Love and Peaches

  Her mom looked at her, resigned. Murphy knew the look well.

  It was the look of someone expecting more from her.

  Thirty-four

  It was surprising how many people showed up on the day the Darlington farmhouse was to be demolished. Some people came whom Birdie had never seen. She wasn’t sure why they would have come at all. An auction for the property was set for Saturday, and maybe some of them had come to see it all firsthand. But ultimately, it was hard to say why they were all there.

  It was only a house. It was only a day.

  The bulldozer sat at attention, ready to go. Walter was holding Poopie’s hand. Leeda and Murphy and Birdie’s mom stood behind Birdie, but nobody touched her. Nobody tried to hold her hand. She must have been giving off the impression of being an island.

  From where they all stood in the grass behind a yellow piece of tape, Birdie watched the contractor come out of the house for the last time and walk down the saggy front stairs. Casually, he walked over and talked to a man standing by the bulldozer. The man looked up at the driver, said something, and nodded to him.

  Birdie had resolved to stand there and take it like an adult. She didn’t decide to do what she did. She just did it. When she saw the operator reach for the key of the bulldozer, she ducked under the tape and ran for the house.

  At first she thought she might lie down on the front porch and be a human shield. But instead, moving on some deep impulse, she opened the door and ran inside, slamming it behind her. She ran up the stairs to her bedroom. She swooped down into the corner by the window, wrapped her arms around her knees, and began to cry.

  Birdie cried like she hadn’t cried since she was five years old. She cried for the workers that were gone, and for Honey Babe the dead dog, and for the caves under the house, and for Enrico. She cried for the simple fact that people lost things that mattered.

  She knew they were outside thinking she was ridiculous, but she didn’t care. She planted her hands on the wooden floor of her room and cried her heart out.

  When she finally looked up from her knees, Poopie was kneeling beside her. Behind her were her mom, Leeda, and Murphy. They didn’t look like they thought she was ridiculous.

  “Avelita,” Poopie whispered. “Avelita, there. It’s okay.”

  Birdie stared at Poopie for a second, then wrapped her arms around her neck and cried some more. Poopie didn’t laugh at her or tell her to buck up. She rubbed her hair like she completely understood. Like she understood everything.

  “Are they gonna knock the house down and kill us all?” She sniffled through her hair against Poopie’s shoulder.

  “We could go down with the ship,” her mom said, reaching down to stroke Birdie’s hair. Birdie laughed through her tears and sat back, rubbing her eyes.

  “I feel like a little kid,” she said, sniffling and looking down at the floor.

  “That’s okay,” Poopie said.

  Leeda and Murphy crawled forward and sank back against the wall next to Birdie. Poopie and Cynthia did too, on the other side.

  They sat staring at the opposite wall, thinking their own thoughts, which all revolved around the same basic things.

  “I could go for a Nicorette,” Murphy said, and Leeda snorted. Birdie laughed too.

  A few minutes went by until they pulled one another up.

  One by one, they filed out.

  Birdie turned around to look at her room. She didn’t know where she was going now, but she knew it felt like jumping off a cliff. For the first time ever, she couldn’t see what was waiting for her.

  She turned and followed.

  All in all, thirty-two people watched the Darlington farmhouse get knocked to the ground. A few of them cried. Several of them shook their heads, thinking it was the end of some kind of era they hadn’t even known was an era. Within fifteen minutes, they saw a hundred-year-old house reduced to a pile of rubble on the ground.

  Afterward, everyone stood and stared at one another like creatures in shock. And then they began to trickle away to go about their lives. If you had asked them tomorrow what they’d done the day before, half of them would have had to think for a minute to remember that yes, they’d gone to see a demolition.

  Only a few of them thought they saw shapes in the clouds on the drive home. And the shapes were faint—of things they couldn’t quite name and hadn’t seen yet.

