Peaches

the TV, which was playing some Nelly video.
    “What are you doing, Birdie?”
    “Nothing. Um, hiding from Poopie.”
    “She knows you’re up here.”
    “She wants me to go into town with the workers and take them shopping.”
    “Well, why don’t you?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “There’s some cutie downstairs, looks like a worker. Maybe you should go anyway.”
    Birdie blushed harder, clasping her hands like an old lady. Birdie was more like an old lady than any old lady Leeda knew, and she knew a lot because old ladies loved the Primrose Cottage Inn, their fluffy white hairdos poking over the backs of the rockers on the verandah all summer long.
    “What are you reading?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Well.” Leeda cleared her throat, remembering her posture and throwing her shoulders back. “Where should I put my suitcases?” she asked brightly.
    “Dad wants you to sleep in here with me. He said we should pull out the trundle bed.”
    Leeda sank deeply into one hip. “Are you serious?”
    Birdie nodded solemnly.
    “No way. I need my privacy.”
    “I told him. I need my privacy too. I said we’re not ten anymore. He didn’t listen.”
    Leeda surveyed the room and wondered. It hadn’t changed much since they were ten. The same four-post bed, the same stuffed animals on the shelves.
    “Well, it’s just not happening,” Leeda said, stiffening in the way she did when she was resolved. “I’m going to talk to Uncle Walter. I think you should come with me.”
    Birdie let out a breath and stood up.
    Leeda frowned. Her cousin made her uncomfortable for a couple of different reasons. One was that she didn’t chitchat. She would let long silences drift into a conversation and make no attempt to get out of them or to help Leeda when she tried to fill up the empty space. The second reason was something a little filmier and harder to grasp. There wasn’t any artifice to Birdie—her big brown eyes were always earnest and truthful. Being around her made Leeda feel like she herself was a little bit artificial.
    Leeda glanced behind her. Birdie’s magazine was opened to “Three Things Every Guy Craves in Bed.”

    Two minutes later, they were both standing in the entry to Uncle Walter’s office, which was a tragedy—with piles of paper leaning like towers, and unwashed plates stuffed into crevices of shelves, and bills spread out with big red stamps at the tops of each one.
    “Hey, Uncle Walter?”
    Uncle Walter looked up from his desk and gave Leeda a heartbreaking smile, because she was Leeda and people treated her like velvet, and smiled at her when there was no reason to be smiling. He looked ten years older than he had the last time she’d seen him.
    Birdie brushed past her and began trying to organize some of the papers, looking self-conscious. The whole scene, with Birdie included, made Leeda’s question freeze in her throat. The bold-type notices on the papers were things like Past Due and Account Frozen. Leeda pretended like she didn’t notice. Walter was still looking at her expectantly. “Uh, do you mind if I sleep at the dorms?”
    It was easier than she expected. Walter didn’t even consider it; he looked back down at his desk. “Sure, honey, that’s fine.”
    It had taken a few seconds for Leeda to take it all in and realize something that for all her thoughtful slowness, Birdie didn’t seem to recognize at all.
    The Darlingtons and their orchard were perched on the edge of disaster, and Birdie didn’t even know it.
    When Poopie Pedraza arrived at Darlington Orchard in her late twenties in search of work, she looked to the sky and saw the shape of the Virgin Mary in the clouds. Poopie took a picture that appeared in the paper the next day. People flocked to the orchard hoping for more holy cloud sightings, until, on closer inspection, it was determined that the cloud in Poopie’s photo actually looked more like a potato. After that, the miracle cloud was completely forgotten by everyone but Poopie, who wasn’t sure she believed in miracles, but who waited for another sign.

Chapter Five
    M urphy woke up to the sound of a bird chirping.
    She pulled her pillow over her head and then pulled it away for a moment. “Shut up,” she yelled, and pulled it back.
    The bird went on chirping, its shrill song drilling right through the glass and the fabric of her pillow. He was doing it on purpose. She knew he was.
    Murphy shot up to a sitting position and looked outside. It was just after dawn.