The Lemon Orchard
Authors: Luanne Rice
ALSO BY LUANNE RICE
Little Night
The Silver Boat
Deep Blue Sea for Beginners
The Geometry of Sisters
Last Kiss
What Matters Most
The Edge of Winter
Sandcastles
Summer of Roses
Summer’s Child
Silver Bells
Beach Girls
Dance with Me
The Perfect Summer
The Secret Hour
True Blue
Safe Harbor
Summer Light
Firefly Beach
Dream Country
Follow the Stars Home
Cloud Nine
Home Fires
Blue Moon
Secrets of Paris
Stone Heart
Crazy in Love
Angels All Over Town
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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A PAMELA DORMAN BOOK / VIKING
Copyright © Luanne Rice, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Rice, Luanne.
The lemon orchard / Luanne Rice.
pages ; cm.
ISBN 978-1-101-62291-9
1. Bereavement—Fiction. 2. Separation (Psychology)—Fiction. 3. California, Southern—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3568.I289L46 2013b 813'.54—dc23 2013009690
Photograph on title page copyright © 2012 by Paul Giamou / iStock
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
For Armando
acknowledgments
Much love and gratitude to Armando, Armando Sr., Delfina, Brandon, Antonio, Eliza, and Melanie.
Much gratitude to my agent, Andrea Cirillo, and everyone at the Jane Rotrosen Agency: Jane Berkey, Don Cleary, Meg Ruley, Annelise Robey, Christina Hogrebe, Peggy Gordijn, Christina Prestia, Carlie Webber, Danielle Sickles, Rebecca Scherer, Donald W. Cleary, Brooke Fox, Ellen Tischler, Liz Van Buren.
I am thankful to everyone at Pamela Dorman Books/Viking and Penguin, especially Pam Dorman; Kiki Koroshetz; Clare Ferraro; Kathryn Court; Julie Miesionczek; Dick Heffernan, Norman Lidofsky and their sales teams; Lindsay Prevette; Carolyn Coleburn; Nancy Sheppard; Andrew Duncan; Patrick Nolan; John Fagan; Maureen Donnelly; Hal Fessenden; Leigh Butler; Roseanne Serra; and Jeannette Williams.
Thank you to Deborah Dwyer for copyediting this and so many of my novels.
Veronique de Turenne is a graceful writer and wonderful friend whose blog,
Here in (the) Malibu,
introduced me to Malibu’s history, nature, and secret places.
I am thankful to Asha Randall for countless kindnesses and for introducing me to Adamson House.
Many thanks to Bernard Wolfsdorf for his expertise in immigration law and his generosity in discussing it with me.
Much gratitude to Jim Weikart, Tim Donnelly, Jay Tsao, Ted O’Gorman, Injae Choe, Lauren Gardner, Elvira de Leon, Delsy Hermosa, Oscar Castillo, Nick Chambers, Jackie Bass, and Becky Murray.
I feel very inspired by Luis Alberto Urrea’s brilliant
The Devil’s Highway
. Reading it changed the way I see the world—I know it will turn out to be one of the most influential books of my life. Luis opened my eyes to life along the border and I’m so grateful.
Love and thanks to Maureen, Olivier, and Mia Onorato; Molly, Alex, and Will Feinstein; Robert and Audrey Loggia; and William Twigg Crawford.
I’m grateful to my family of immigrants on both sides: for their hope, beliefs, struggles, and love.
contents
prologue
FEBRUARY 2007
This is how I picture it: Eleven o’clock that cold and sunny morning, she is behind the wheel, hands in the two-and-ten position because she’s a good girl and that’s the way her father, sitting beside her holding the large black coffee he’d bought at Kendall’s, likes her to drive, and she’s taking care because she doesn’t want him to spill it and scald himself. The station wagon is twelve years old, and it smells of dog, and if she looked in the rearview mirror, she could see where we used to buckle her car seat.
