At the bottom of the stairs, Birdie could smell a cloud of Poopie’s perfume, as if she’d just been there. She walked into the kitchen and grabbed a box of wheat crackers from the pantry, then wandered into the office to flip through the bills.
After her mom had left, she and her dad had both been so shell-shocked. The office had fallen apart for a while, and now it was such a relief to see everything in order. The two of them—well, the three of them—had gotten their life harnessed together. Birdie marveled at how smoothly it ran now and how quickly it had happened.
She sorted through the bills and highlighted the due dates. She opened their insurance statements and tried to run down the numbers, but she couldn’t focus. She kept thinking about things Enrico had done. Where he’d kissed her. The angle of her hand on his shoulder. A tiny bruise on his side. When she looked up, her dad was standing in the doorway. Half a wheat cracker lodged itself in her throat and she coughed, her pulse throbbing. Her dad returned her gaze solemnly.
“Your tickets came.”
“Oh,” Birdie managed to choke out, swallowing.
Walter stepped up to the other side of the desk and handed her the envelope. He watched quietly as she peered down at the address: Barbara Darlington. Birdie fiddled with the plastic window, running her finger along the edge, and looked up at him. When her mom had still been living with them, Birdie had gotten so used to the worry on his face that she’d come to think it was part of his features. Now, standing before her, his face creased in the way she’d remembered.
“How’re the books looking?” he asked.
Birdie swallowed. She glanced down at the bills in front of her and the ledger, which she’d tallied up the night before. “Good.” She had to say it again because it didn’t really come out with a voice attached. “Good.”
Walter nodded. “You’ll have so much fun on vacation you won’t want to come back,” he said.
Birdie laughed. It was a tense laugh. What did he mean by fun? What did he mean by vacation?
Her pulse thrummed against her wrists as he stood there, looking at her. As if he had something more to say. And then he walked over and rubbed her head like he had when she was little. “You’d better come back from Mexico in one piece. I wouldn’t know what to do without you.”
He turned and walked out. Birdie slumped over, amazed, relieved, disbelieving. She folded the envelope in two and stuffed it into her pocket, as if at any minute someone might whip it out of her hands.
It took her a minute to put together that Poopie hadn’t told her dad. And then to ask why. One answer immediately leapt to mind. It was that Poopie hadn’t made it her business. It wasn’t her concern.
Birdie’s elation seeped out like helium, but she couldn’t ignore the pricks of excitement running up and down the soles of her feet. She—Birdie Darlington—was going somewhere.
Twenty-one
Murphy and Jodee picked out a short, fluffy tree at the tent set up in the parish parking lot of Divine Grace of the Redeemer. Murphy stood and watched, her hands around a Styrofoam cup of complimentary cider, as her mom flirted the guy down to thirty-five bucks. Then together they loaded it halfway into the trunk of the Pontiac, tying it down securely.
Murphy couldn’t believe how good she felt. For two weeks, she’d spent each night lying awake, sleepless with anger, her fists balled, or thrown over her head, or wrapped strangle-like around the pillow beside her. But today, and for the last few days, she’d felt like she was at the top of her game, somewhere she hadn’t been in a long time. She’d turned all her energy to thinking about May and New York. She’d spent countless hours on the Internet looking at photos and maps, burning it all in her brain, like a map to buried treasure. Now when she thought about Rex, which was still often, she felt above him somehow, like he’d let her down enough that she could give him up. She felt powerful. Like if he appeared in front of her at that very moment, she could have laid him flat with one swift punch.
She felt differently about Leeda. Part of the fist balling had been directed at her too and the things she’d said. The two had been avoiding each other, neither willing to make the first move to get back together. But Murphy didn’t even know what, on her side, she’d actually done.
“You want me to drop you anywhere, baby?” her mom asked. “Maybe you should stop by and see Rex….” Jodee looked hopeful. It was unspoken between them that Jodee thought Murphy was crazy for letting such a good guy go. To Murphy, her mom’s credo of men first was pitiful.
