Ruth dragged the stiff-bristled brush down the length of the redwood slat, knocking loose a gray curl of last winter’s mud dauber nest, and counted thirty-eight.
Two shy of forty. She wanted forty trays laid out in the dirt before the sun dropped behind the western ridge. Forty was a round number, a full cart load twice over, and she had no intention of leaving the last harvest of the Abernathy orchard looking like an afterthought. If the city was going to turn her seven acres into a municipal park with decomposed granite paths and fourteen diagonal parking spaces where the well pump stood, they were at least going to inherit an orchard that had been worked properly to the final afternoon.
She rinsed the brush in the galvanized bucket, her knuckles aching where the cold hose water hit them, and peered under the cutting table. There they were, shoved back against the wall of the old sulfur house: two more three-by-eight frames, their redwood bottoms stained the dark, syrup-brown of fifty Julys.
As she hauled the thirty-ninth tray onto the sawhorses, tires crunched on the gravel out by the state road.
Ruth did not look at her watch. It was six-fifteen. Daniel had left the San Fernando Valley at one in the morning to beat the freight trucks over the Grapevine, stopped for coffee in Kettleman City, and turned off the noisy eight-lane freeway that had eaten her north acre in seventy-nine. Beyond the cyclone fence and the last row of gnarled Blenheims, the four-story tinted glass buildings of the corporate campus were still dark, their air-conditioning units droning a low, steady note against the dawn quiet.
The car door shut with a tinny clang. A moment later his shoes scraped on the concrete apron of the shed.
“Forty?” Daniel asked, looking at the stack by the narrow-gauge rail cart. “You didn’t pick enough for forty. I drove past the south block. Half those trees are holding up more propping boards than fruit.”
“There’s a hundred lugs stacked in the shade by the sulfur shed,” Ruth said, wiping the redwood frame with a damp rag. “And the kids from the high school garden club are coming at eight. Put that box down before you get sugar on the wood.”
Daniel set the pink bakery box on the corner of the table where the scale sat. The string was already looped over his thumb, the way he always carried it. Inside would be six conchas, three vanilla and three chocolate, the sugar crust slightly damp from the five-hour drive. He was seventy-seven, a year older than she was, and his linen shirt was ironed down the sleeves, though it would be stiff with apricot spit by noon. His hair had gone the color of clean pewter since his wife died three winters back, but he still stood with his weight on the balls of his feet, like a boy waiting for a pitch.
“You missed a spider,” he said, pointing a long, blunt finger at the corner cleat of the tray.
“I was getting to it.” She walked over to the wooden magnetic strip nailed to the stud above the sink and took down the fourth knife from the left. The carbon steel blade was two inches long, whetted down over the decades until it curved like a crescent moon, the hickory handle darkened by the oil of his thumb. She held it out, handle first. “Wash your hands. Pump’s primed.”
He took the knife, tested the edge lightly against the pad of his ring finger, and smiled. “You sharpened it.”
“Walt’s stone is still on the bench. Didn’t see the sense in letting you mangle the fruit.”
They worked the first three lugs alone before the sun cleared the top of the glass buildings across the fence. In the early cool, the Blenheims smelled less like sugar and more like wet wool and green almond. Each apricot was the size of a golf ball, pale orange with a scatter of red freckles on the cheek that had faced the sun, the skin bruised easily if you gripped too hard.
Ruth didn’t have to look at her hands. Pick up the fruit, find the crease with the tip of the blade, draw it around the equator to the stem end, give a tiny twist of the wrists, and push with the thumb. The two halves parted cleanly. A flick of the knife point sent the brown pit rattling into the five-gallon lard tin between their ankles. Lay the halves cup-side up on the redwood slats, close enough that their shoulders touched, row after row, so the juice wouldn’t run out into the wood when the heat took them.
Clack. Clack-clack. Their pits hit the tin in an uneven counterpoint.
Daniel began to hum, a habit left over from thirty-four years of conducting ninth-grade band in a room without air conditioning. It was something Spanish and slow.
