She forgot things until they started smoking.

“I think I'm going to name my first child Myrtle so I can call her Mertie for short,” Birdie said.

Leeda plopped down beside her. “Drat, you beat me to it.” Rex sat down beside Murphy and pulled her close to him.

“I'm sure Stepford Mom already has names picked out for
all
your kids,” Murphy joked.

Birdie snorted. Leeda just ignored her.

The day felt like heaven on earth. The sun kept peeping at them through the passing clouds, and to Murphy it felt like kisses from angels, though she would never have admitted it.

“Birdie, your heer, it ees so scruffy, but I loooove it,” Leeda said in a thick Enrico accent, brushing her fingers through Birdie's hair to smooth it out. She began to braid it and Birdie
leaned back against her.

There was a long easy silence, and Murphy tried to think of something fun to talk about. “Thunderstorms, cool or scary?”

“Cool,” Birdie answered.

“Cool,” Leeda agreed.

“Cool because they're scary,” Rex said.

Murphy picked wood splinters off the table, nodding. “Favorite three things about yourself.” Everyone was silent. “I'll start.” Murphy chewed on a thumbnail glibly. “My curvyliciousness, my taste in music, and how dang funny I am. Bird?”

Bird rubbed her lips, thinking. “The orchard. Me as a kid. Mmm, my hair.”

Leeda kept braiding. “I'll take a skip,” she said.

“There's no skipping. Except for boys because they're not so interesting.” She pinched Rex. Leeda stared over Birdie's shoulder blankly. She seemed to really be thinking.

When several seconds went by without a response, Rex took over, asking if Birdie really wanted to know what all the bases meant. Then he explained them in the gentlest terms imaginable. She listened with half her head tucked into the collar of her shirt, squinting in embarrassment, the visible tops of her cheeks red. Murphy kept her eyes on Leeda, who seemed to be somewhere else.

The afternoon wore on into dusk, and the temperature started to drop. Leeda wrapped half her cardigan around her and the other half around Birdie as they sipped cold beers. Rex kept his hand on Murphy's knee under the table. She could feel the warmth of his palm through her jeans. Murphy set her hand on top of his.

By the time they dragged themselves away, the parking lot
was draped in dusk. Wind blew leaves across the back road. On the highway, Leeda fell asleep against Murphy's shoulder, and Birdie turned the heat on full blast, though most of it escaped through the cracks in the old truck's dried-out window seals.

 

At Anthill Acres, Murphy waved to the girls as Birdie pulled out, and she and Rex crunched up the gravel to the stairs of her trailer.

She crossed her arms and looked back at her door.

“Look.” Rex blew into the air. “First mist.”

Murphy watched the mist rise up and disappear. “Nice,” she said, rolling forward and backward on her feet and rubbing her arms. He stood looking up at her from under his eyebrows for a while.

Every time they were alone together, the same question came to Murphy's lips. She rocked back and forth on her feet, fighting with herself about whether or not to ask if he'd reached any decisions yet.

“I think you should say it,” he said, taking her by surprise.

“Say what?” Murphy asked. She immediately knew. And it made her go hot and cold inside. She gave him her best innocent, ignorant look.

Rex shrugged. “You tell me.”

“Tell you what?” Murphy grinned, nervous, palms sweaty. She tried to think it to him through telepathy. That should be enough.

He swallowed. Looked embarrassed. “I need to hear it, Murphy.”

Murphy's eyes sank away from his face toward the gravel.
“Good night?” she asked, turning it into a joke. “Don't let the bedbugs bite?”

Rex looked at her a minute longer, straight, the way she could never really look at him. He kissed her at the corner of her lips. Then, before she could think of anything halfway decent to mumble to stop him, he got into his truck and pulled out. Murphy watched him as he disappeared behind the trees. The ease with which he left made her breathless.

Maybe he didn't understand, but
that
was why she couldn't say it. Because she loved him, but also because she couldn't pin him to her. Because he was too big and true to be sure of.

