Up ahead, the rows of pecans—eighteen trees altogether—stood across from one another in perfectly straight lines. The pecan trees were enormous and unwieldy, full of knots and peeling bark, thrusting their heavy limbs in every direction. Poopie always said the trees were spooky. If she’d been walking through the grove and you asked her where she’d been, she’d twist her arms and claw up her fingers to imitate a tree.
The trees were uniform height except for Methuselah, which hung above the others like an old witch. She was the most ancient by at least two hundred years. No one knew how old pecans could get or who had named Methuselah. She appeared in the oldest plans for the orchard, which dated back to the 1800s.
Now that Birdie was outside on her family’s property, which would one day be hers, she felt centered again—shifted off Mexico and Enrico and all the fluttering. Looking around, she always knew exactly where she stood. She turned to watch the sun, which was sinking beyond the house. It made her feel peaceful that at least the orchard sunsets would always be around—all her life, she would be on this spot.
Some things really did last.
Four
Outside Bridgewater High School, which still had a confederate flag hanging next to the American flag outside the principal’s office, Rex Taggart’s truck was parked and idling. Murphy paused as she pushed through the front door, her backpack slung low over one shoulder. Then she stepped back once, nervous. Then hopeful. As with all things she really wanted, she tried to lower her excitement level by thinking about stuff that bored her, like Impressionism and Raisinettes. Just that morning she had decided to ask him. And Murphy liked to move fast. Why waste time?
Murphy swayed her hips as she approached the truck. She was small—short—but she walked big. Murphy opened the passenger door and stared inside at him. He sat with one hand on the wheel, the other resting on a small pumpkin in the passenger seat. He smelled like a combination of oil, the outside, and just…Rex. His eyes were a deep bottle-green that looked brown if you didn’t really look. His hair was messy. His style was no style—jeans and a dark green T-shirt.
“Boo,” Rex said, holding up the little pumpkin.
“Scary.” Murphy set it on her lap as she got in. “It’s not even October yet, goofy.” October was still two days away, unfortunately. Murphy was counting days like the Count of Monte Cristo stuck in the dungeon.
Rex shrugged. “You can never start carving too early.”
Murphy gazed at the tiny uncarvable pumpkin and then looked over at Rex and pinched him. “You couldn’t stay away from me, huh, stalker? That’s okay. You don’t have to use pumpkin excuses.”
“How was your day, Shorts?” he asked, an easy smile creeping sideways across his mouth. He seemed to be taking her in—her loose low-cut button-down shirt the color of a tea stain, green cords she’d bought for $3.50 at a garage sale, her curly hair wild around her face like a lion’s mane. Murphy knew she was being admired and stretched like a cat.
“I saw my guidance counselor,” she answered him.
“And?”
“He said I need to pick safety schools. Did you know that when they say, ‘This will go down on your permanent record,’ they really mean it?”
Rex feigned the appropriate level of surprise, reaching for her fingers and studying them like they were diamonds. “No way.”
Murphy nodded. “Yep.” So when she’d climbed the Orange Street electrical tower and had to have the fire department come get her down, that had gone on her permanent record. Same for stealing underwear from Wal-Mart. And getting caught naked with Elliott Howe under the stage during The Crucible. Apparently.
“But they’ll love me. They’ll say I’m just sassy. Anyway, I’ve seen the stats.” Murphy had looked up NYU’s admitted freshman profile statistics every year for the past three years, and despite her aversion to schoolwork, she was always way ahead of the curve. SATs, no problem. GPA, no problem. Class rank, no problem. For all she knew, she’d be valedictorian. Not that she’d stick around long enough to give a speech.
She ran her free hand over her backpack, which contained two packs of gum, notebooks mutilated with blue pen drawings, and her crumpled application to NYU. It was wrinkled and torn because she’d loved it to death ever since she’d gotten it. Clutched it like it was a hot air balloon.
“Of course they will,” he agreed.
She eyed him. “What are you doing here anyway?”
