My mom was sitting in her car waiting for me in the parking lot. "What took so long in there? Where's the money from the grocery bags?"
It had to be obvious why I needed the bank, even if she hadn't brought it up earlier. "There was a line to begin with," I replied, "and ... I'll explain later." I wanted to tell her all about Kelly and the money counting, but I stopped myself and hoped she wouldn't press for details.
"Okay. It's your secret little project. I just hope your father doesn't beat us home."
I ran into my room when we arrived before Lisa or Jennifer could stop me. I closed the door and hid the envelopes of money deep in my closet. All I said to Lisa that night was "You were exactly right about the total." She was so happy with herself that she didn't ask about anything else.
***
The next day after school, I grabbed the envelope full of tens and twenties and knocked on my cousins' door. Sam answered.
"Wanna go for a ride?" I asked.
He walked out the door before asking, "Where to?"
We climbed on the tractor, and I let him drive to General Supply. I put the envelope down my shirt so it wouldn't blow out of my hands.
We walked through the doors, and I was surprised to see Jimmy behind the counter.
"I thought you only worked during the summer," I said, walking up to him.
"After school too, remember?" he replied. "You ever get those boxes?"
"Yep, and we just finished selling them all," I told him proudly. "Thought I should come and pay the bill."
Jimmy went and got the card he usually wrote our charges on and started adding things up.
"You owe $534," he said when he was done.
"Wow, how much for each thing?" I asked.
"It was $300 for the boxes, almost a couple hundred for the poison, rolls of plastic, cans of pop—it adds up."
I reached into the envelope and handed him the money and then watched as he crossed off all the items on the card.
"Do you think you could start a fresh card for my dad, with none of those things written on it?" I asked him.
He looked at me, smiled, and tore up the card. "Sure," he said.
"And can I get a receipt for all that stuff? Actually can I get two copies for my records?"
He shook his head, teasing me, but wrote out the receipts I wanted.
"Thanks, Jimmy," I said as we walked off. "You working next summer?"
"We'll see," he called out.
When Sam and I got home, I said to him, "Can you ask Amy to come over and talk to me in a couple of hours?"
I went into my room and started writing a letter to Mrs. Nelson. I had a feeling that she wouldn't answer her door and talk to me, but I hoped she would read a letter. I tried to explain in it that I had lived up to my part of our deal and that I was putting the $8,000 into an envelope with the letter, along with a copy of the agreement and a receipt for the supplies we used. I also wrote about how much I learned and how much I appreciated her believing that I could do it. I promised to take care of the orchard too.
When Amy came over, I took her into my room and let her read the letter.
"What do you think?" I asked when she had finished.
"Sounds pretty good. Do you think it will convince her?"
"I don't know. Would it convince you?"
"I'm not crazy in the first place. Let's see the money."
I pulled out the envelope full of hundreds and handed it to her.
"Whoa!" she said as her eyes widened. "I don't think I've ever seen a hundred before." She spread the money on my bed, running her hands over the top of it. A strange look came over her face. "Let's just keep it!" she said. "With our share, we could both buy cars! Cool ones!"
I bit my lip. "I'm afraid to." I could feel heat rising on the top of my head. "I've got to keep my part of deal," I said.
"Okay, I know," she said, looking a little embarrassed.
"So can you come with me tomorrow to give this to her? I want you there as a witness so no one can say we didn't give her the money."
"Let's do it right after school, then," she said.
I didn't sleep well that night. I kept going over the first conversations I had with Mrs. Nelson and our trip to the lawyer's office. It all seemed so long ago.
***
After school on Wednesday, I stuffed the money and papers into the manila envelope Kelly had given me. I sealed it, wrote Mrs. Nelson's name on it, and headed over to get Amy.
I met Lisa in the kitchen. "What are you doing? What's that?" she asked, pointing to the envelope.
"Business," I said, and hurried away before she could ask any more questions.
