The Peach Keeper

by Sarah Addison Allen

  “If I need your help, I’ll ask for it,” Agatha snapped as she walked by. She walked to the third hallway, her papery fingertips trailing along the walls as she counted the doors to Georgie Jackson’s room. When Georgie’s son Ham had come to her and asked for Agatha’s help in getting Georgie a place here in the home, Agatha had given him the money without hesitation. All she’d ever wanted was to help Georgie, to make up for the one time when Georgie had needed her the most and Agatha had turned her back on her … the one time that had changed everything. Agatha kept tabs on how Georgie was being treated, but she rarely visited Georgie here. Georgie wouldn’t have liked it. She would have said, You have your side, I have mine. That’s the way it has to be now.

  When she reached the room, all Agatha could make out was a dark form haloed by the morning sun. Georgie looked like a hole Agatha could fall into.

  Agatha mourned for a lot of things she’d lost, but lately this was the loss she felt the most—the loss of friendship. She missed her eyesight. She missed her husband. She missed her mother and father. But those girls she grew up with were such an important part of her life. If her old friends all appeared to her now, she would protect them with her last breath, which of course was too little, too late. The way it had always been. They were gone, all except for Georgie, who was suspended here in life only by a thin, glittering thread.

  She walked over to Georgie and sat beside her. “It’s finally happening,” Agatha whispered.

  Georgie—sweet, innocent Georgie—turned to her and said, “Peach.”

  Agatha fumbled around until she found Georgie’s hand, and then held it in her own. “Yes,” Agatha said. “It’s still there.”

  But the question was, for how long?

  FOUR

  Wish Lists

  Colin sat in the corner café of Au Naturel Sporting Goods, nursing his cappuccino and staring out the large store window at the cars going by. Because this road led directly to the entrance of Cataract National Forest, there was a lot of traffic. This side of town had a completely different feel to it, hectic and slightly superficial. It had been a long time since he’d been here, but nothing much had changed, like the fact that locals rarely came to National Street because they considered it too touristy. The long rows of brick buildings were old, but the shops they housed were hip and new, and most were owned by transplants.

  As much as he didn’t like acknowledging it, he was still connected to this place, if just by memory. He’d seen a lot of the world in his work. Urban landscaping wasn’t about homogenizing cities but drawing from their heritage, and he was one of the best landscape architects in the business. Learning about new cultures, traveling to new places, not staying in one place too long—it was exactly what he wanted to be doing. But then he would come home, usually only when forced by guilt from his mother or, in this instance, a request for help from his sister, who never asked for help, and he would feel a strange sensation, like his feet growing heavy. It was as if he was sinking back into the root system of this place. And he didn’t want to be that Colin anymore, the one planted here, the one pruned to exactly the size and shape everyone expected him to be.

  He heard the bell over the door ring, and he turned.

  Willa Jackson had just walked in. She was wearing jeans over black cowboy boots and a black sleeveless top that crisscrossed over her bare shoulders. Her honey-brown hair was wavy in a way that was no curl and all volume. It’d been much longer in high school, and she’d always worn it in a messy braid. Actually, he really didn’t know if she’d always worn it like that, it was just how he remembered it the last time he saw her, walking out of the school.

  Now her hair ended just below her ears and she parted it on the side, catching the hair at one temple with a sparkly barrette. He liked it because it was spunky, and it suited the image of what he thought she’d become. He didn’t realize he’d gotten it so wrong. Surely he couldn’t have gotten it so wrong. Because if he was wrong about Willa, his inspiration, then maybe he was wrong about his own decisions, too.

  The girl who’d earlier made him the cappuccino excused herself from talking to a customer and walked over to Willa. He could hear her say, “Someone is here to see you.”

  “Who?” Willa asked.

  “I don’t know. He came in about an hour ago and asked for you. I told him you’d be here soon, so he’s sitting in the café, waiting for you. Cappuccino with one raw sugar,” she said in a lower voice, reciting his order as if it was confidential information, some secret she was revealing about him.

  Willa turned to walk toward the café but stopped when she saw him. She turned away quickly, which made him smile.

  “What?” the dark-haired girl asked. “Who is he?”

  “Colin Osgood,” Willa said.

  “Related to Paxton?”

  “Her brother.”

  “Do you hate him, too?” the girl asked.

  “Stop it. I don’t hate them,” Willa murmured before turning back around and walking over to him. She stopped at his table and gave him a polite smile. “I see you made it home alive.”

  “Yes. And I want to apologize for last night. I haven’t been that tired in a long time.” He rubbed his eyes with one hand. He felt like a ghost of his former self, like someone could reach for him and get only air. “I could probably sleep for days more.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “Pit stop on my way out.” He held up his lidded cup of cappuccino, which was actually very good.

  “Leaving so soon?” The thought seemed to brighten her mood.

  “No. I’ll be here for about a month. I’m just on my way to Asheville for the afternoon.”

  She started to back away. “Don’t let me keep you.”

