Peaches

when you want me to drive.” Birdie, annoyed, but decidedly above showing it, cradled her soft squash blossom cardigan between her cheek and the window and let the buzz of the tires underneath her and the soothing hiss of the night air put her into a half-awake coma.
    Somewhere in the middle of the night she woke up to see that Leeda had taken over driving. Birdie fell back asleep and didn’t wake up until the sun was out.
    “Where are we?”
    Leeda looked back over her shoulder, her face drawn and pale.
    “Louisiana.”
    Birdie took over the driving, and Leeda moved to the back, her long legs crunched up like the curls of a pretzel as she lay across the backseat. Murphy sat reclined on the passenger side with her head back, her mouth hanging open.
    Birdie turned the radio on low to weatherband. It was a habit, living on the farm.
    Scattered showers throughout much of the Southeast, the results of tropical storm Jude moving toward the coast of Florida. And then nothing. The radio had crapped out.
    Birdie looked at Murphy, who shrugged. “Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you get unlucky.”
    They switched again in the early afternoon, Birdie moving into the passenger seat. She didn’t know why she was so tired, but she conked out again, waking only when she heard the engine stop much, much later.
    She looked up, expecting it to be another gas station, and then her stomach lurched.
    They were at a row of two-story, redbrick apartment buildings. The area was kind of dingy, mostly pavement, surrounded by a Krystal and a Krispy Kreme. Everything looked like it had been built in the seventies.
    “Here we are, Bird.” Leeda turned around in her seat and grinned at her blearily. Birdie was suddenly touched. Both of her friends looked so tired. And it was because they were doing something nice for her, Birdie.
    She told the girls she wanted to freshen up first, so they headed over to Krispy Kreme. She walked into the bathroom and locked the door behind her, then looked in the mirror.
    She looked terrible. She splashed cold water on her face and finger-combed her hair, then tried to smooth out the crinkly crushed wrinkles in her gauzy white embroidered shirt. Actually, cleaned up a little, she didn’t look so bad. Her lips were pink and rosy and the sleepiness seemed to make her eyes bigger and softer looking. She almost looked sultry. And she looked thin. Thinner. The summer’s hard work had paid off on her body, and she hadn’t even noticed.
    Birdie took the barrette out of her long auburn bangs and readjusted it. She looked clean and pure and pretty. She was ready.
    She walked back into the main area, where Murphy and Leeda were sitting across a table from each other but facing the counter, parallel. Birdie decided to take half a dozen doughnuts to Enrico and chose carefully the ones she thought he might like. Then they walked across the street.
    “It’s number twelve,” she said, scanning the doors. Shealmost hoped that there was no number twelve and that they were in the wrong place entirely. But there it was, to the left. Murphy and Leeda followed her to the concrete stoop.
    “Um, do you guys mind waiting in the car?”
    “Sure,” Murphy said, smiling at her encouragingly. “You can do it, Bird.”
    “Do I look sweaty or anything?”
    Both Leeda and Murphy shook their heads.
    Birdie turned back to the door, listening to the sound of her friends walking away. She raised her fist to the door and knocked. No answer. She looked back at Yellowbaby. She knocked again.
    Then she tried the knob, not expecting it to give, but it did.
    The living room she entered consisted of cream carpet, a tan couch, a La-Z-Boy, and several books, in Spanish and English, lying open on the floor, on coffee tables, on the staircase. It was no mistake. Birdie smiled nervously.
    “Enrico?”
    She walked into the hallway. “Hello?”
    She peered into the two doorways. The bathroom and the bedroom. Enrico’s bed was there, all messed up. The whole room smelled like him. It made Birdie’s knees wobbly. But he wasn’t here.
    Then she heard the music. Birdie turned and walked toward the sliding glass door, which was open. Her heart jumped into her temples. She approached the threshold of the door.
    There were two loungers on the concrete patio. One of them was empty. Enrico was lying on the other one, a book resting on his side.
    On his lap was a girl with short black hair.
    Birdie took a step backward, her instincts kicking