It was like the end of an animated movie. Like everything that Birdie loved about her childhood home had come out all at once before she left.
Behind her, the truck roared to life as her dad started the engine. Birdie felt the time leaving her; she was aware of only having seconds.
She smiled. In her mind, she said good-bye. She said thank you to whatever or whomever there was to be thankful to.
She ran for the truck and jumped in.
She moved on.
They pulled away.
Thirty-eight
Rex Taggart was packing up his truck in the parking lot of Homewood Suites when Murphy found him.
“You’re leaving.”
He turned. “Yeah.”
“Right before I’m leaving.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s timing.”
Rex didn’t answer.
Murphy leaned up against the truck and looked at him. “Thanks for beating up my dad, by the way.”
“Yeah, usually it’s the other way around after you’ve seen somebody’s daughter naked.”
Murphy grinned. “Judge Abbott doesn’t seem like the fisticuffs kind. I don’t think he’d lay a hand on you. Maybe he’d lay a subpoena on you.”
Rex laughed under his breath.
“Rex?” Murphy looked at him. “Why did you do it?”
Rex thought. “It didn’t seem right, him coming in and shaking up your life when you’ve come this far without him. It seemed selfish to me. Maybe I was wrong. Your mom kept asking for my advice on everything. I hope you’re not too mad at her, Shorts. It was a really hard choice for her. I don’t know. Maybe I should have stayed out of it.”
Murphy studied her fingers. Rex knew her as well as she knew herself sometimes. But maybe that gave him the same blind spots too. She watched him load the last of his stuff into the truck and shut the door. He turned to her.
“It’s good-bye again, huh?” she said, smiling even though it hurt.
“Yeah.”
“Rex…” She picked at a piece of paint that was chipping off the old truck, and then met his eyes again. “Thanks.”
“Yeah. No problem.”
He shifted as if he were getting ready to go. Murphy plunged ahead.
“And I wanted to say, I…I didn’t stop. I didn’t stop loving you…in that way. That’s not why I didn’t write. It’s the opposite. I mean, I couldn’t write because I didn’t stop.” She was making no sense, but Rex seemed to be calmly getting it.
“I know, Murphy.”
“But listen.” She bit her lip. “Can we be friends? I want us to be friends. I want us to have each other. Can we, you know, have something long and boring and reliable? Like, maybe I can call you sometimes, when I’m pissed off or when I have something funny to say. Or there’s something maybe only you would get?”
He jangled his keys in his pockets and smiled his sideways grin at her. “Murphy, I’m here.”
He looked at her as if waiting for something. But finally he gave his keys another jangle, opened the door, and got in his truck.
Murphy backed up, waving to him from her pockets, her thumbs tucked in and four fingers out and waggling.
He nodded at her. Then he turned his attention to the road. As he pulled away, he put a hand out.
Murphy watched him chug down the road, feeling the loss of him.
It hurt enough that she wanted to write him a letter.
Maybe she would.
Thirty-nine
For the first few days of September, Leeda felt like Noah gathering the animals two by two. There was so much building to be done. And she felt like she was pulling each animal out of some kind of flood.
There was a freshly built corral. She’d hired someone to do it. There were the dorms. She was having insulation put into them for winter use, and the men’s dorm was being divided into pens. The women’s dorm would follow as soon as Leeda could have another place built to live in. But that, like everything else, would take time. Yesterday an article about her had appeared in the local paper. Leeda had been in the local paper many times over the years. But this was the first article that hadn’t mentioned traits like “bright,” “attractive,” “popular,” or “straight-A.” It had focused on the things she was doing, not on the things she just was. The title, which Murphy had laughed at snarkily over the phone, was LOCAL GIRL MAKES HOOF.
“Hoof instead of good?” Murphy had asked. “God, typical Bridgewater.”
Birdie, who had decided to major in journalism so she could write about all the things that captured her fancy, found three typos in the online article.
It was a long while before Leeda could find the time to sit down and write a letter. When she finally did, it took her a long time to figure out just what she needed to say.
Dear Mom,
I know you’re mad at me right now. I know you think I threw Grandmom’s money away. I know you wanted something else for me—something bigger and more important. I think and hope that over time you will change your mind about all these things. I don’t think there’s anything I can do to show you otherwise, except to let time tell.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Grandmom, as well as about our family and about our town, or whatever. You’re going to laugh, but I’ve been thinking that maybe Grandmom left the ponies to me because she wanted dirt in the house. I think maybe she wanted life there. I know that it’s a stretch, because how could she have known I’d let all the animals in? But I guess I’m saying I believe that, if Grandmom had really had her way—her true way—things would have been allowed to be messy sometimes. I like to think maybe she wanted that for me. Messiness.
So I know it’s crazy, but sometimes I’m sitting here on the dorm porch, and I think that I’m taking up a place that should have been hers. Like I’m carrying something for her that she couldn’t carry. I know that makes no sense. And to be honest, most of all I’m doing it for myself. But sometimes I look around, and I feel like I’m fixing something. Like it’s not too late. I feel brave.
I hope you’ll come over and visit a lot. Then you can see things from where I sit. I really think I finally know where that is. It feels so good to be home.
I love you.
Love, Leeda
Leeda put the letter in an envelope, addressed it, and sighed.
With Murphy and Birdie gone, Bridgewater seemed a little empty. Leeda had no one to laugh with or to get into trouble with or to go swimming with. Still, she knew she would find people to rely on almost as much as she’d relied on her best friends. It would take time too.