“I think I’ll hang out here awhile,” Murphy said, tossing the cider cup into a garbage can and sticking her hands in her pockets.
“You sure, baby?”
“Yeah. I can walk home.”
Once her mom was gone, she shuffled around, directionless. Maybe it was because of TV or maybe that Murphy had been born for colder climates, but every year, she expected a layer of snow for her to stomp through downtown. But Main Street was clean and clear, with only the occasional snack wrapper blowing across the brick sidewalks. It was cold enough for a coat but not a hat. And as long as Murphy had been alive, snow had never fallen on Bridgewater at Christmas.
She stopped in Eckerds to flirt with a guy she knew there and get some free Blow Pops. She leaned over the counter and pursed her lips and moved up and down on her toes while he dug out all the watermelons, her favorite. There was a scale with a mirror next to the pharmacy counter, and she stared at herself sideways. With her low-slung jeans and junk store green army coat, Murphy looked high-fidelity, full-color, and healthy. The counter boy’s voice pitched high when he asked her, nervous and awed, if she wanted anything else. Murphy smiled and stuck a Blow Pop in her mouth as she turned and sauntered out the door.
Outside again, her feet took her toward Ace Hardware. She peeked through the glass door on her way past, casually, not really looking. She circled back and walked by again. She fiddled with a newspaper machine in front of the shop next door, pressing the coin release button over and over again.
“Hey, Murphy.” She spun around. He was walking toward her, a length of steel cable in his hands.
“Hey, Mr. Taggart.”
“I was just running an errand,” he said, nodding toward the front of his store. The Ace. He looked genuinely happy to see her, but he was the kind of guy who was generally happy to see people. “You wanna come in?”
Murphy floated close to him. He held the door open for her, warm air and the smell of oil and metal drifting out. She peered through the doorway, unsure. “Okay.”
The door closed behind her with a jingle, and Rex’s dad led her down the crowded, narrow aisle. The store was a riot of tools and parts in yellows, greens, blacks, organized on floor-to-ceiling shelves. It smelled like men or maybe just masculine. It was the way Rex smelled. Murphy followed Mr. Taggart down the chaotic row toward the cash register. He laid the steel cable down beside it and rummaged behind the counter.
“Where has my son been hiding you?”
“Um.” Murphy hesitated. Had Rex not told him? That wasn’t a huge surprise. “Around.”
“Uh-huh.” Mr. Taggart nodded, making eye contact, giving her his undivided attention. When Murphy didn’t say anything more, he smiled. “You wanna help me with this? We’re sort of short-staffed today.”
“Sure.” Murphy held the cable taut while he cut it with a pair of pliers.
“Great,” he said.
Murphy gave him a tremulous smile. She knew she should get going. But she couldn’t move. “Can I help you with anything else?” she blurted.
He looked surprised. “Yeah, if you have the time. That’d be great.”
They worked for over an hour, Murphy running down parts and stacking things on the shelves. Mr. Taggart tallied things up, gently focused on the computer at the front desk as he typed in orders, but he made sure to keep thanking her and looking her in the eye. There was a gentleness about him and also a sort of sadness. Murphy wondered if it was from when his wife had left. Some kinds
of people never got over things like that. Murphy had always known she must be one of the people who did.
Finally, after about an hour and a half, Murphy ran out of things to do. She didn’t want to admit it at first. She rearranged the boxes of nails three times pointlessly. Then she walked back to the counter and leaned against it.
“Well, Murphy, that’s it, unless you want to apply for a job here.”
Murphy smiled. “No, that’s okay.”
“You have bigger plans, I hear.”
Murphy shrugged, a lump in her throat. “Maybe.”
“We’ll miss you when you head north.”
Murphy didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t thought much about anything in Bridgewater she’d miss besides the people she loved. But she’d miss Rex’s dad. Maybe she’d even miss Ace Hardware.
“Well, tell Rex to bring you home as much as possible before you run off.”
“Okay,” Murphy murmured. They walked up to the front and he opened the door for her. From the doorway, Murphy could see the gazebo where the judges sat for various parades. To the right, the redbrick courthouse with a stand of loblolly pines. Liddie’s Tea Room, with two Red Hat ladies shuffling out the front door.
