The Secrets of Peaches (18 page)

T
he doctor had explained things to her in teenage girl language, as if Leeda wasn't capable of understanding compound sentences. They said her body had just shut down and restarted, like a computer. She was going to be fine. The doctor had said she just needed rest and quiet time. They were going to let her go home. But it might take weeks for her to feel like her old self.

Leeda stared out the window. Her dad stood there to the left, fiddling with the remote control. “What do you want to watch?”

“I don't care, Dad.”

Lucretia sat monarch-like in the farthest chair, reading a copy of
W
. She'd only put on the minimum amount of makeup, which for her was groundbreaking. Her hair was slightly disheveled. The way her face sagged in places made it look like she hadn't slept. And she kept eyeing Leeda above her magazine, looking worried. But Leeda couldn't imagine her really wanting to be there.

Leeda tugged the light blue curtain to get a better view of the sky—overcast, flat—beyond the window.

“You leaning toward any of them?” Leeda's dad nodded toward the stack of acceptance letters that he'd brought to the hospital. UCLA, UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara, Pepperdine.

“Still waiting for Berkeley,” Leeda mumbled, staring at the sky.

Her dad hovered for a few minutes. Mr. Cawley-Smith had always been good at navigating the murky waters between his wife and his daughter. He always gave them both the room they needed. It was like a bow to the fact that they inhabited a girly world he didn't understand. But sometimes Leeda wished he'd stick a toe in. “Well, I'm going to go get you a bagel. You look too thin. You want anything, Lucretia?” he asked her mother. It was amazing that over the years, he hadn't managed to shorten such a mouthful to Lu or something like that. It spoke volumes about how intimacy worked with Leeda's mother.

With her dad gone, Leeda flipped the channels, and Lucretia flipped her magazine pages faster and faster.

“I think you should move home,” Lucretia finally said, laying the
W
on her lap decisively. “You're obviously not taking good care of yourself.”

Leeda thought it was ironic that her mom thought she could take better care of her. But she didn't bother to say it. She was over fighting with her mother. Fighting was a way of trying to connect.

But Lucretia didn't let it go. She stood up and walked to the bed and perched on the corner, like she wanted to be close to Leeda but not too close. “You're going to Aunt Veda's this summer, and that's good. But next summer, we'll have to sort out something for you that's more structured.”

“I'm not coming back next summer.” Leeda yawned.

Lucretia looked surprised. “Oh?”

“I'll spend the holidays in San Francisco. I can stay with Aunt Veda or I can rent a place on my own.” Leeda had all sorts of money coming to her when she turned eighteen. She had all sorts of options and none of them, in her mind, were coming back to Breezy Buds.

Several emotions crossed her mother's face: surprise, then anger, then recognition. Her mouth settled into a straight, practical line. “When will we see you?”

“Hopefully you won't.”

“Oh, don't be so dramatic, Leeda.” Lucretia opened the magazine again, flipping and flipping, as if she wasn't interested anymore.

In the past, this would have infuriated Leeda. But she didn't flinch.

She only leaned forward. She gently pulled the magazine away and looked her mother in the eye. She couldn't remember the last time she'd done that, fully, completely, fearlessly. “You think I'm just saying this because I'm seventeen and seventeen-year-olds say this kind of thing, but I am promising you, Mom, that when I go, I won't come back. I don't want you around me anymore.”

Lucretia gasped so loudly that it seemed like a word. Her blue eyes were as wide and wounded as if she'd been slapped. She had been making Leeda feel that wounded for years, and now Leeda felt serene. She felt like she'd weathered some terrible storm. Like the last few months had been tumultuous and now she had arrived on the other side, somewhere far away, in
calm waters, millions of miles from anything familiar. She felt like…what should you call a place far away from all the things that had messed you up before?

Leeda felt like she was her own
continent
.

There were always two ways to tell spring was coming in Bridgewater. One was the color of the sky—which made the gradual shift from a flat, lifeless gray to a smooth, hopeful blue. And then there were the people. They got a little excitable. They did things they normally wouldn't.