“Well, Shorts, I thought we could crash out.” He was trying to get a rise out of her by calling her Shorts. Murphy hated nicknames. She made a big deal of not caring and looked behind her. He had a backpack, a thermos of what was almost definitely sweet tea, and a tiny radio.
“Are you trying to seduce me?” She sighed, as if it could be a bad thing.
Rex shrugged mysteriously and steered them out of the parking lot. Murphy picked at the lint on her cords, giddy. She should wait to ask. But Murphy McGowen was not built to wait for anything. She glanced at him sideways.
It made her want to vomit, how happy she was. She went out of her way to hide from both of them how much she liked him. But whenever she was with him, she felt like she was stretching out instead of shrinking. She’d always had to resist the urge to trip girls like that, girls walking down the hall talking about their boyfriends incessantly. She’d settled for the satisfaction that their boyfriends were secretly checking her out.
“By the way.” Rex dropped her hand to shift the gear. “Pops wants you to come to dinner.”
“I can’t that night.”
“Which night is that?” Rex asked.
“I’m really busy.” Murphy couldn’t imagine anything she wanted to do less than meet Rex’s dad.
“Saturday it is.”
Murphy threw up her hands. “I have a lot of studying to do.” Murphy had a bad record with parents. They usually eyed her like she was a black widow spider come to poison their boy. Which usually, she sort of did—with the way she moved her hips when she walked, with the way she wore her shirts buttoned two buttons too low. In Bridgewater, everyone knew everyone. And there was no way Mr. Taggart hadn’t heard about Murphy. She’d been in the newspaper three times last year alone—for filling the school fountain with dry ice, for indecent exposure at the Easter Revival, and for mooning the governor of Georgia when he’d come through town on a goodwill tour.
But the difference between those parents and Rex’s dad was that Murphy actually cared what Rex’s dad thought. Because it was Rex.
“Fine.” Rex guided the truck onto an old dirt road, powerful and easy at once. Sometimes Murphy compared herself to him. She just felt powerful. Never easy.
“Fine?”
He lifted one shoulder. “Yeah.”
Murphy sucked in her bottom lip and stared at him. She loved and hated that he could let something go and let her know how wrong she was at the same time. He glanced over and smiled at her. She involuntarily smiled back. Vomity. Her question danced on her mouth. She opened her lips a few times, but it didn’t come out.
He drove her to the orchard and parked in the grass by the side of the road, just near the south end of the pecan grove, and they climbed out. A set of train tracks ran their way straight across this southern edge of the property. Rex took Murphy’s hand and she trailed behind him, pausing as she crossed the tracks. She looked down them, to where they disappeared. Tracks were one of her other favorite views. They seemed to lead to so many amazing things just out of sight.
“Do you think in your last life you might have been a hobo?” Rex asked. “Because you look hungry for a train.”
They strolled toward Smoaky Lake, balancing their picnic goodies awkwardly. The water was a muddy warm brown, rippling in the breeze against the rocks and dirt that made up its small shore.
After checking the ground for fire ants, they plopped on the grass. Murphy leaned back on her elbows, breathing the dry, earthy smell in the air and tapping the tips of her Pumas together. She felt stretched out to ev
ery inch of her skin, waiting for Rex to kiss her. The moments before were always delicious.
Thump.
Rex had pulled her AP Art textbook out of her bag and dropped it between them. Murphy frowned.
“What’s that for?”
“You’ll figure it out.” He slid it toward her and then stretched his lean body out on the grass, his bangs dangling over his eyes. Murphy watched him for a moment covetously. Coveting his body and his superhuman resistance to her. Rex was unlike any guy she’d ever known. He didn’t try to get her clothes off every time he saw her. He didn’t blink at Murphy like a pigeon when she said something halfway intelligent. She sighed, rolled onto her stomach, and opened the book.
As she read, Rex kept his distance. He left space between them for Murphy to cross.
“You wanna see something great?” she asked after about half an hour of silence. Rex rolled on his side and tucked his hand under his head. Murphy slid her book toward him. It was opened to Piet Mondrian’s Ocean 5, a painting that was all black lines, all perpendicular, on a flesh-colored background.