Amy and I stood on Mrs. Nelson's porch and looked at each other. I was thinking hard about what to say in case she answered the door.
"Go ahead," said Amy pointing at the doorbell.
I let out a sigh, reached over, and pressed it. We could hear the chimes inside but nothing else. After half a minute, I looked over at Amy.
"She's got to be in there," Amy said loudly. "Her car's right out front." She pounded on the door. When that didn't work, she pounded again while yelling, "Open up, we know you're there!"
I pulled her hand away from the door. "That's just going to make her mad," I whispered.
"So what?" she spit out. After calming down a little, she asked, "Now what should we do?"
"What if we just leave it?" I suggested.
We couldn't think of anything better to do, so we jammed the envelope full of money into the crack of the door. It was hard to walk away from it, especially after Amy reminded me it would buy a nice new car, but we eventually backed off the porch while keeping our eyes on the door.
"What if she just takes it and never says anything?" Amy asked.
"I guess then we'll have to tell our parents," I said, dreading the possibility. "But you're a witness. And Lisa knew exactly how much money there was, and so did the woman at the bank. I'm going to keep an eye on the door from the orchard. Besides, we forgot to take some apples down to the Wheelers, so I'm going to try and pick some."
We returned home, and I grabbed some cardboard boxes my dad had brought home from work. They weren't fruit boxes and were an odd shape so we hadn't used them before, but I didn't think the Wheelers would mind. I kept my eye on the envelope as much as possible, which was still visible in the door. The weather had turned colder, and I could see my breath if I blew hard enough. I moved up and down several rows trying to find enough good apples to fill the Wheelers' boxes. Without the pressure I had felt just a few days earlier, I realized that I recognized the features of individual trees and could even remember picking and spraying certain ones. I even had my favorites—the trees that produced fat, low-hanging apples. It seemed silly to name them, but I had studied them so closely, I could recognize them by sight.
I finished with the boxes and then sat in a spot secluded in the orchard where I could keep an eye on the envelope and door. There was no movement, and eventually I had to stand and pace back and forth to keep warm. Darkness settled in and I couldn't see the door anymore, so I reluctantly returned home.
***
The next day on the way to the bus stop, I could see the envelope still there. I looked over at Amy with a worried expression. She shrugged her shoulders knowingly. I thought about running and getting the envelope and hiding it back in my room, but just kept moving toward the bus.
School seemed to last much longer that day. I squeezed out of the bus in the afternoon with an urge to run and check the envelope, but walked coolly next to Amy instead. We made it halfway down the dirt road wordlessly until the door came into view. The envelope was gone.
I gulped and stopped walking. "Now you just have to wait and see what she does," said Amy, trying to sound reassuring.
To take my mind off the envelope, Sam and I drove down to the Wheelers' to deliver the apples I had picked. Jerry was more excited than ever to see us, and grabbed an apple and bit into it without wiping it off or was
hing his hands.
"Delicious!" he said enthusiastically. "What's your secret, boys?"
"Lots of fertilizer," I said, smiling.
"That's got to be it. This place only makes the best." He laughed.
Sam and I carried the boxes over to the building Jerry always came out of. "This has to be the sweetest trade I've ever made," he kept saying. I had the feeling as we drove off that he would have liked us to stay the rest of the day.
***
Despite the cold, I kept watching Mrs. Nelson's house from the orchard. Nothing happened for the rest of the week, and I couldn't even see any movement through her windows. I decided on Monday afternoon that I might as well fill up some boxes with apples for my mom and aunt before they all fell to the ground. I grabbed more of my dad's non-fruit boxes and went to work. I was able to keep an eye on Mrs. Nelson's since picking had almost become automatic and I could do it mostly by feel.
A couple of hours after I started, Tommy's car pulled up to his mom's house. He went inside, and then a few minutes later started walking down the dirt lane to my house. He saw me in the orchard and headed toward me. As he got closer, I moved down the ladder I was on and stood clutching it with one hand. I thought of running to get Amy. I hated to be alone if he was going to confront me.