“How’s the alto sax?” Ruth asked, filling her third row.
“Moved to Bakersfield,” Daniel said. “His father got work on the solar farms. Shame. Kid had an embouchure like he was born with a reed in his mouth. Left me with three flutes who couldn’t find middle C with a search warrant.”
“You’re retired.”
“I go in on Tuesdays. The new girl they hired out of Fresno State is terrified of the percussion section. You have to show your teeth to the drummers the first week, or you’re dead by Thanksgiving.” He flicked a pit. It chimed against the rim and dropped in. “Your wrist is stiff.”
“My wrist is seventy-six.”
“You’re favoring the thumb. You’re making the knife do the split.”
“Just fill your side of the tray, Daniel.”
By eight-thirty, the three teenagers from the high school arrived on bicycles, wearing oversized headphones around their necks and carrying steel water bottles that clanked against their handlebars. There were two girls with identical dark braids and a tall, skinny boy in a faded basketball jersey who looked at the stacks of field lugs as if they contained live crabs.
“Phones in the nail apron,” Ruth told them, pointing to the canvas pockets hanging from the crossbeam. “Juice gets in the speaker holes, your mothers will call the city, and the city will call me. Take a knife from the bucket. Not the ones on the wall.”
The skinny boy picked up an apricot, sawed at it as if he were cutting a cold steak, and tore the flesh, leaving half the orange meat clinging to the stone. Juice dripped off his wrist onto his sneakers.
Daniel stepped around the table, moving with that easy, sideways glide he had used in the shed when he was twenty-two and working alongside his brothers. “Here, son. Let me see your hands. You play ball?”
“Point guard,” the boy muttered, wiping his palm on his shorts.
“Good. Then you’ve got fingers, not clubs. Hold it like an egg you don’t want to break. See the line down the middle? That’s the seam. God already did half the work for you. Just run the tip right down the groove, don’t press, let the steel do it. Now push your thumb in the dimple. There.”
The boy’s apricot popped cleanly into two neat cups.
“Look at that,” Daniel said softly. “Clean stone. Now turn them up so they look at the sky. If you lay them face down, they stick to the boards and Ruth here docks your pay.”
“We’re getting community service hours,” one of the braided girls said, her knife already moving briskly. “Not pay.”
“Even worse,” Daniel said. “She’ll dock your karma.”
Ruth watched the side of his neck as he leaned over the boy’s shoulder. There was a small white scar just below his left ear from a bucking prune-shaker in sixty-six, half hidden now by the loose crease of his collar.
In sixty-seven, the shed had held fourteen cutters, mostly Daniel’s cousins and the Portuguese women from down by the creek, the air inside stinging faintly from the sulfur house behind them where the loaded cars sat overnight in the yellow fumes to keep the fruit bright. Now the sulfur house was padlocked, full of rusted smudge pots and Walt’s old tractor tires; nobody sulfured anymore, and the cots dried dark as saddle leather, which Ruth secretly preferred for eating out of hand in January.
That August in sixty-seven, the last trays had been scraped into the burlap sacks before dark. Daniel had had his secondhand blue coupe packed with two cardboard boxes of books and a secondhand trombone, ready for his first semester at the state college in Los Angeles on the GI Bill. He had walked her out past the dry rows where the grasshoppers were clicking in the heat, his hands stained mahogany to the knuckles with fruit acid that took three weeks of September to wear off.
Come down on the bus when you’ve got the sacks sewn, he had said, not touching her, because her father was sitting on the porch with the evening paper and a glass of buttermilk. I got a room with a hot plate on Figueroa. We’ll figure the rest out.
Ruth had looked back at the shed. Her mother had been dead four years; her father’s knees were already going bad, swollen like winter turnips inside his overalls, and there were ten tons of dried Blenheims waiting for the cooperative truck, plus the fall pruning to mark before the rains came.
After the cots are in, she had told him, kicking a clod of baked clay with the toe of her sneaker.