Rex studied it. “What’s good about it?”
Murphy moved a curl hanging in her face. “Well, it’s like…you know how some things look really good from far away, but you get close and they sort of come apart?”
Rex nodded. Murphy smiled, more curls flopping over her face. “It’s the opposite. It only makes sense when you get really close to it.”
Rex brushed her curls to the side with his hands and kissed her just on the apple of her cheek. “Like you.” Murphy breathed in how good he smelled until he pulled away.
“The orchard feels empty,” Rex said, lying back, longing stretching between them like an elastic cord. She peered around. Behind them, obscured by the trees, was Orchard Road, the one-lane street that saw about three cars a day. It ran along the property’s south line and eventually looped up around its eastern edge. To their far right was the gravelly drive that cut the orchard, gently and lopsidedly, in two. Then there were the peach rows themselves—the hundred acres of trees that stretched over a vague roll in the land in low, crisscrossing lines.
“My mom and I used to have picnics here.” Murphy pointed toward the southeast end of the property, far beyond the peach rows. “For Easter. We used to sneak in.”
Rex looked at her, grinned. “Let’s plant a flag here,” he said.
Murphy smiled up at the clouds drifting overhead. She knew Poopie had seen signs in the clouds. Murphy saw nothing but cauliflowers now. She turned to Rex. He was building an intricate little twig flag. He did everything intricately. Sickening as it was, part of Murphy wanted him to be serious—she wanted them to have a house and a flag. Part of her wanted to pin him to her.
“C’mon.” Murphy pulled Rex to his feet and convinced him to go in the water with her. They stripped out of their shirts and pants. They paddled around the cold lake in their underwear and pressed their goose bumps against each other and spit water in each other’s faces. When they got out, covered in flecks of old leaves, Rex got a tarp from his truck. They curled up in it like caterpillars even though it smelled like cars.
Shivering but warm, Murphy had the feeling she got when she dove deep underwater. Like she was a treasure chest half buried in the sand ten thousand feet down. Like she was Eve lying in a cluster of reeds in the oldest garden before being nude was naked.
“Tell me something about you,” Murphy asked.
“Like what?”
Murphy settled into his side, her curves pressed against his lean, long lines. She drew him in like she was spinning a web. He looked at her and swallowed, sliding his hand around her waist. He stared at her without his usual confidence.
“Something juicy. Something nobody knows,” she told him. It would be easy. Rex was doggedly private.
He thought, pulling his body away slightly and clearing his throat. “My dad knows everything about me. But I can tell you something nobody knows but him.”
“Okay.”
“Uhhh…” Rex thought. “I wet the bed until I was nine.”
Murphy laughed. “That’s horrible. You must have been a jacked-up little kid.”
Rex shrugged. “I was going to a shrink after my mom left, and he said it was probably separation anxiety.” Murphy pressed into him further, wanting to squeeze into any places he was missing. She didn’t know anything about Rex’s mom except that she wasn’t around. She wondered if everywhere families were as crooked as the ones she knew. All the families she knew—even the ones with two parents—were missing parts.
“Don’t ever tell anyone, okay?”
“Of course. Dummy,” she added.
She twirled a waxy tarp string around her finger, cutting off the circulation and turning her finger red. “I had an idea.” She tried to sound as casual as possible, as if she hadn’t been waiting to ask this. Her heart beat a little faster. Her stomach turned. She couldn’t believe how hard it was to say.
She pursed her lips a few times, and Rex watched them, then touched them. “What is it?” he whispered.
“When summer comes, why don’t you move to New York with me?”
“Ha,” Rex laughed. But when she stayed quiet, he tried to catch her eye. She was staring at her red fingertip. Finally she looked at him.
He lowered his chin to his chest and eyed her sideways. He seemed to be considering. “What’s it like for us in New York, Shorts?”
“Well.” Murphy swallowed. “We go to the Met and the Rose Room at the library and Saint John the Divine.” As she said them, it occurred to her these weren’t really Rex things. Seeing Rex indoors anywhere was like seeing him in a zoo.