Tommy reached my ladder, huffing loudly with his breath visible in the cold air. "Back out here, huh?" he began.
"Thought I'd pick a few of the leftovers for my family before they drop."
"Well, might as well go ahead and give you this," he said, and pulled a manila envelope out of his coat pocket.
At first I thought it was the envelope I had left on Mrs. Nelson's doorstep, but then I saw it had different writing on it. I took it from his gloved hands.
"Go ahead and open it," he said.
"What is it?" I asked as I turned over the flap on top of the envelope. I pulled out the papers inside. They looked like legal documents or something, and I could see numbers written on them.
"It's the deed to the orchard."
"It is? What does that mean?" I asked while thumbing through the papers.
He pointed to the last page and said, "That's my mom's signature down there at the bottom. It means all you have to do is sign next to it and the orchard's yours. Everything else has been filed with the county already."
I looked up at him in disbelief. "Really? Aren't you mad about this or something?" I blurted out.
"Me? Why should I be mad?"
"Wasn't it supposed to go to you?"
"Maybe when my mom dies, but she'll probably outlive me just to prove a point. Actually, I'm kind of glad it's going to be yours. Then she can't keep nagging me about it."
I stared back down at the documents. "Well, is she mad?" I asked him.
"I don't know about mad. Maybe a little embarrassed and feeling silly. I'm sure she'll get over it next spring when the trees are blooming." He said this last part trying to imitate her voice.
"You know when she told me about your little agreement," Tommy continued, "I mostly felt sorry for you. My mom has no idea what it takes to make any money doing something like this. That $8,000 sounded impossible to me. I didn't want to tell you that because you looked so eager that I hated to discourage you."
"What did you think was going to happen?"
"I thought you would just kind of give up. When I saw the $8,000, I was floored. At first my mom wanted to think of a way not to turn over the orchard, but I kept telling her she'd be the laughingstock of the whole state if people found out she cheated some kid. I figured she owed it to you, no matter how cuckoo the agree ment was. Of course, the only thing that really worked on her was threatening to stop coming out to see her."
"Thanks," I said, although it didn't sound like enough.
"And by the way, I made her sign over the water rights too. This place isn't much good without them."
I didn't really know what water rights were, but I figured they must have something to do with the canal.
"Thanks again, Tommy. How about the other stuff, like the ladders?"
"Go ahead and keep them. She's not gonna need them for anything."
He looked down at my hands that were still holding the envelope and then looked around the orchard. "So how'd you do it?" he asked. "I mean, that's a lot of apples."
I thought hard about his question and about everything that had fallen into place over the past eight months—the library book, my cousins and sisters, the old Ford tractor, the apples not freezing, Brother Brown, Jimmy, the free boxes at the dump. Take away one of those things, and we probably would have failed.
"I guess I was pretty lucky."
"Whatever it was, I'll always be impressed," replied Tommy, nodding his head.
I looked down at the envelope, and it suddenly felt heavy. Tommy deserved some of the credit too. "If you didn't stand up for me, well, I don't know what..." I trailed off.
Tommy shuffled his feet and looked at the ground. "Ahhh, I figured I owed it to my dad. I never did help him like I probably should have. I dunno, I guess I regret what he probably thought of me, how we never seemed to have anything in common. If I plowed up these trees, he'd probably haunt me forever. It's better having you worry about them."
Tommy held his hands up to his ears like he was trying to keep them warm. "I gotta run, before I freeze." He turned and started walking away. "Hey, Jackson," he called, "just don't turn it into a trailer park, okay? You'd make me look like a moron."
"Don't worry," I shouted. "You want some of these apples?"
"Nah," he yelled back without turning around. "I'll catch you next year."