“Bye, Murphy.” Mr. Taggart touched her arm gently. She felt the warmth of his hand on her wrist. When he pulled it away, it left a deep, wide void right in the middle of Murphy. She stepped outside, and the door slowly closed behind her.
By the time she reached the trailer park, Murphy’s chest was heaving. She knew she needed to just crawl into bed and pull the covers over her head and find her way back to being angry. Inside, all the lights were on and Jodee was erecting the tree. She had it in the corner of their tiny living room/TV room/foyer.
Murphy hovered in the doorway. Now that she saw her, she wanted so badly to crumple up in her mom’s arms. But she didn’t know how to let her know.
Jodee stood facing the tree for several seconds, not noticing Murphy standing behind her. Finally Jodee turned to her, her face nervous, apologetic. Murphy’s stomach tightened just slightly.
Jodee looked uncertain for a moment and then sidestepped to the kitchen counter, sliding a thin envelope off its yellow surface and handing it to Murphy. “I’m sorry. I opened it. I shouldn’t have.”
Murphy looked at the envelope with NYU’s purple school insignia in the return address but didn’t take it. Her throat went knotty. “What does it say?”
Jodee pulled the envelope back. “You’ve been deferred. For regular admission.”
“Oh.” Murphy just stood there, trying to compute. How was that possible?
Murphy reached for the letter. She took it to her room. After she’d read it three times, she lay back on her bed and stared at the ceiling, which was low, and her walls, which were close together. Her window too was the size of a postage stamp. She willed herself right through the roof.
Twenty-two
“Nonsense.”
Leeda sat in the stuffy, doily-strewn parlor of Primrose Cottage, her grandmother’s dollhouse-like Victorian home. She could feel the smell of dust and coffee sinking into her clothes. The couch she sat on was silk and straight-backed, and Leeda clutched the armrest rigidly, like she was sitting on the electric chair. If her grandmom said the word nonsense one more time, she thought she might faint.
Grandmom Eugenie was still in curlers, but otherwise, sitting in the throne-like settee chair to Leeda’s right, she was elegantly dressed: a festive red wool sweater that reached up to her powdery white chin and black slacks. They were going to lunch at Liddie’s Tea Room to celebrate her ninety-fifth birthday since Leeda had refused to join in on the family festivities that evening. But though she was escaping a run-in with her mother, she hadn’t escaped a lecture from her grandmother. Her grandmother liked to give lectures on her birthday. It was like she’d marked it on her calendar, which was of course miniature-horse-themed and hung beside the fridge: December 12, tell everyone what’s what.
“Families are supposed to put up with one another,” she said, her mauve mouth steeled in righteous determination, her violet eyes taking Leeda in sharply. She had a mimosa in one hand and sipped it now and then. Grandmom Eugenie was always so sure she was right and always so blunt about telling her family what to do that it made Leeda feel like a paper doll. Like she wasn’t quite three-dimensional. “Now, you go back to the orchard and pack your bags and move home. You’ll never have time back with your family again once you’re really gone.”
It was the first good news Leeda had heard since she’d arrived. Eugenie stood up, set her mimosa down on the glass coffee table, and uncurled a curler out of her hair, then another. With Leeda sitting, they were nearly the same height. A curl hung in Eugenie’s face comically. Leeda couldn’t imagine being ninety-five and still spending so much time on her appearance. It was just one more testament to Grandmom Eugenie’s steely resolve. “There’s a box for you on the dining room table. I think that’ll change your mind. I’m going to go do my makeup.”
Leeda watched Grandmom Eugenie disappear up the stairs, uncurling as she went. Her makeup would take close to an hour; it always did. Leeda sighed, feeling like a caged animal. The whole house made her toes itch with claustrophobia.
She got up and walked to the dining room. The box was about a foot by a foot, a square hatbox. Some kind of fuzz ball had attached itself to the side of her palm and she rubbed it off on the floor, then went and washed her hands in the bathroom.