  Thirty-five

  Leeda peered through the open doors of the trailer, making sure everyone was situated. Mitzie and The Baron were the backmost two ponies, and The Baron snuffed at her, stretching out his neck to sniff her shirt and give it a tiny nibble. Leeda placed her hand assertively on his muzzle and gave him a nudge so he wouldn’t chew a hole in the fabric. She leaned down and nosed him, smelling his scent.

  “They’ll take good care of you,” she said. Still, she couldn’t look him in the eye. Closing the trailer doors, she turned and walked inside. The living room, but for a few pens that needed to be disassembled and taken outside, was pristine and quiet. It felt empty, like a room that had just been vacated, even though the animals had been gone for days. But it looked perfect.

  She checked the answering machine one more time—nothing but a few saved messages from Eric, the last one saying he’d see her at the airport in four days. She went upstairs to grab her purse. She sat on the bed. The house felt as silent as if it were buried underground. Leeda had never heard such quiet in her life. She had never felt more alone.

  She thought, since this was her last chance, that she might take something more of her grandmom’s with her. One last magpie item for the road. She opened the top drawer of Eugenie’s chest and looked through her jewelry, searching for something small and cheap, without any value to anyone but her. The jewelry box had two compartments, one on top of the other. Leeda pulled off the top layer and stopped, peering down at an envelope.

  It was another letter. Leeda studied it curiously. She wondered why it was apart from all the others.

  She slid it out of the yellowish envelope, opened it, and read.

  Genie—

  I can’t wait for you anymore.

  If I don’t hear from you by tomorrow night, I’ll know what you’ve decided to keep, and I won’t blame you. But I’ll be gone by the morning. It’s too hard to be here anymore.

  If I never see you again, I just want to hope one thing for you. I want to hope you won’t be afraid. Of whatever or whomever you love. I hope courage for you.

  ,

  Your Mandie Rae

  Leeda stared at the letter, utterly blank. Mandie Rae? Her brain moved slowly over the very simple truth, as though the wheels in her head had started running slower. A woman. Her grandmother had loved a woman.

  Leeda swallowed. She sat for several minutes, absorbing it. She stared at the full signature again. It was probably the reason Eugenie had kept this letter hidden and separate. Her lover had had the courage to sign her full name.

  Leeda let out a shuddering, angry sigh. They had never had a chance, she thought, her head spinning. Not with Eugenie being who she was. It would have been a slim chance for anyone. But for Eugenie—perfect and respectable—it would have been almost impossible.

  Finally she put the letter into its envelope and folded it into her pocket, holding it tightly in her fist.

  A heavy weight bore down on her as she walked to the trailer. Maybe part of her had hoped something else for the two of them, despite what history told her. But it was the difficulty of their love that dragged at her. It was senseless. In a different kind of world they could have let themselves be happy. But in the world her grandmom had lived in, brick walls had stood firmly between Eugenie and true happiness.

  Leeda pulled on her raincoat, hoisted up her bags, and headed out the front door, locking it behind her with a knot in her throat.

  She put her stuff in the passenger seat and climbed into the driver’s side, looking behind her to make sure the trailer was okay before starting the ignition and slowly backi
ng out. A few knickknacks sat on the dashboard where Leeda had placed them to make room in her purse for a water bottle. Her Miss Piggy. The half a crayon. Some bark.

  She drove about twenty-five miles per hour, so it took forever to get down Main Street. Then she was crawling out Anjaco Road, past the grainery, and toward the fairgrounds. A sign loomed up on her in rainbow letters: AUCTION TODAY!

  She had seen the sign a million times. There were auctions at the fairgrounds every Saturday. Today, she knew, they were auctioning the orchard. Because of the weather, the grounds would be muddy. It would be miserable. Just the way it should be.

  The sign crawled past her, and then she was on empty road, just trees on either side.

  Her mind turned back to it, though. Again and again, she came back to the sign. On her right, the town dump, where people left used tires and appliances and all their trash, was approaching.

  Suddenly, forgetting the trailer behind her, Leeda made a sharp, sudden turn into the dump. She swiveled in her seat to make sure the trailer had stayed hitched.