Georgia winter always teased its way in. On November fifteenth Judge Miller Abbott played his last eighteen holes of the season at the Balmeade Country Club in summer-like weather. He was shooting well until, on a putt at the ninth hole, his ball was knocked off course when it ran into—of all things—a peach pit. The nearest peach tree was three hundred yards away.

That night, a cold breeze swept into Bridgewater. The leaves went fluttering like butterflies, and Judge Abbott began to have what he later called “the orchard dreams.”

Every night far into the following year, he dreamed of Jodee McGowen reclining nude by Smoaky Lake, like she was Eve lying in a cluster of reeds in the oldest garden in the world.

T
hree-quarters into November, Cynthia Darlington steered her car out of the parking lot of Liddie's Tea Room. “You sure you won't spend the night?”

“Yeah, thanks anyway.” Birdie stared out the window as they zipped past the loblolly pines butting up against one another alongside Orchard Road. Already Birdie felt like she was starting the afternoon late. Summer days always lasted longer than she expected them to, but November days snapped past as clean and crisp as sweet peas. Birdie had forgotten that.

She glanced over at her mom, whose hands were wrapped tight around the steering wheel, her nails a gleaming pink. Birdie glanced at her own fingernails—they were short and had little specks of dirt under them. She watched the peach trees, bald in most places, as Cynthia pulled toward the house.

“See you Thursday, honey,” Cynthia called behind her as she climbed out of the car.

“Okay.” Birdie leaned over to wave in at her mom, wondering how she was going to have a whole Thanksgiving dinner on the table by then.

Running through a mental list of chores, she crunched up the driveway toward the house. And then, remembering Methuselah, she turned in that direction. Checking on the tree was one of the items on her list. She walked between the dorms, sunk crookedly on either side of her, and then turned left. As she absently watched her feet on the grass, her mind drifted to Poopie. Birdie had wanted to ask her a hundred times a day if she was leaving, but the words always got caught inside her. If she asked, she'd know the answer. There would be no five percent maybe it wasn't true. But the ninety-five percent true was killing her anyway, so why was she waiting? When she looked up, a figure startled her, and she stopped short.

Her dad turned to look at her over his shoulder. He was standing in front of Methuselah, hands stuffed in his overall pockets.

“Hey.”

“Hey, did you see this tree's dying?” he said lightly, rubbing his chin and then apparently gauging the distance between the tree and the edge of the property.

Birdie looked at Methuselah. “I'm gonna do some research on how to treat it.”

Walter shook his head, shrugging. “It's just old age. She's gonna come down.”

Birdie felt a tiny lump in her throat. “I've been reading up on it,” she shot back defensively. “It could be scab, or crown gall, or a zinc deficiency.” She'd Googled it.

“I don't think so, honey. We need to call and have someone come chop it.”

“No!” Birdie blurted, horrified. Walter looked at her, surprised.

“Birdie, this tree's too close to the road to let it fall on its own.” Birdie glanced over at where the knotty grass met the black tar of the single lane of Orchard Drive. She swallowed.

“Let me take care of it,” she said. “Please?”

Walter studied her, then shrugged his broad shoulders. “Okay. You're a big girl.”

Birdie heaved a sigh of relief. There was no doubt in her mind she could save the tree.

Walter turned back toward the drive, waving once over his shoulder. “I'm headed to town.”

“What for?” But her dad hadn't heard her. As she walked up to the house, she heard the sound of his truck pulling away.

 

Inside, the house was deeply, unsettlingly quiet. Birdie let the dogs jump on her and lick her hands. “Poopie?” Nobody answered. She pulled off her scarf and rubbed her cheeks and glanced at the chalkboard. No messages. Honey Babe and Majestic followed Birdie from room to room, tip-tapping along. Birdie could feel the wind leaving her sails. She reached for the mail and found a letter from LCC on the table with a bunch of forms to fill out. It surprised her because she hadn't sent anything to them yet. Her dad had sent in her materials, she guessed. She marveled at how her future was taking shape with her hardly lifting a finger.

