Peaches

in.
    And then the girl bent forward, and Enrico’s face appeared over her shoulder, and his eyes met Birdie’s. He squinted for a moment, like he couldn’t quite make sense of what he was seeing. Then the girl on his lap turned around.
    “Birdie?” he asked, sliding the girl up and standing.
    Birdie scratched her chin hard. “Hey, Enrico. Hey…” She nodded at the girl, trying very desperately to make it look like she was happy to meet her. But the girl smiled weakly, unsurely.
    “Birdie, what are you…?”
    Birdie laughed. “Oh, ha, you know, we’re on a road trip. And I…brought you these doughnuts.” Birdie’s eyes were welling up with tears.
    “I…” Enrico’s dark eyebrows descended low in concern. It was obvious he was faltering between asking her if she was okay and pretending he didn’t notice she wasn’t.
    “So, um, hi…Actually, we…”
    Birdie couldn’t get the rest of the lie out. It would have been ridiculous anyway. She closed her mouth instead. She laid the box of doughnuts down gently next to where she stood. And then she turned and ran.

    Leeda was sitting in the driver’s seat and Murphy was sitting against the hood of the car when they saw Birdie run out of Enrico’s town house, her hair flopping behind her and her arms pumping.
    “What the hell…?” Murphy and Leeda caught each other’s eyes. It was probably the first time they had actually made eyecontact the whole trip. And then they watched Birdie cover the rest of the parking lot in a sprint.
    She came panting up to the car and leapt in through the open passenger door. Behind her, appearing on his stoop, was Enrico.
    “Let’s go!”
    “What?”
    “Get in the car, Murphy!”
    Murphy did what she was told, looking dazed, and Leeda turned the key in the ignition.
    “Birdie, what’s going on?”
    “Just drive!” Birdie groaned.
    The engine was turning over and over. While it did, Enrico jogged up to the side of the car. “Birdie?” he called through the window, his voice muted by the glass.
    Behind him Leeda could see that a pretty Latina girl had emerged from the front of the house. Her heart flopped. Oh, damn.
    Murphy turned around in her seat. “Birdie, can I roll down the window? The guy clearly wants to talk to you.”
    Enrico was crouching and staring in the window. Leeda looked over her shoulder. Birdie had dropped her face behind her hand.
    “Please just drive.”
    As soon as she could get the car in gear, Leeda threw it into first. The tires peeled in the gravel and they jerked forward and stalled.
    “Oh God, kill me. Please kill me,” Birdie said from the back.
    “Sorry!” Leeda started the car a second time, throwing it into first again, and this time pulling away with a jerk.
    Birdie was saying it over and over again into her hand. “Please kill me.”
    “Bird? Bird?” Murphy was now leaning over the back of her seat. “Don’t say that, Bird.”
    Leeda couldn’t help looking in the rearview mirror as she squealed out of the parking lot. First at Birdie, still hiding in her hands. And then, in the background, at Enrico, standing in a cloud of dust, coughing, and looking as love struck as anyone she’d ever seen.
    Thirty years after Georgia’s last devastating tropical storm, its landlocked acreage braced for another pounding from Mother Nature. Bridgewater’s stores taped Xs on their windows, and in an unprecedented maneuver, the twenty-four-hour Kuntry Kitchen closed its doors. Yellowbaby, an aging Volkswagen, whose radio was held together by a pair of tweezers, failed to report how serious things had become. Its driver, Murphy McGowen, tuned in once, but all she heard was salsa music.

Chapter Twenty-two
    “W e should probably stop here for gas,” Murphy said, nodding to the gauge.
    Leeda kept her eyes straight ahead on the road. “I can see for myself. And I don’t like Exxon. I like BP.”
    “You think you can tell the difference between Exxon gas and BP gas?”
    “I think I’m driving and therefore I get to pick where we get our gas.”
    In the backseat, Birdie clenched and unclenched her teeth. She had used to think hell was being in a room full of people she didn’t know. But now she realized hell was actually being in a small car with Murphy and Leeda, two people she knew better than anyone.
    “Hey, why don’t we go to Shell and split the difference,” she said tightly, as kindly as she could. She didn’t think what type of gas they put in Murphy’s clunker