The Best American Short Stories 2017

  Otto kissed her goodbye, making a lazy swat at her ass as he headed out to turn the heater on in the truck, leaving Heddy and Peter alone in the kitchen.

  “Heddy’s off to Yale,” she announced. She tightened her raincoat hood and grinned at him from the circle within. With her face isolated by the hood, she looked about twelve, the blooms of color on her cheeks tilting even more cartoonish. She slept through most everything—the dogs, the rooster, thunderstorms—and it seemed like proof of her greater moral center, something Peter could imagine existing as whole and real in her as a red apple. An innocence coupled with a strange knowingness: when they had sex, she kept looking down to watch him go inside her.

  “You look pretty,” Peter said. “Done at four, right?”

  Heddy nodded. “Home around five,” she said. She loosened her hood, pulling it back to expose her hair, the tracks from her comb still visible.

  Peter and Otto spent the day in near silence, the seats of Otto’s truck giving off vapors of leather. Otto drove the orchard roads, stopping only so Peter could dash out in the rain to open a gate, or chase down the ripple of an empty candy wrapper. No matter how much time they spent together, Peter couldn’t shake a nervousness around Otto, a wary formality. People liked Otto, thought he was fun. And he was fun, the brittle kind of fun that could easily sour. Peter hadn’t ever seen Otto do anything, but he’d seen the ghosts of his anger. The first week Peter had moved in, he’d come across a hole punched in the kitchen wall. Heddy only rolled her eyes and said, “He sometimes drinks too much.” She said the same thing when they saw the crumpled taillight on the truck. Peter tried to get serious and even brought up his own father, dredging up one of the tamer stories, but Heddy stopped him. “Otto pretty much raised me,” she said. Peter knew their mother moved to the East Coast with her second husband, and their father had died when Heddy was fourteen. “He’s just having his shithead fun.”

  And they did love each other, Otto and Heddy, living in easy parallel habitation, as if the other person was a given, beyond like or dislike. They surprised Peter sometimes with their sentimentality. Some nights, they watched the movies they’d loved as children, colorized films from the fifties and sixties: orphans who could talk to animals, a family of musicians that lived in a submarine. The movies were oddly innocent—they bored Peter, but Otto and Heddy loved them without irony. Otto’s face went strangely soft during these movies, Heddy on the couch between Otto and Peter, her socked feet escaping from under the blanket. Peter heard them talking, sometimes: they carried on long, sober conversations, their voices sounding strangely adult, conversations that trailed off whenever Peter came into the room. He’d been surprised that neither Heddy nor Otto cared that much about nudity, Otto striding naked down the hall to the shower, his chest latticed with dark hair.

  When Peter talked to Otto, it was only about yield. How many tons of almonds per acre, what kind of applications they’d make to the soil in a few weeks, after harvest was over. When they drove past any of the workers in their blue rain ponchos, up in the trees on ladders, or gathered around chubby orange water coolers, Otto would honk the horn so they jumped. One man held up his hand in silent greeting. Others shielded their eyes to watch the truck pass.

  They were mostly seasonal pickers, moving from farm to farm, and a few students on leave from fancy colleges. The students accepted produce and a place to live as trade, an arrangement that Otto found endlessly amusing. “They got college degrees!” Otto crowed. “They email these fucking essays to me. Like I’m going to turn them down.”

  The new guy Otto had hired was different. Otto didn’t even ask him if he’d work for trade. He had already asked for advances on his salary, accompanied by careful lists of his hours written on the backs of envelopes. Peter knew Otto had let the guy’s wife work, too. Nobody seemed to care who watched their boy, except for Peter, who kept his mouth shut.

  Around noon, Otto pulled the truck off into a grove of stony oaks. They left the doors of the truck open, Peter with a paper bag between his knees: a sandwich Heddy had made for him the night before, a rock-hard pear. Otto produced a bag of deli meat and a slice of white bread.

  “The kid from Boston asks if he can take pictures while he harvests,” Otto said, folding a slice of meat into the bread. “What for? I ask him.” Otto paused to chew, then swallowed loudly. “For his website, he says to me.” He rolled his eyes.