  “You’re not.” He gestured to the chair on the other side of the table, and she stared at him, her lovely light gray eyes narrowed slightly, before she pulled it out and sat. “So, you own this store.”

  “Yes,” she said slowly, as if it might be a trick question. “As I mentioned last night. And undoubtedly how you found me this morning.”

  He took his eyes off her for a moment to look around. He’d counted two other sporting goods stores on National Street, but Willa seemed to have found something that set hers apart, specializing in organic wear and environmentally friendly equipment, with a café in the store that made the place smell like roasting coffee beans, sharp and dark. “You must do a lot of hiking and camping.”

  “No. The last time I was in Cataract was during a field trip in third grade. I got poison ivy.”

  “Then you must love coffee.”

  “No more than usual.” Willa nodded to the girl clerk. “That’s my friend Rachel’s territory.”

  He was confused. “Then why do you own a sporting goods store and café?”

  She shrugged. “A few years ago I met someone who wanted to sell this place, and I needed something to do.”

  “And this is what you chose.”

  “Yes.”

  He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. Why did this bother him so much? When he’d recognized her yesterday on Jackson Hill, sitting on top of her Jeep, he’d felt a surge of true happiness, like seeing a mentor. It was Willa Jackson, perpetrator of pranks so epic that on the rare occasion when he got together with his old classmates, it was still one of the first things they talked about. The care and detail and time that went into some of them was amazing—like her last one, pulling the fire alarm and then, when all the students were outside, unrolling a giant banner from the roof of the school, on which was written WILLA JACKSON IS THE WALLS OF WATER HIGH SCHOOL JOKER. “I watched you that day the police took you from the school, and you didn’t look embarrassed. You looked relieved. As if, finally, you could stop pretending. I thought you were going to leave here and never look back.”

  She gave him an exasperated look. He didn’t blame her. He should just shut up. This was none of his business.

  No, there was one more thing he n
eeded to say. “You’re the reason I decided to follow my own path instead of coming back here and doing what everyone wanted me to do,” he said, which made her brows rise. “No one thought you were capable of all that mayhem, and you showed them not to underestimate you. If you could be that brave, then I thought I could be, too. I owe that to you. To the Joker.”

  She shook her head. “That bravery, as you call it, resulted in a class-two misdemeanor when I pulled that fire alarm. I was charged, nearly expelled, and wasn’t allowed to go to graduation. And my dad was fired because of me, because I took his keys and his computer passwords to pull my pranks. Don’t glamorize it, Colin. I’m glad you found your path, and I’m happy it had something to do with me. But I found my path, too, even if it wasn’t what you expected.”

  She thought her dad was fired? Colin knew for a fact that he’d quit. Colin had been there when it had happened. Why wouldn’t her father have told her?

  Willa took advantage of his silence and stood. “I have to get to work,” she said. “Thanks for returning the invitation last night.”

  “Still not going?” he asked as he, too, stood.

  “No. And before you ask again, I’m not planning some big prank.”

  “Too bad. That group could use some shaking up.”

  She avoided his eyes and walked past him. “I’m not the girl to do it.”

  He watched her walk away. She carried the scent of something fresh and sweet with her, like lemons. “Do you want to go out sometime?” he found himself calling after her, because somehow he knew he would regret it if he didn’t.

  She stopped abruptly. The girl clerk looked up from the café counter with a smile. Willa turned and walked back to him. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said in a low voice.

  “I asked if you wanted to, not if it was a good idea.”

  “You think they’re two different things?”

  “With you, Willa, I think they are definitely two different things,” he said, taking a sip of his cappuccino, not taking his eyes off her.

  “You’re only going to be here one month. I think it’s high-handed, not to mention completely ridiculous, to think you can make me see the error of my ways in that short period of time.” She had good instincts. She knew exactly what he was trying to do.

  “Is that a challenge?”

  “No.”

  He walked to the door with a smile. “I’ll be seeing you, Willa.”

  “Not if I see you first, Colin.”

  Oh, yes, that was definitely a challenge.

  Ha. The old Willa was somewhere in there, after all.

  “Where were you last night? Mama had a hissy fit,” Paxton said when Colin got home that evening. She was coming in from work at the outreach center, where she had an office and oversaw the Osgood family’s charity ventures. They just happened to meet in the driveway at the same time, a synchronicity they’d always had, a twin thing that he sometimes missed.

  “Sorry,” he said, putting his arm around Paxton as they walked inside. “I didn’t mean to worry everyone. I fell asleep on someone’s couch.”

  “Someone? How very unspecific,” Paxton said as they walked to the kitchen. The housekeeper, Nola, was making dinner. Nola had been a fixture at Hickory Cottage for years. Her family had worked there for generations. She was a stickler for manners and respect, and Paxton and Colin had always given it to her. In return she’d given them secret snacks. Colin stopped to forage around in the refrigerator. Nola tsked at him and gave him one of the rolls she’d just made, then shooed them both out.

  Colin followed Paxton to the patio, where she stopped and turned to him. “Out with it. Whose couch did you fall asleep on?”

