The Drying Yard
The city has bought the last apricot orchard in the valley, and Ruth Abernathy, seventy-six, means to finish its final cutting day properly: forty trays of fruit, halved by hand and laid out in the sun. As he has every July for half a century, Daniel Reyes drives up from Los Angeles at dawn to help. In 1967 he asked her to come with him, and she said, “After the cots are in.” Today, with the trays filling and the light going gold, she has one more chance to decide what comes after.