  “We should get a website,” Peter said, unwrapping the pear. “It’s not a bad idea.”

  It had actually been Heddy’s idea. She’d written about it in her notebook. Heddy’s notebook wasn’t expressly secret, but Peter knew he wasn’t supposed to read it. It was for her self-improvement. She wrote down business ideas for the farm. Kept itemized lists of the food she ate, along with calorie counts. Wrote down what days of the week she would wear her teeth-whitening strips, what days she would jog around the orchards, ideas for baby names. She’d written the beginnings of bad, sentimental songs that confused him, songs about pockets full of rain, men with no faces. One page she’d filled with his name, over and over in ballpoint pen. It took on a new life, his name, repeated like that. The inane embroidery.

  “A website,” Otto said, stuffing the ham into his mouth. “Freeman Farms on the web. Get one of the college kids to do the thing. With photos. Apples you’d want to fuck.”

  Otto laughed at his own joke. Under the far grove of trees, Peter could see the workers, clustered together for their lunch. Since it had stopped raining, some of them had hung their dripping ponchos in the branches, for shade.

  Otto and Peter spent the rest of the afternoon in the office. Otto had Peter handle the phone calls to their accounts. “You sound nicer,” he said. After Peter finished up a call with the co-op in Beaverton, Otto jabbed a chewed-up pen in his direction.

  “Go find out who’s gonna make our website,” he said. “I want flashy shit, too, blinking lights and video and everything.” He paused. “Maybe a place for a picture of us, too. So people can see who they’re doing business with.”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  “It makes people feel safe,” Otto said. “Doesn’t it? To see a face.”

  Heddy had taken his car to school, so Peter drove Otto’s truck out to the trailers, the passenger seat full of the cartons of extra eggs from the chickens. The workers lived in five aluminum-sided mobile homes, the roofs tangled with wires and satellite dishes, yards cruddy with bicycles and a broken moped. He could tell which cars belonged to the college kids, who needed even their vehicles to be blatant with opinions: they were the cars scaled with bumper stickers. Otto had let the college kids pour a concrete slab by the road a few months ago; now there was a brick grill and a basketball hoop, and even a small garden, scorched and full of weeds.

  As he approached, Peter saw a boy out in front of the first trailer, the boy from the new family, bouncing a mostly deflated ball off the concrete. He must have been eleven or twelve, and he stopped playing to watch Peter’s truck approach. There was a shadow on the boy’s shaved scalp; as Peter pulled up to the trailer, he realized it was a kind of scab or a burn, black with dried blood, thin and delicately crackled. It covered a patch of the boy’s head like a jaunty cap.

  A woman—the boy’s mother, Peter assumed—opened the door of the trailer and stood on the concrete-block stoop, not closing the door fully behind her. She was in slippers and men’s pants, cinched at the waist with a belt, and a ribbed tank top. She was younger than he would have guessed.

  “Hi,” Peter said, stepping out of the car. He ran his fingers through his hair. It made him uncomfortable whenever Otto sent him to talk to the workers. Peter was twenty, the same age as some of the college kids. It wasn’t so bad talking to them. But the real workers, the older men—Peter didn’t like giving orders to them. Men who looked like his father; their red-rimmed eyes, the hunch of the manual laborer. Peter had harvested garlic in Gilroy during high school summers, had driven in the morning dark with his father, t
he cab stinking of the magenta grease they used on their Felcos. He remembered the way the group went quiet when they saw the foreman’s truck, how it was only after the truck had fully retreated that they turned the radio up again, like even the meager pleasure of listening to music was something that had to be hidden.

  “Otto said we could finish at three,” the woman said, picking at her shirt hem. She was kind of pretty, Peter saw as he walked over to her: long black hair she’d braided, the blurry edge of a badly done tattoo creeping over her shoulder. She reminded him of the girls in Fresno. “It’s after three,” she said.

  “I know,” Peter said, sensing her worry. “It’s fine. Otto just wanted to know if someone knew about computers. Like, how to make websites. I’m supposed to ask around.”