On February 3, three jumbo-size Sugar Daddys were shoplifted from the Bridgewater Drug and Dairy. On February 20, Maribeth McMurtry accidentally broke the Joseph in her life-size nativity set as she was packing it away for the year. And on March 20, Mayor Wise decided to take a detour along Orchard Road, completely out of his way.

With the windows down and spring air in his nostrils, he remembered sneaking onto the orchard once, at the age of thirteen, to pick the first peach of the season. He had heard that with the first bite of the first peach, you got to make a wish. Of course, being thirteen, he had wished a naked girl would show up in his front yard, like a free prize popping up in a box of Cracker Jacks.

He never realized it, but he had forgotten to specify when.

M
urphy woke up just as the sun was rising. Gently, gingerly, she rolled over and propped herself up to look at Rex. He lay flat on his back, one arm stretched out where it had been wrapped around her, the other flat against the back of the couch. They had fallen asleep watching
Late Night
. To her, he looked like some kind of Holy Grail that only she had been bold and brave and true enough to find.

Inevitably he sensed she was awake and stirred. She curled back into his warmth and pretended to be asleep.

“Faker,” Rex whispered, grabbing her arms and kissing her sloppy style on the cheek. Murphy squirmed, her chin pressed against her neck, giggling. And then they both stopped giggling and looked at each other, and Murphy felt like she was hanging on what they had like a clothes hanger. Dangling, swaying, up high.

She had never wanted to hang.

But they'd been back together for almost two months now. Rex had landed back in her life with force, even more lodged in than he was before. And Murphy wasn't dancing away from him
anymore like she used to. When she looked at him there on the couch, sitting up, all groggy and disheveled, she wasn't scared of him like she used to be. Or scared of wanting him as much as she did. She didn't feel like she needed to pin him down to make sure she had him. She felt like she knew.

Her mom was still asleep in her bedroom, her door open. Murphy could hear her gently snoring. She pecked him once more on the lips, then forced herself to climb up off the couch.

She shuffled to the kitchen, filled up the coffeepot, switched it on, and popped her hand out the front door. Outside, it had started to warm up just a tad. She could see the buds on the few straggly trees that hung over Anthill Acres. She reached into the little black metal mailbox at the side of the door.

When she saw the edge of the manila envelope, something in her just knew. She glanced immediately behind her, then stepped out onto the stoop, cold metal chilling the soles of her feet. She closed the door behind her, shimmying the fat packet out from the junk mail and the bills.

She ran her fingernail under the gummy lip of the envelope, her heart pounding. She squeezed the top open, not pulling the paper out, but instead peeking inside, reading the top sheet. When she saw the top few words, she crumbled inside. She felt the way she'd felt when her cat Perko had died. Like she had lost something she could never get back. She felt surprising, out-of-nowhere grief. She closed the envelope back up again.

The McGowens had a recycling bin that sat under the overhang of the stoop. Murphy had made her mom get one. Now she took the junk mail and the packet and stuffed them in. She put the coupon flyers on top, obscuring the envelope.

She walked back into the house past Rex and leaned over the kitchen counter, pouring out two bowls of Pops, even though she knew Rex thought they were nasty. Rex looked at her. “What's wrong?”

Murphy's mom was just emerging from her bedroom, her hair all sideways, her red Victoria's Secret robe all akimbo. She had a hand to the side of her face, like she was trying to pat herself awake, but she too looked at Murphy, perplexed.

Murphy rubbed her neck and stared up at her ceiling fan. “I didn't get in.”

She didn't look at either of them to catch their expressions. She knew her mom would be relieved, but she didn't know if Rex would be crushed or happy or somewhere in between. She didn't want to know.

And anyway, she couldn't lie and look him in the eye at the same time.

“T
he invoices go in the invoice files, which are alphabetical,” Jodee explained, running a red nail along the red tabs in the metal filing cabinet. “The mail goes by person into this filing cabinet here.” She flicked her fingers along another set of tabs, which encased tiny little names.

