“Chickie,” she called with a giggle in her voice, wanting to apologize. But the sound of the screen door hissing closed announced that Birdie had already gone. Murphy walked to the end of the hall, which was marked with a big square window, and peered out to see her and her dogs rushing across the grass toward the house, still walking self-consciously with no one behind to watch her.
“Damn.”
Murphy’s eyes drifted over the landscape. It was a far cry from Anthill Acres, where the foliage consisted of the kudzu that lined the telephone poles and the moss that stuck up through the cracks in the concrete patios.
Just emerging from one of the rows—on a path to intersect Birdie if she’d been walking instead of run-hobbling—was a figure. Murphy watched it closely, making out a man, well, a guy, in an orange T-shirt and jeans. He was nice to look at, definitely, though he had very little style—his jeans weren’t any kind of hipster blue and his T-shirt looked like Hanes standard variety. Murphy was into style.
Still, she could tell just by the way he walked that he had to be good looking. Guys who knew it had a certain walk that didn’t show off—their looks could do it for them.
Murphy made a mental note of him. And then she slunk back down the hall and forgot about him altogether.
Up on the porch, several people—mostly young Mexican men—were milling around speaking Spanish—sitting on the porch rockers and standing on the stairs, their skin brown and warm looking. Leeda parked her Beemer as close to the house as possible and primly made her way through the crowd. “Pardone, pardone.” She wasn’t sure if that was right, though she’d taken two years of Spanish so far. Of course, she’d spent most of that time snapping the split ends out of her hair and being courted via note by ninety percent of the boys in the class and half the girls.
Inside, the house smelled like mothballs and boxwood—the signature scent of Uncle Walter’s. Uncle Walter himself carried the smell with him wherever he went, much like Leeda’s mom carried the smell of Givenchy Very Irresistible, claiming that every woman should have a scent others could remember her by.
Leeda let out a long, nervous sigh. She hadn’t been to the house in over a year. Looking around now, she could see the signs of Aunt Cynthia’s sudden disappearance. Bare spaces where pieces of furniture had been. The dining room table covered in papers, the chairs pulled out and in disarray. Cynthia had always been in Walter’s office, on the phone with some client, solving some issue for the workers, or handling the bills. It felt quiet without her high southern voice lilting through the rooms. Leeda wished she had Rex with her. Or one of her friends from school.
Poopie came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. “Hiya, honey,” she drawled in her weird mixture of Spanish and southern accents.
“Hi, Miss Poopie.” Leeda kissed her on her warm, dewy cheek. Poopie didn’t smell like mothballs. She always smelled like warm cookies.
“You look more and more like a movie star every day. How many boyfriends you have?”
Leeda smiled. “Just one for now.”
Poopie shook her head. “A waste. I hope he’s sweet to you.”
“He is.”
Poopie smiled too, showing three gold teeth. “Well, it’s good to have you, sweetie. We need every hand we can get this year. I’m about to drive the van into town to take the workers shopping. This young man is helping me get everything organized.” She nodded to a cute, dark-skinned guy standing in the archway of the kitchen. He smiled at Leeda. Leeda smiled tightly back, polite. People who didn’t speak her language always gave her the giggly wigglies. “Go on up and see our Birdie. She’s hiding from me.”
Leeda plodded her way up the droopy, lopsided stairs, miserable. She wondered if her parents would have ever sentenced Danay to two weeks with the Darlingtons. She tried to picture it. Instead the picture leapt into her head of the day Danay had left for Emory (the Harvard of the South, as her mom liked to say)—her mom and dad with their arms genteelly looped behind each other’s backs watching her drive away, tears in their eyes. It made a lump rise to Leeda’s throat.
In the upstairs hall, the same dresser held the same knickknacks that had been there since Leeda could remember. The same piece of cinnamon candy had been sitting there for at least sixteen years. Leeda wrinkled her nose. She liked things new and shiny, not old and dusty.
Birdie was sitting in her giant window, flipping through a Cosmo and nibbling the chocolate off a Goo Goo Cluster. Aside from the Goo Goo Cluster, she reminded Leeda of a Renoir she’d seen in Paris last summer—soft and full and pretty. Two papillons lay sleeping on each other’s necks at her feet.
“Hi, Birdie.”
Birdie jolted and tucked the magazine behind her, her cheeks turning pink. Leeda scanned the room to the TV, which was playing some Nelly video.
“What are you doing, Birdie?”
“Nothing. Um, hiding from Poopie.”
“She knows you’re up here.”
“She wants me to go into town with the workers and take them shopping.”
“Well, why don’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
“There’s some cutie downstairs, looks like a worker. Maybe you should go anyway.”
Birdie blushed harder, clasping her hands like an old lady. Birdie was more like an old lady than any old lady Leeda knew, and she knew a lot because old ladies loved the Primrose Cottage Inn, their fluffy white hairdos poking over the backs of the rockers on the verandah all summer long.
“What are you reading?”
“Nothing.”
“Well.” Leeda cleared her throat, remembering her posture and throwing her shoulders back. “Where should I put my suitcases?” she asked brightly.
“Dad wants you to sleep in here with me. He said we should pull out the trundle bed.”
Leeda sank deeply into one hip. “Are you serious?”
Birdie nodded solemnly.
“No way. I need my privacy.”
“I told him. I need my privacy too. I said we’re not ten anymore. He didn’t listen.”
Leeda surveyed the room and wondered. It hadn’t changed much since they were ten. The same four-post bed, the same stuffed animals on the shelves.
“Well, it’s just not happening,” Leeda said, stiffening in the way she did when she was resolved. “I’m going to talk to Uncle Walter. I think you should come with me.”
Birdie let out a breath and stood up.
Leeda frowned. Her cousin made her uncomfortable for a couple of different reasons. One was that she didn’t chitchat. She would let long silences drift into a conversation and make no attempt to get out of them or to help Leeda when she tried to fill up the empty space. The second reason was something a little filmier and harder to grasp. There wasn’t any artifice to Birdie—her big brown eyes were always earnest and truthful. Being around her made Leeda feel like she herself was a little bit artificial.
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.
Chapter Five
Murphy 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.
Peaches with Bonus Material Page 4