Peaches

blinking. “Balmeade?”
    Birdie nibbled her lip. She remembered her mom and dad talking about some woman Mr. Balmeade was seeing on the side. They’d talked about her like she was a joke.
    “He told her he was getting divorced. My mom wouldn’t date a married guy. Well, a married guy who was happily married…” Murphy looked unsure. “I mean, that’s bull probably. She’d probably hook up with anybody with two legs and a heartbeat. Of course,” she continued, “he dumped her eventually.”
    Birdie didn’t know what to say. Apparently neither did Leeda. Murphy tugged out tufts of grass from beside Leeda’s leg. “The difference between me and my mom, I guess, is that shegets used by all these guys. For me, it’s the other way around.”
    “Well, whatever works…” Birdie ventured. She felt in her heart it couldn’t work, but maybe she was just naive.
    “Oh my God.” Leeda pointed to the water. Honey Babe had come around to where the shore angled into the lake at its lowest and was pushing away from the shore, paddling his minuscule legs.
    “Honey!” Birdie laughed. Majestic, always the follower, was creeping in after him.
    Murphy and Leeda both chuckled. “That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen,” Murphy said, deadpan. “I didn’t know your dogs had it in them.”
    Honey Babe and Majestic were now side by side, paddling slowly toward Birdie, their giant ears bobbing in rhythm above the water. They looked like tiny synchronized swimmers.
    Birdie laughed, loud and long. For the first time in a long time, she didn’t have the sense that life was passing her by. Whatever had been building up in her didn’t disappear. It also didn’t explode. It stayed the same. But inside, Birdie felt like she expanded. For now, she was big enough to hold it.

Chapter Thirteen
    M urphy wiped the sweat off her forehead and reached up to pick another peach, tightening her grip around it and plucking it off its branch with a tiny snap, then lightly pressing it in her hands before dropping it into the basket harnessed to her front. It had been a couple of days since the girls had snuck out to the lake, and since then she’d been working harder. Not for Walter or for Darlington Orchard, but because of Birdie.
    She could see her through the trees, talking to a pair of workers by the house, looking unsure of herself as usual, her big eyes thoughtful. Murphy ruminated that she might be the first really nice person Murphy had ever met and actually liked. It was something about the way she was so sweet but so rugged when it came to the farm stuff—knowing all about the farm and the animals, like with the sleeping bird the other night. Yesterday she’d driven by in a rusted-out red tractor, spraying the trees. She was sweet. But she wasn’t soft. Murphy could respect that. And she had the uneasy feeling that she didn’t want to let her down.
    Leeda, just down the row beyond two men, seemed busiertoo, though it was pretty comical watching her work. She liked to put each peach to her nose and sniff it, then wipe off the fuzz, then look at it as if it were a work of art, then drop it into her basket. Freckles had popped out lightly on her pale shoulders and across the bridge of her nose, and her hair was a sweaty mess, which she constantly tried to straighten out. It made Murphy smile.
    Emma stood on Murphy’s left side, picking steadily and expertly, passing up the less-ripe peaches for the ones that were ready for harvest. Murphy hadn’t gotten the hang of that yet.
    She tried to watch Emma sideways to get her technique. When Murphy actually put effort into something, she liked to do it right. But Emma caught her and smiled. It was quite a switch from the coolness with which the women had treated her at spring break.
    “The trees are so crooked,” Murphy said, dumbly trying to cover up why she was staring. “It looks like someone wrestled with them. Estan ”—she searched her mind for the word for ugly— “feo.”
    Emma smiled bigger. “We clipped the branches for the new branches to grow.”
    “Oh.” Murphy stared.
    “New peaches no grow on old wood, you understand?”
    Murphy looked at the tree anew and traced the branches with her eyes. She could see how it was sort of beautiful, all the places the tree had been sliced for the new bits of it to grow, creating awkward, stooped angles in the limbs.
    “Doesn’t it seem like trees should be able to grow on their own, without all our help?