  “I know computers,” the boy said, picking up the ball. The ball was marbled in a trashy pale pink, and the boy pressed it between his hands so the ball bulged.

  “Zack, baby,” the woman said. “He doesn’t mean you.”

  “I know a lot,” Zack said, ignoring his mother.

  Peter didn’t know what to say. The kid seemed sick or something, his eyes unfocused. “Otto wants a website for the farm,” Peter said, glancing from Zack to the woman. “I’m Peter, by the way,” he said, holding out his hand.

  The woman let the door shut behind her, walked over, and shook his hand. “I’m Steph,” she said. She seemed to get shy then. She put her hands on her son’s thin shoulders. “Matt’s my husband,” she said. “The beard?”

  “Otto likes him a lot.”

  “Matt works hard,” Steph said, brushing lint off Zack’s T-shirt. “He’s at the store.”

  “Does he know anything about computers?”

  Zack said, “Matt’s dumb.”

  “We don’t say that, baby,” Steph said. She shot Peter a look, gauging his expression, then tried to smile. “Matt’s not great with computers. One of the younger people might be better,” she said, nodding her head at the trailers with the hammocks strung up in the yard.

  “I’ll ask them,” Peter said. “Oh,” he remembered, “I have eggs for you.” He walked back to the car and got a carton from the passenger seat. “From the chickens,” he said.

  Steph frowned. It took Peter a moment to understand.

  “Just extras,” Peter said. “It’s not payment or anything.”

  Steph smiled then, taking the carton, and shrugged. “Thanks,” she said. The tattoo on her shoulder was a kind of vine, Peter saw as she came closer, thick and studded with black leaves. Or maybe they were thorns.

  Zack let the ball drop to the concrete and reached out for the eggs. Steph shook her head at him, softly. “They’ll break, honey,” she said. “It’s best if I hold them.”

  Zack kicked the ball hard, and Steph flinched when it hit the metal siding of the trailer.

  Peter backed away. “I’m just going next door,” he said, waving at Steph. “It was good to meet you.”

  “Sure,” Steph said, cradling the eggs to her chest. “Say goodbye, Zack.”

  Steph couldn’t see, like Peter could, how Zack’s face had tightened, a look of concentration fleeting across his face. Zack let one hand rise up to graze the edge of his wound. He scratched, and a quick filament of blood streamed down his forehead.

  “He’s bleeding,” Peter said, “Jesus.” Steph let out a harsh breath of air.

  “Shit,” she said, “shit,” and she huddled Zack in her other arm, still clutching the eggs, and started pulling him toward the house. “Inside,” she ordered, “now. Thank you,” she called over her shoulder to Peter, struggling to get Zack up the steps, “Thanks a ton,” and then the two of them disappeared inside, the door snapping shut.

  Heddy came home breathless from her day; kisses on both of Peter’s cheeks, her bags tossed on the counter. She used the office computer to look up a video on the Internet that showed her how to cover her books using paper shopping bags, then spent half an hour at her bedroom desk, dreamily filling in the name of each class, smudging the pencil with her fingertips.

  “That’s the only way to get a realistic shading,” Heddy explained. “Like it?” she asked Peter, holding up a book.

  “It’s great,” Peter said, naked on top of the bedcovers, and Heddy’s eyes scatted down to study her drawing again. He had planned to tell her about his day, about Steph and Zack. That horrible wound. But it would make her sad, he thought, and she cried so easily now. Worried even when she had a bad dream, as if the fear would pass through her blood somehow and affect the baby.

  “Le français,” Heddy said, slowly. “I got to pick a new name,” she said. “For class. I’m Sylvie,” she said. “Isn’t that pretty?”

  “It’s nice,” Peter said.

  “I got to pick second from a list. The girls who had to pick last got, like, Babette.” She erased something with great concentration, then blew the remnants away. “I have to get special shoes,” she continued, “for salsa class.”

  “Salsa class?” Peter sat up to look at her. “That’s a class?”

  “I need a physical education credit,” she said. She smiled a mysterious smile. “Dancing. Good to know, for our wedding.”