In October, she collected pecans. She watched the fall sunsets from the stairs and called Poopie to ask all sorts of nature questions. By then, her mom had begun to come over for dinner every Wednesday night. Leeda had broken up with Eric the week she had bought the orchard. On Fridays she usually had a date with a guy from vet school.
And then one evening she was sitting on a bench outside the dorm with a week-old kitten and a bottle when a car pulled up the drive.
Leeda had to squint to recognize him at first. He had grown a shaggy beard, and he was wearing a sweater with a hole in it. He looked the picture of everything she would have thought was the opposite of what she’d ever wanted. But her heart jumped into her throat. He walked up to the porch and she stood stiffly. He gave her an awkward hug.
“How was Alaska?” she asked.
“Good. Melting, I guess. How are you?”
“Good.” She offered him a spot beside her on the bench, and they sat. She placed the kitten into a box lined with a towel and a heating pad. “I bought this place,” she said.
“I know. I read about it online.”
Leeda bit her bottom lip, feeling awkward, wondering what to say.
“Are you hiring?” he asked, frowning at her, nervous and true.
Leeda looked at his hand. She debated with herself, and then she reached out and took it.
He squeezed her fingers tightly, and he let out a
breath she hadn’t noticed he’d been holding. She laid her head on his shoulder, and he kissed the top of her head.
She pulled away. She brought his hand to her face and rubbed it against her cheek.
Some things are easier than you ever thought. That’s what it felt like for Leeda to fall in love, for real, for the first time. It felt like it had never been hard at all.
Epilogue
There were so many ways to get between Bridgewater and NewYork and Florida. There were buses, planes, trains, and cars. Only it can take so much time to get enough money for gas. It was years before Murphy, Leeda, and Birdie were all three together at the orchard again, and by that time, it wasn’t anything like it had been.
The year they graduated, Murphy and Rex found they couldn’t really be friends and never really had been. They compromised and met in Chicago—where Murphy could have her big-city flair, and Rex could have his outdoors close by, and they could shiver together through the winters in the tiny little apartment they shared. They were married in Bridgewater the following year. Even though she thought it was a sexist tradition, Murphy let her dad give her away. Mr. Taggart had insisted they get married at the Church of the Holy Redeemer. Murphy had insisted they didn’t send out invitations. They just put out fliers. Three of the people who showed up had made out with Murphy at some point in time.
Birdie had read a book once called The Age of Innocence. Enrico had recommended it. In it, at the end, it was pointed out that one of the main characters had given up the thing she loved most because giving it up meant keeping it beautiful and right. Birdie had tried to look back on this at moments when she felt desperately homesick. But as time went on, she didn’t have to remind herself. It became so clear that where the orchard had been, her life had filled itself in with wild colors and soul-shaking experiences and other things as meaningful as peaches and white dirt. Birdie, of all three girls, became the hardest to pin to a specific time and place. She would send Leeda and Murphy and her family cryptic letters with clips of her travel articles from Brazil, from India, from Switzerland, and she would promise to come home soon. But home, it seemed, was something Birdie carried on her back. She finally thought she knew what Poopie had felt when she’d first come to Bridgewater and, seeing shapes in the clouds floating above a place that was completely foreign, found a reason to stay.
Leeda’s third year into running the shelter, while Grey was in Atlanta buying supplies, two teenage guys—friends—came walking up the driveway looking for jobs working with the animals. Standing on the porch, they looked like stray puppies. Leeda hired them on the spot. They didn’t see the orchard as something that had been lost. They found new spots nearby to swim. They stayed out late. They settled in and grew into the place like trees.
Grey had made a sign and placed it by the door as a joke, but Leeda had kept it. It read Leeda’s Home for Lost Souls. Below it, Leeda hung a framed photo that Birdie had given her. It was of two Mexican women and three sixteen-year-old American girls: one looking wild and angry; one turning her eyes up, shy and meek; and one standing apart from the other two, thin and perfect, removed and ghostlike.
Without anyone to prune them or care for them, the peach trees slowly died, absorbed by the woods. There was the occasional holdout. A lonely tree here or there that somehow managed to survive and produce ripe, delicious fruit, better than any Leeda could find anywhere. But the last time they were all at the orchard together, Birdie only found one lone blossom, drying up. She took it with her and tucked it in her hair.
What mattered was still there. That was what they all felt, and it was what surprised them all. What mattered couldn’t be shaken.
Acknowledgments
My continued gratitude goes to Sara Shandler, as well as Zareen Jaffery, Nora Pelizzari, Kristin Marang, and Elise Howard. Thanks to Glenn Smith at Camp Tall Timbers in High View, West Virginia, for giving me a place to write and spend time with horses. Much appreciation to Barbara Birney of Cause for Paws Animal Shelter in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, for sharing her time and knowledge. Donations can be made to Cause for Paws at P.O. Box 271, Harper’s Ferry, WV, 25425.
Finally, thanks always to my friends and family.
About the Author
Jodi Lynn Anderson, the national bestselling author of PEACHES and THE SECRETS OF PEACHES, has lived in Georgia, Costa Rica, and New York, but she currently hangs her hat in Washington, D.C. You can visit her online at www.thesecretsofpeaches.com.
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Credits
Jacket art © 2008 by Howard Huang
Jacket design by Sasha Illingworth
Copyright
LOVE AND PEACHES. Copyright © 2008 by Alloy Entertainment and Jodi Lynn Anderson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub © Edition SEPTEMBER 2009 ISBN: 9780061855061
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