Chapter 18
Breaking Up and Starting Over
In a way, it felt unsatisfying that the paper I was holding was what made me the owner of the orchard. I looked through the pages, and there were words about land and plots but nothing about the trees. As I looked at them in their shadowy rows standing above me, I didn't feel like I owned them. Maybe it felt a little more like responsibility, which had come over me very gradually. I told myself it was what Mrs. Nelson wanted all along, if she was ever really serious about that "true heir" stuff.
That night I went over and told Amy and showed her the papers. She looked over them and then looked up at me very proudly. "Well, how do you feel? This is just what you've been hoping for and tricking us all into."
"I don't know. Now that it's real, it feels a little weird."
"Have you told your other employees yet?"
"No, so please don't say anything. They've been bugging me non-stop about the money, but I've got to give it a few days to let it sink in and to make sure no one over there changes their minds." I gestured toward Mrs. Nelson's house. "I also have to figure out what I'm going to say."
***
It took all the way until the next Monday for me to get up the nerve to talk to the younger kids. I asked everyone, including Amy, to come to my room after dinner so we could discuss something important. They all sat on my floor expectantly while I sat on my bed.
"I just want to start by saying you all were better workers than I ever hoped for. If you didn't know it, I had no idea what I was doing and just kind of made things up as we went along," I said.
"Oh, we knew it," said Amy.
"Yeah, yeah. Well, if you remember how this whole thing got started, I was talking to Mrs. Nelson one day and she wanted to share the money that could be made from the orchard. But I left out some of the details that I have to tell you now."
"Oh, really?" said Lisa. "Isn't it a little late to be telling us now?"
Everyone stared at me with a mixture of fear and disgust. I went ahead with the whole story, including the trip to the lawyer's office, the envelope with the $8,000 in it, and then the conversation I had with Tommy. I held up the deed as a kind of proof of what I was saying. I told them how at first I had hoped to make a lot more than the $8,000 and planned to give all the extra to them. No one said a word the whole time. They just sat there with the
ir mouths open. Michael was the first out of the gate with a response.
"How could you be so stupid?" he spit out, shaking his head. "That money was ours too. What makes you think you could just take it all and give it away without even asking us?"
"Yeah, we should have voted or something," said Lisa. "Except you knew we wouldn't have voted to do that."
I looked over at Amy for some support, but she just looked away.
"I know. I know I was stupid. It's just that I signed the agreement, and I was afraid she was going to take the money, anyway. And I'm sorry I didn't tell you the whole thing up front. I was afraid you wouldn't help, I guess," I said, trying to sound as sorry as possible.
"Yeah right, you're sorry," said Michael.
"Listen, since we agreed on percentages, if you want, you can own a percentage of the orchard."
"That's just a stupid piece of paper," said Michael. "We want the money."
"Okay, how about this. Now that I'm the owner, we don't have to give any money to Mrs. Nelson on anything we earn in the future. What if next year you all get twice the percentages we agreed on this year?"
Lisa's eyes got big, and I realized I should have thought through the numbers before making the offer.
"You're trying to trick us again, aren't you?" said Michael angrily. He was looking back and forth between me and Lisa.
"Actually, that's a better deal than we had if we make the same amount of money next year," said Lisa in a calculating tone. "If we make $9,000 again and I get twenty percent, that's $1,800 for me. And over $1,600 for you, Michael."
"I want my money now. How are we supposed to trust him a year from now?" demanded Michael.
"We could put it in a contract and write it all up, just like Jackson had," interrupted Jennifer from the corner.
"Yeah, we can have a contract," I said carefully, still trying to add up percentages in my head. "Plus you all can split up the money that's left this year. I won't take any of it."
I brought out the remaining $646.30 and laid it out in front of them. The sight of the cash and the idea of the contract seemed to pacify them. They held a vote and it was unanimous in favor of the plan, although Michael kept pointing out that I could be tricking them again.
The Year Money Grew on Trees Page 18