  She sat for a moment, staring at the windshield wipers breathlessly, the knot in her throat huge, tears springing to her eyes. And then she swiped at them, sniffed, gathered herself, and pulled a wide U-turn, back onto the road the way she’d come. She pressed harder on the gas. As she drove faster, an irrepressible smile grew on her face, and her heart raced in pure, unadulterated fear.

  She had just realized there was somewhere else she was supposed to be.

  A year before she died, Eugenie Cawley-Smith was sitting on her porch, reading a box of old letters and crying. When a neighbor stopped to ask her what was wrong, she hit him in the shin with her cane, and she walked inside to put her secrets where they belonged.

  Thirty-six

  Murphy looked at the address and then up at the house. In all the years she’d known her dad, she’d never known where he lived.

  It was a cookie-cutter house. Two floors, green siding, and a small, square yard. It didn’t have the slightest hint of personality. At least the trailer had a certain rusty romanticism to it. Murphy sighed, kicked her feet at the pavement a few times, considered leaving, and finally walked up to the door. The screen door was closed, but the door itself was open to the late August air, the sounds of kids playing down the street, or the occasional distant honk of a horn. Murphy peered into the darkness. Somewhere inside, a TV was on. She looked at the doorbell, and then at the black cast metal door handle. On impulse, she pushed the thumb button and opened the door.

  She followed the sound to the living room, where her dad was sitting on a beige sofa. He started when he saw her.

  “Hey.” Before he could get up, she plopped down on the couch next to him. “What’re you watching?”

  He took a moment to gather himself, then answered, “Matlock reruns.” He sat back, looking at her askance. Murphy just stared at the TV. Finally he turned to the TV too. From her spot on the couch, Murphy could see the empty dining room, a light on in the kitchen, and a pile of papers on the kitchen table that had to be his work. She hadn’t ever pictured the judge as lonely. But she had imagined the quiet of his house.

  The judge reached for a bag of chips that was sitting on the table beside him and offered them to Murphy. Murphy took a few, and he put the bag between them so she could have more. It was a nice, dependable thing to do.

  Halfway through the show, when she was starting to feel sleepy, she laid her head on his shoulder. It felt slightly awkward and slightly pleasant.

  “I’m sorry I called you a chump,” she said.

  “It’s okay,” he replied.

  “Even though only a chump watches Matlock.”

  Her dad laughed. He had a kind of dorky, understated, controlled laugh that reminded Murphy of the fact that he was a judge and that he probably thought he had a reputation to uphold, even around those he loved.

  It didn’t feel wild or free.

  But it felt like real life.

  Maybe sometimes, real was enough.

  Thirty-seven

  Birdie was in the garden uprooting a few favorite plants and distributing them into soil-filled pots. Somehow the orchard’s emptiness sounded wrong. Maybe it was that August had always been inhabited by the noise of the workers. Maybe things echoed differently because there was no house to echo off of. Maybe it was just the sound of everyone never coming back.

  The sound of a truck coming up the drive drew Birdie’s attention. She could just glimpse that it was Leeda. Birdie waved as she climbed out and walked down the path toward her.

  “What’re you doing?” Leeda asked, putting her hands in her pockets and nodding at the plants.

  “We’re taking them to Florida. I’m gonna go down with Poopie and my dad before I go back to school.” There was a rental house waiting for them there until they could close on a permanent one. It was right by the ocean. Birdie couldn’t imagine what waking up to the ocean would feel like.

  Leeda stared around the garden. Then her gaze turned to the rows of peach trees across the lawn. “What’ll happen to them?”

  “They’ll get overgrown by other plants, I guess.”

  Birdie took off her garden gloves and wiped her hand across her brow. Leeda’s eyes, like Birdie’s, couldn’t stop straying to the place where the house had been. It was like they both had to keep reminding themselves it wasn’t there.

  “Bird, I need to ask you something.” Leeda sat down on the bench under the nectarine tree. Birdie sat next to her, warily.

  “I’ve decided not to go back to New York.”