Bonnie Blue, our seven-year-old and the latest in a long line of blue-merle border collies, rides with me because she’s still rambunctious and likes to nuzzle the driver’s ear from the back seat, and Peter and I worry she might distract Jenny. Bonnie and I are two miles behind, with one last stop to make, to pick up the chocolate cake at Hoffman’s Bakery, where Viola and Norma have decorated it with goalposts and a fifty-yard line and know to spread raspberry preserves between the layers because that is Jenny’s favorite.
My daughter: Jenny Hughes. She is wearing the bulky Nordic sweater, endearingly lopsided, she knit for Timmy from yarn that still contained bits of burrs and brambles from the sheep’s wool, and it’s so Jenny to be wearing it, just two days after he gave it back to her as part of the breakup, along with her telescope and dog-eared copy of H. A. Rey’s
The Stars
.
The February day is frigid but bright, and although there’s plenty of snow left from last week’s storm, the roads are clear of ice. Jenny is thinking of the party. She and I don’t care about watching sports but Peter played football at Brown, and every year we go all out for the Super Bowl. Jenny loves to cook, and together we’ll make chili, Buffalo wings, and guacamole. Last year Timmy came over, and the two of them huddled on the couch whispering and laughing, surrounded by Peter and our friends; I don’t think I watched a full minute of the game, I was so taken by the sight of my daughter in love.
Jenny was sixteen in November, her license is new, and she brings her sense of responsibility to driving the way she does everything else. Straight As last semester, a talent for the violin, a blue ribbon in last summer’s horse show, caring for our animals, such good-heartedness, and a head-down pure-hearted determination to go to Brown University like her parents, and I wonder if her choice is a way of trying to hold us together, to remind Peter and me of where we met, and I know she feels bad for leaving the house angry this morning, calling me a hypocrite for inviting people over and entertaining relatives just when Peter is planning to move out. My aunt and uncle from California are staying with us; they are in Connecticut because he’s a professor, guest lecturing at Yale, where I am an adjunct professor of cultural anthropology. Jenny is afraid that they have picked up on the tension and are judging Peter.
So there she is, driving home from the barn along the Shore Road, past the marsh brown and glistening, the creeks frozen over, pure white in the sunlight, her father beside her sipping coffee, telling her how well she rode that morning, how she kept her elbows in and heels down and took Gisele over the jumps.
Peter and Jenny adore each other and have since her birth. At night, as an infant, when she’d wake up crying and refuse to sleep, she’d quiet only when he would cradle and walk her, singing her made-up songs as he carried her back and forth across her room overlooking the meadow, that single stately elm framed in the window, ghostly in moonlight.
And even those years when Jenny was ten and eleven, and I finally went back to school for my master’s, taking classes in New Haven, studying and writing about the anthropology of movement, my books and papers spread out on the dining room table every night, Peter would come home from the office and he and Jenny would take dinner into the den and eat in front of the TV, laughing, Jenny shrieking; they both loved comedies and cartoons, especially French ones—Asterix and Tintin were huge in our house.
She drives toward home and the meadow, gleaming with crusted snow, the road straight and clear, no traffic in either direction, pavement sanded and clear of ice, tree branches interlocking overhead and throwing morning shadows, and her elm—she thinks of it as hers—comes into view. Shore Road takes a sharp left, a boomerang bend, just where our driveway veers off to the right.
Ancient stone walls built by Connecticut’s settlers, arrived from England in the 1600s—evidence, as if we need more, of migration and movement, and how the history of the world is made up of people leaving one place for another, looking for more food, religious freedom, a better life—line the way; when she was little she loved to walk to and from the bus stop on top of the walls, and sometimes we’d hide messages for each other in a lichen-bound crevice that we called our mailbox. She remembers our secret hiding place, the shivery pleasure of finding a note, and she is wearing Timmy’s sweater, the smell of him inseparable from the feeling of being in love, and in that instant she steps on the gas.