She sank onto the kitchen chair and stared around. She knew there were a million chores she could do. But she couldn't think where to start.

Finally she picked up the phone and dialed Enrico.

“Hello?”

“Enrico.” She scratched the back of her neck, which immediately prickled. “Hey.”

“Birdie,” he said, sounding out of breath. Birdie could hear loud voices behind him, talking and laughing.

“Hey. Sorry I haven't called in a while. Things are so crazy here.”

“That's fine,” Enrico said lightly, unconcerned. Birdie tightened her fingers around the bottom edge of the phone. She felt like Enrico was getting fuzzy so far away. Were they growing fuzzy to each other?

“You okay, Birdie?”

“Yeah.” Birdie pushed a toe into the linoleum. “I guess.”

Enrico laughed. “You sound quiet.”
He
sounded happy. Excited. Lively.

“I…” There was a loud shuffling on Enrico's end of the phone and then a couple of girls' voices in the background.

“Birdie, I have to go. I'll call you tonight.”

“Okay.”

“I'm sorry. I'll call you.”

“Okay.”

Birdie listened to the phone click. She tried to quell the jealousy in her gut. She circled the downstairs rooms one more time, looking for Poopie. The dogs circled behind her. Finally she went out the back door and dragged the crates of peach preserves up from the musty cellar. She'd haul them down to the Pecan Festival on Thanksgiving morning and sell them at the Darlington Orchard booth. Next she tackled the back porch with a big scrub brush and bleach, something she'd always seen Poopie do. She wasn't sure what time of the year she was supposed to do it, but it couldn't hurt.

Then she trudged down to the bat cave to check for any signs of life and, seeing none, grabbed the bucket-like container she'd
bought and began scattering its stinky contents all around the opening, wrinkling her nose. It was a mixture of bat droppings and secret ingredients that the label guaranteed to work. Upon more thought, she went into the house and got two bowls of orange juice and placed them by the opening too. If they got mega-bats, well, that was better than nothing.

Afterward she did laundry, leaning on the dryer with her chemistry textbook vibrating under her hands, the warmth of it heating the drafty old room. She heard her dad come back from town and head upstairs.

Around eleven she heard the front door open and padded out to the hall to see Poopie coming in.

“Hey,” Birdie greeted her.

“Hiya, honey.” Poopie unwrapped her scarf and warmed her hands next to the radiator. This was the way it was now. Like everything was the way it
had
been, on the surface.

How could Birdie begin? How did you tell someone you were still a kid? That you still needed them? That if they left you, you'd crumble? Did you just blurt it out? “You want some tea?” Birdie asked, turning on the stove.

“No thanks,” Poopie answered. She looked ready to go. She backed up.

“Poopie,” Birdie blurted. “Can I talk to you about something?”

Poopie got a cagey look on her face and busied herself straightening the napkin holder on the table. “Maybe tomorrow, honey, I'm tired.”

Before Birdie could even register surprise, Poopie pecked her on the forehead and hurried up the stairs. No, she didn't hurry; she
ran
.

Long after midnight, when her clothes were dry, Birdie climbed to the dark upstairs hallway and into her room, setting her alarm for six. She pulled Honey Babe and Majestic under the covers with her and curled around them, snuggling their warmth tightly. She had the kind of thoughts in the dark that grew bigger the longer she lay there. Murphy, Leeda, her mom, Enrico, Poopie…everyone seemed to be speeding away, and Birdie was a road sign in the rearview mirror. The dogs, at least, were stuck with her.

She didn't remember that Enrico hadn't called back until she woke up in the middle of the night, shooting out of a dream. She squinted in the dark, trying to recall where she'd been—and then it came back to her. She'd been standing on the cartoon ground in Mexico, rocky and dry and flat, watching a single peach blossom blow across its surface.

Birdie chased it, but it was too fast. It blew away from her.