  He took a bite of the roll and smiled at her, which used to result in a smile back. Not now.

  When he’d set eyes on his sister in the foyer yesterday, it had been the first time in almost a year, when she’d flown up to spend a week with him in New York to celebrate their thirtieth birthday. She’d been so excited by the prospect of finally moving out of Hickory Cottage. But those plans had fallen through—something that had their mother’s fingerprints all over it—and the difference between when he’d last seen Paxton and now was astounding. Unhappiness radiated from her like heat. She was beautiful, and always carried herself well, but she’d stayed too long in this house with their parents, shouldering absolutely everything it meant to be an Osgood. And it was partly his fault. He’d left her alone to deal with this. He’d known what was expected of him, and so had Paxton. But she’d embraced it. He’d wanted to establish something that was his alone, to prove that he could actually exist beyond Walls of Water. To Paxton, nothing existed outside Walls of Water.

  “Come on,” Paxton said. “Tell me. Please?”

  He finally shrugged and said, “It was Willa Jackson’s couch.”

  Paxton looked surprised. “I had no idea you were friends with Willa.”

  “I’m not,” he said, finishing the roll in another two bites. “When I was out yesterday, I saw her drop something, but I couldn’t catch up with her, so I thought I’d just drop it by her house. I had no idea how tired I really was. I think I embarrassed her.”

  That made Paxton laugh. She didn’t do that often enough.

  “So tell me about Willa,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest and leaning against the concrete balustrade.

  Paxton adjusted that ever-present tote bag on her shoulder. “What do you want to know?”

  “She seems to have a very quiet life.”

  “Yes.” Paxton tilted her head. “Why are you surprised? Her family has always been quiet.”

  “But Willa was the Walls of Water High School Joker,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  Paxton didn’t get it. Neither did he, exactly. “I just thought she’d be more … outgoing.”

  “She grew up, Colin. We all did.”

  He scratched his hand against the side of his face. “Why doesn’t she want to go to the gala? Her grandmother helped found the Women’s Society Club.”

  “I don’t know. When I sent her the invitation, I wrote her a personal note about wanting to include her grandmother. But she blew me off.”

  “She didn’t want to have anything to do with the restoration?”

  Paxton looked confused by the question. “I didn’t ask her.”

  “You didn’t ask if she had old photos or old papers? If she wanted to see what was going on inside as it was being restored? Anything?”

  “There were enough photos on record to go by. Colin, honestly, this restoration was about contractors and designers and scouring art auctions and estate sales for period pieces. It didn’t have anything to do with Willa. What could she have contributed?”

  He shrugged as he looked out over the patio, to the pool, the pool house, and the mountain landscape beyond. The rolling mountains looked like kids playing under a big green blanket. He had to admit, there was nowhere in the world like this place. Part of his heart was still here, somewhere. He just wished he knew where so he could take it back. “I guess it just would have been a nice thing to do.”

  “I did the best I could,” she snapped. “And where were you when all this was happening? You coordinated everything with the landscaping by phone and email. You wouldn’t even do that in person.”

  “I didn’t know you wanted me here for the duration.” He paused, frowning at her reaction. “No one asked you to take on this project alone, Pax.” He’d been surprised by Paxton’s call last year, asking him to do the landscaping, but he couldn’t say no. She’d wanted a large tree on the property, and after a lot of networking, Colin had found one being threatened by development nearby. But transplanting a tree that heavy and old had to be carefully choreographed. Everything had to be planned, down to the smallest detail. All year he’d been in touch weekly with the arborists they’d hired. And he’d taken off a month to oversee everything up until the grand opening of the Madam, which he’d considered a great sacrifice, becau
se he hadn’t been home for that long in over a decade.

  Paxton threw her hands in the air. “The Blue Ridge Madam is the first thing anyone sees as they drive into town. It was an eyesore. It was either tear it down or restore it. That house is part of our town history. I did a good thing, even if I didn’t ask Willa Jackson to help.”

  “Calm down, Pax. What’s wrong?”

  She closed her eyes and sighed. “Nothing’s wrong. I just can’t ever seem to do enough.”

  “Enough for who? Mom and Dad? You have to get over that. You’re never going to be happy until you live your own life.”

  “Family is important, Colin. But that’s not something I’d expect you to understand.” She turned to leave. “Cover for me at dinner tonight, will you? Tell Mama and Daddy that I had to go finish up some work at the outreach center.”

  “Why?”

  She spun back around and said, “Can’t you do that for me? It’s not as if you’ve been around for the past ten years to do it.”

  She was right. “Is that where you’re really going?” he asked as she stepped back into the kitchen.

  “No.”

  Paxton drove to Sebastian’s house and pulled in front. His car wasn’t there. That’s when she remembered that he kept late hours on Thursdays at his office, which was the reason he’d had the time to go with her to visit her grandmother that morning. Now she had to see him twice in order to get through the day? She wondered how she survived before he came to town. Basically, she’d kept her stress to herself, sublimating it with red licorice or trying to work it out through her endless series of private lists.