  He shifted. He wished suddenly that he was wearing underwear. “Who do you dance with in this class?”

  Heddy looked at him. “My classmates. Is that okay?”

  “I don’t want some asshole bothering you.”

  She laughed. “God, Peter. I’m pregnant. Think I’m safe.”

  He decided not to tell her about Steph and Zack.

  “We’re going to make a website for the farm,” Peter announced, lying back against the pillows.

  “That’s great,” she said. He waited for her to say more. To say it was her idea, not his. He sat up and saw she was still bent over her books.

  “A website,” he repeated, louder. “One of the workers knows how to make one. He can set it up so people can order off it.”

  “That’s wonderful,” she said, finally smiling at him. “I’ve always thought we should have one.”

  “Well,” he said, “I had to convince Otto. But everyone else has one. It makes sense.”

  “Exactly,” she said. She left her books on the desk to come to the bed, to lay her head on his chest. Her scalp was pure and clean through her parting. Her weight against him felt nice, the press of her tight belly, and he kissed the top of her head, her hair that held the cold of the air outside and smelled like nothing at all.

  Peter propped the front door open with a brick and lugged cardboard boxes of canned food and plastic bags of bananas from the car to the kitchen table. He’d been in charge of grocery runs since Heddy started school. Rainfall was the heaviest it had been in twenty years, everything outside crusty with wet rot, and on the way to the house Peter stepped over a neon earthworm in the wet grass. The worm was slim, the color of bright new blood.

  Peter cleaned out the refrigerator before putting the groceries away, throwing out the expired tub of baby spinach he’d bought on the last run, the leaves matted into a wet stink. He was still learning how to buy the right amount of food.

  He could hear Otto moving around in the office. Otto had been working with one of the college kids to build the farm website. They had figured out the domain name, and there were some photos up already, a form to submit orders that was almost finished. The college kid spent a lot of time out on the porch, talking on his cell phone, his fingers pinched girlishly around a cigarette.

  Peter watched now as the college kid walked back to the trailers through the gray rain. In the distance, greasy smoke was rising from the brick grill. He thought of Steph. Peter had seen her a few times, working alongside a man he assumed was Matt. She hadn’t acknowledged him. Peter hadn’t seen Zack outside the trailer again, even on sunny days.

  Peter bought a notebook for himself on the grocery run. He’d meant to write in it, like Heddy did. Record his ideas, his thoughts about the world. He splayed it across his knees and waited with a penc
il, a glass of water. But there was nothing he wanted to say. He wrote down what Otto had told him about living well on an acre, what plants to buy. What trees could grow from cuttings. What sort of drainage you’d need. He would need to know these things when he and Heddy got their own place. He let himself imagine it: no trailers crudding up the property. No Otto leaving commas of pubic hair on the toilet seat. Just him and Heddy and the baby. He put the notebook aside. The water in his glass had gone stale. He picked an apple from the bowl on the table and flicked open his pocketknife, making idle cuts in the apple’s skin. It would be hours before Heddy came home.

  Soon he started carving designs, words. It pleased him to get better at it, to let whole sections drop cleanly under his knife. He carved his own name over and over in loops he linked around the core. Liking the reveal of wet flesh against the red skin. He lined up the finished apples in the refrigerator, where the rotting spinach had been.

  He napped on the couch and dreamt about Heddy dropping a glass, the two of them watching it explode blue and low on the ground. He jerked awake. It was dark already. Otto came into the kitchen and flicked on the light. He opened the refrigerator and burst out laughing.

  “You are losing your mind.”

  Peter looked up from the damp couch. Otto swung two apples by their stems, Peter’s cuts withered and browning, wrinkled at what had been their sharp edges.

  “Do you work only with apples? Or is there room for expansion? I’m talking oranges here, pears,” Otto said. “I’m so proud you’re keeping busy.”

  Peter got up when he heard the car outside. His shirt was wrinkled but he tucked it in as best he could.

  “It’s freezing,” Heddy said, hurrying through the door without a coat on. Her hair was dripping onto her shoulders, her raincoat bunched in her arms.