When she returned, she pulled off the note first.
Leeda, here are some things we thought you’d need. Love, Dad.
Oh.
She pulled off the lid and removed the items one by one. There were socks—lightweight spring ones. A white pair of sneakers she hadn’t worn in two years. Contact solution. A toothbrush. If her mom had packed the box or even looked inside, it would have been filled with entirely different things. At the bottom of the box was a pink jacket and two envelopes. One thick one with Columbia University in the return address. In the bottom-right corner it said, Welcome! She didn’t even have to open it. The other envelope was addressed to her in her mom’s handwriting. Leeda’s heart did a little dip, and she slit it open with her fingers. She peered in at what was enclosed, and her heart sank. She emptied out the hundred-dollar bill that had been folded inside. Nothing about the box was unpredictable. So she didn’t know why it hurt. She’d felt so hurt lately, she didn’t know how she hadn’t run out of that particular feeling.
But then there was a surprise. There was one final item in the bottom of the box. She reached in and pulled it out. Notes for a Truly Leeda Leeda. She looked at Murphy’s handwriting on the shiny red cover. The title was surrounded by stars. Leeda sank into the dining room chair beside her, leaning over the table without her elbows touching it, by habit, and opened the book with a throbbing, longing heart.
She flipped through the notebook. In most places, Murphy’s large, crooked handwriting ate up the pages greedily, as if she couldn’t write large enough to get her point across. Occasionally Birdie’s more graceful handwriting appeared, adding asides or participating with Murphy in some kind of list she had thrown together, like favorite Leeda moments, or most unknown things about Leeda, or Leeda’s top five best articles of clothing.
Mostly, though, it was all Murphy. Listing albums Leeda had to own before she died, like Janis Joplin’s Pearl. Copied scraps of her favorite poetry: about nature and despair and cities and even one or two about love that Murphy had annotated with words like Sickening, but she’s good and Horrible but worth reading. Dried leaves—pecan, magnolia, and, of course, the thin slivered shape of the peach leaf—taped in messy crisscrosses. A cider label Birdie had once kissed. A diagram of Leeda—outlined sloppily with colored-in blond hair, with words on the outside pointing to different parts of her: brainy pointing to her head, good posture pointing to her back, hot gams pointing to her legs, impenetrable (ha ha) pointing to her heart.
Leeda read the favorite Leeda
moments again and again. It was eerie, but she felt like she was reading about somebody she didn’t quite know. She didn’t know how much of the Leeda they wrote about she really was and how much Murphy and Birdie were just filling in by conjecture.
Most striking, now that she hadn’t looked at it in a while, was how filled with passion the pages were—Murphy’s crazy, sprawling brain. You could almost hear her loud, unruly thoughts. The last time Leeda had read the book, she hadn’t noticed all that much difference between her own ideas of herself and the ones that were on paper. But now she saw how Murphy saw the world in bold colors and tried to spin them around Leeda like the threads of a robe. As if Murphy could be the one to make Leeda visible.
Leeda touched one of the poems, running her fingers over the words. I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.—Walt Whitman.
Leeda understood what the words meant, but she didn’t feel like she had any claim to them. She wasn’t full of bright colors. What she was full of was more like those bats she and her mom had seen—blind, dark, fluttery.
Leeda flipped through again, skimming for specific details. There was nothing in the book about Rex. There was nothing about the times that Murphy and Leeda hadn’t liked each other, when they had still been mostly strangers. There was nothing about the times they had wounded each other or broken each other’s hearts.
There was another huge difference between the last time Leeda had read through the book and now. Last time, it had flattered her, buoyed her up, made her giggle, and inflated her ego. But now, it just made her uneasy. She didn’t want to lean on anybody else to tell her who she was. In fact, she wasn’t sure she wanted to lean on anyone, period. Not when they could spin out from under you. She didn’t want to be the person Murphy left standing in her pecan dress, or the person Birdie and Murphy left watching them walk away in the pecan grove, or the person her mom hadn’t shown up for, for the millionth time.
The Secrets of Peaches Page 12