  “What?”

  “My family’s gonna flip. Murphy may flip. But it’s not right for me.”

  “What are you gonna do?”

  “I’m gonna stay here. I’m gonna go to vet school. Do some online stuff, and then I’ll take classes in Atlanta once a week.”

  Birdie couldn’t hide her surprise and confusion. Finally she smiled, scandalized, amazed. “God, what’s everyone going to say?” She knew vets didn’t make much money. It certainly wasn’t what anyone expected for Leeda. Lee was designed to be high profile. She was supposed to be somewhere people could see her and admire her and look up to her.

  Leeda plucked a leaf off the nectarine tree and pulled it apart in strings along the veins. “It doesn’t matter.” Leeda turned to her. “Bird, I want to do something, but it has to be okay with you.”

  “What?”

  “I want to take care of animals. Like a shelter.” Leeda tossed her leaf and folded her hands on the back of the bench, turning to face Birdie. “I know that sounds crazy. Like I’m eleven. Like I want to ride unicorns and have a room painted in rainbows and take care of all the homeless animals. But it’s really what I want. I want to be helpful in a tiny way.”

  “I think that’s great,” Birdie said. She didn’t quite understand it, but she trusted Leeda. And Leeda never jumped into anything without weighing it first. In fact, Birdie wasn’t sure she’d ever seen Leeda jump, period.

  “Bird, I bought the orchard.”

  Birdie gasped. Leeda plunged on.

  “Your dad accepted my offer. But…” Leeda got nervous here, plucking another nectarine leaf and tearing it violently. “But I know that it’s your place, even if it’s not yours anymore. And I don’t want to intrude on that. If you don’t want me to, if it’s too weird or something, I would totally understand—”

  Birdie put her hands on Leeda’s arm to stop her.

  “It’s yours,” she said. The words came out at the same moment the thought arrived in her brain. She didn’t mean, “I’m giving you permission.” She didn’t mean, “Take it.”

  Years ago, Poopie Pedraza had stumbled onto the orchard by a twist of fate. Birdie had always thought life would hand it to her next, like that was supposed to be.

  But now, saying “It’s yours” was only stating a truth.

  The orchard had found its way into Leeda’s hands while everyone had been looking somewhere else.

 
It was evening before they had everything packed up, way behind schedule. Leeda had gone home to deal with her parents, a look of utter fear on her face.

  Dusk had always been, maybe, the best time at the orchard. It filtered out the distraction of sunlight, throwing into relief the shapes of the dorms, the line of where the air lifted off from the grass, the silhouettes of the peach trees, and the sounds—of a distant dog barking, of the hum of bees.

  Birdie walked over to take one last look into the gaping hole where her house had been. She kicked around some of the stones. There was a pile of garbage that had yet to be carted off over by a Dumpster they’d rented. There were old books they’d discarded and boxes Birdie had never even opened. She suddenly felt sad she hadn’t explored more. She was out of time.

  On impulse, she sifted through the boxes just to get a glimpse. There were old shoes. Some ancient balls of yarn. Two boxes of nails. The only thing that contained anything interesting was a cardboard shoe box. It held a bunch of faded old postcards from Cambodia, Paris, Japan. Birdie skimmed through the pictures like they were little treasures. They promised adventure, beauty, the unknown, the unexpected.

  Birdie turned one over and looked at the back. There was no note on any of them. Just the address of the orchard, no person specified, and the postmark. And on the back of each card and drawn in faded blue ink was a tiny heart.

  Birdie took one of the postcards to keep. The rest she put back in the box, and she laid it with the rest of the debris.

  A few bats already had woken up and were zigzagging this way and that, catching flies. Synchronous fireflies were lighting the shadows between the leaves and the dark spaces nested in blades of grass, hovering right above the ground. Majestic was standing in the truck, paws on the window. The last peaches, the ones that had been missed, were dark spots against the green of the peach leaves—the last color in the spectrum to disappear from sight, the one that stayed the longest, the color of new things.