“It’s nothing like here,” she finally told him. In Murphy’s mind, New York was, in essence, the polar opposite of Bridgewater, Georgia. She wouldn’t be Jodee McGowen’s daughter, and Rex wouldn’t be the guy who dropped out of high school to do odd jobs. Their rough edges wouldn’t be in anybody’s way.
Rex took it in, nodding. “It sounds great. But I wouldn’t go for New York. Or to get out of here. I’d be going for the girl.”
Murphy said nothing. She tried to let her face go blank.
He brushed his bangs out of his eyes so he could look into hers. “Oh, don’t look so horrified. I love you, Murphy.” He smiled and tugged on a curl of her hair. “Live with it.”
Murphy stayed as still as the spider she was, catching Rex’s words and spinning them around. He said love so matter-of-factly. Like he’d already said it to her a million times, even though he never had. The grass held them like a soft web.
“Then you’ll come with me?”
He looked at her intently, then sighed. “I’ll think about it,” he finally said.
“Till when?” Murphy pressed.
“Till I’m ready.”
Murphy grinned and looked up at the sky. “Like when?”
“You want a date?” he asked, smirking.
Murphy nodded.
“How about a date at my house, with my dad, for dinner?”
Murphy heaved a sigh.
Rex smiled gamely. “And I’ll tell you by Thanksgiving—how’s that?”
“By the time the tofurkey lands on my table,” Murphy said solemnly.
“Before a bite even touches those pretty lips.” Rex nestled into her, tightening his arms around her as if he were a kid, and kissed her neck. She felt how bare he was in front of her and how much she needed him too, even though she had no interest in needing him.
In the cool night air, wrapped in only the tarp and their wet underwear, she wondered if maybe they could have a house, and a flag, and a way to hold on to each other. For the first time, Murphy began to wonder if maybe they could be the rare ones that didn’t end.
Five
Plunk plunk plunk. Birdie woke with a start and looked toward the window.
Plunk. Plunk plunk. Slow on the draw as usual, Majestic and Honey Babe leapt up and raced to the window seat, sticking their noses against the glass, foggi
ng it up with nose prints. Birdie shuffled behind them and looked outside. Murphy and Leeda stood on the grass, in a triangular patch of pure sunlight, staring up at her. Birdie opened the window and grinned. They launched into a pathetic rendition of “Feliz Cumpleaños,” still holding handfuls of old peach pits.
“You sing worse than Poopie,” Birdie called down.
“We gotta go to school,” Murphy yelled up. “But we left your presents by the door.” They raced off across the light-striped grass, looking chilly and underdressed. Birdie could see them through the other window, hopping in Leeda’s car at the head of the long white gravel drive. They left dust hanging in clouds behind them.
Birdie slipped her feet into her pink bunny slippers and shuffled downstairs. Somebody—most likely Poopie—had turned on the heat for the first time all season. It smelled like last year’s pecan bread.
She scooted past the kitchen to the front door, Honey Babe and Majestic bumping into her heels and gnawing at the cotton-tails of the slippers whenever they caught up. She opened the front door, cool air greeting her. The presents lay on the dusty porch—one newspaper-wrapped bundle, one sparkly purple with a flounce of silver ribbon. Birdie scooped them up and looked over at the peach rows. The leaves had a new orange tint to their tips, like a woman who’d dyed the ends of her hair red. Birdie closed the door and opened the newspaper bundle—a sweater from Murphy that said Hola across the front, clearly scavenged from some secondhand bin. Birdie laughed. Next she opened Leeda’s—an iPod with a peach engraved on the back.
“Happy birthday, honey,” her dad greeted her when she got to the kitchen door.
“Thanks.” Birdie smiled, sliding into the chair next to the empty one where her mom used to sit before she and the family dog, Toonsis, had left them. Poopie was standing at the stove, and her dad was sitting in his usual spot. The Darlington kitchen had had the same color scheme Birdie’s entire life. Yellowing counters, rust-colored linoleum, off-white cabinets that had gone yellow too. A big window above the sink overlooking the orchard saved it from being drab.
The Secrets of Peaches Page 3