The radio was playing some insipid pop song, and Murphy kept glancing over at the dial, tempted to change it. But her mom was so serious about training her that Murphy thought looking distracted might let the wind out of her sails.

“The best part is you can look through magazines when you're done with the mail. And then you just have to answer the phones.” Jodee had already explained the ins and outs of the phone system. Murphy had a headset, like the women on those adult education ads she'd seen on TV. It made her feel ten years older just having it on her head.

She must have looked as dismal as she felt because Jodee pinched her cheek. “It's not so bad, baby. The people are great. And it's only temporary.”

“I know.” It had taken all of two weeks to get Murphy
situated. She had applied at Ganax two days after she'd found out about NYU and now here she was working after school and sometimes on weekends. She was going to apply to schools close to home for the spring semester. And then, eventually, she said she'd try to transfer to NYU. In the meantime, she'd be at Laurens Community College with Birdie. Birdie had taken the news with tears in her eyes for Murphy, her hands over her mouth. And then she'd gotten ecstatic that they were going to spend at least the fall together. Murphy had tried to act less deflated by the idea of LCC than she was.

“You got it?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, and don't change the radio station. Mr. Carter wants easy listening for when customers come in.” Jodee kissed her, shimmying out the door in her knee-length maroon skirt. “See you tonight.”

Murphy sat at the reception desk bathed in fluorescent light, feeling like an exhibit at the circus, and stared out the double glass doors at the outside. She couldn't believe the same town that harbored the Darlington Orchard could harbor Ganax Heating.

The four hours went by like five million years. She opened all the invoices and used her staple remover on the ones that were stapled. One particular company liked to staple their invoices—several sheets thick—in the very middle, and Murphy spent ten minutes digging under each staple with her fingernails before she realized there was a staple remover to do that. When she was done with the invoices, mail, and filing, she stared up at the fluorescent bulbs overhead, rocking back on her chair. She peered toward accounts payable, but everyone was facing their computers.

Murphy stared at the phone and at everyone's names. She made little paper clip animals to be in the circus with her and lined them up beside the nameplate that said
Receptionist
. She thought it was darkly funny that her name had become Receptionist. She thumbed through magazines, took her scissors, cut out the photos, and used them to make little collage scenes on the desk. When she got bored, she dug out a blank sheet of paper and addressed it to the company that stapled their invoices in the middle.
Dear Sir or Madam, I want to let you know that it makes no sense to staple your invoices like you do. It takes me ten times longer to open one of your invoices than anyone else's.

She walked up to the double doors every half hour or so to look outside at the free world. The grassy parking lot medians were soggy. The whole world looked like it was finally in bloom.

When Rex came to pick her up at seven, Murphy had been staring at the minute hand of the clock for five minutes. She threw herself on him like he had untied her from railroad tracks.

“Let's go out to celebrate your first day.”

They went to Applebee's, which was the only restaurant Murphy hadn't been kicked out of besides Kuntry Kitchen. She stared around at the lights, at the servers, as if she'd just landed in Bridgewater on a spaceship and was getting used to her new surroundings. Because staying was new. Not escaping was new. Every time she looked at Rex, she bravely gave him a smile.

“So have you looked at other schools in New York yet?” he asked.

Murphy shrugged.

“Murphy.” He leaned forward on the table. “Can I ask you something?”

Murphy played with her napkin and then moved her fork to the other side of her knife. “Yeah.”

“Why didn't you apply to any other schools?”

Murphy moved the fork back to where it had been originally. “Because NYU is the only…”

Rex shook his head and held up his hand. “I know what you told me. Now tell me something new. Why not?”

Murphy could feel her bottom lip start to tremble. She met Rex's gaze directly, but she didn't say anything back. She didn't know why not. She didn't want to say it was because of him. But she guessed maybe it had been. Maybe.

“Shorts.” He moved to her side of the table and put his arm around her. He kissed the top of her head. And even though everything around them seemed superficial, and dull, and so much less than she wanted, he felt real and true.

Before they left, Murphy made her way to the bathroom. After she'd finished washing her hands, she stood in front of the sink and looked at herself. She looked smaller than she remembered.