She had meant it. While she was sewing the burlap ears on the hundred-pound sacks with the long curved needle, while she was hosing down the sulfur tracks, she had kept the bus schedule folded under the handkerchief box in her dresser. Then her father had taken a spill off the tractor hitch the week before Labor Day, cracking his pelvis, and when Daniel called the house phone from a pay booth on Alvarado Street, she had let it ring twelve times while she stood in the pantry with a dish towel in her hands, listening to the clock tick above the refrigerator, waiting until the ringing stopped so she could go back to boiling the water for her father’s tea.
By the next July, when Daniel drove up for the weekend to help his uncle, she was wearing Walt’s small diamond on a string inside her blouse so the apricot juice wouldn’t dull the setting. Daniel had seen the string against her collarbone when she leaned over the sorting bin. He had handed her a sharpening stone without a word, and he had come back every July since, first alone, then with a wallet full of photos of Lena and their two girls, then alone again.
“Mrs. Abernathy?” the girl with the left braid asked. “This one’s got a bug in the middle.”
Ruth blinked. The morning had gone white-hot outside the shed eaves. “Earwig,” she said, glancing down. “Knock it out on the ground and cut around the black spot. If it’s sour, toss it in the slop bucket under the table. Don’t put bad fruit on my boards.”
By noon the heat had settled into the valley floor, pressing down the dry smell of wild oat grass from the foothills and the exhaust from the eight lanes of traffic beyond the sound wall. Up on the metal roof, a mourning dove gave its three low, hollow notes and stopped.
They ate in the black shade of the grandfather tree at the corner of the shed. It was the oldest Blenheim on the property, planted by Ruth’s grandfather in nineteen-eleven when the valley was forty miles of uninterrupted blossom every March, white as a snowfall from the bay marshes to the southern pass. Its trunk was split down the middle and bolted together with a rusted iron rod the thickness of a man’s wrist, the bark twisted like wrung laundry.
The teenagers sat ten feet away on upturned lugs, their thumbs flying over their phone screens now that they were off the clock, sharing a bag of sour gummy worms over the ham sandwiches Ruth had made.
Daniel leaned his spine against the bolted trunk, peeling a hard-boiled egg into a paper napkin. “They’re good kids,” he said. “The tall one’s got the rhythm down. Another week, he’d make sixty cents a box.”
“We paid forty-five in sixty-six,” Ruth said, unscrewing the lid of the thermos. She poured him the iced tea first, the way she had poured Walt’s for forty-four years. “And you only made that because you cheated on the corners.”
“I never cheated a tray in my life. My mother would have come down the row with a willow switch.” He salted the egg, took a bite, and looked out across the drying yard. Twenty-four trays were already stacked on the rail cart, waiting to be wheeled out into the dirt once the cutting was done. The bare earth of the yard had been dragged smooth and sprinkled with water yesterday to keep the dust down, though the sun had already baked a pale crust over the surface. “Cathy came down from Portland last month.”
“How are the boys?”
“Loud. Seven and nine. They found my old trumpet in the hall closet and nearly blew the stucco off the garage.” Daniel folded the shells tightly into the napkin, creasing the paper along the edges with his thumb. “She wants me to put the house on the market before September. There’s a two-bedroom bungalow three blocks from the elementary school up there. Has a little porch. Needs a roof, she says, but her husband knows a guy.”
A yellow jacket hovered over a drop of sweet tea on the knuckle of Ruth’s hand. She held still until it lifted away toward the shed.
“Portland’s wet,” she said.
“Rains nine months a year, from what I hear. Everything’s green. Moss on the driveways.” He looked at his neat little packet of eggshell. “Nobody needs a three-bedroom house in Van Nuys by himself, Ruthie. The lemon tree in the back died in the freeze two years ago, and I’m tired of arguing with the guy who mows the lawn.”
“It’s a long drive from Oregon,” she said.
“Twelve hours. Fourteen if you stop when your knees tell you to.” He didn’t look at her; he was watching the skinny boy try to toss a gummy worm into his own mouth and miss. “I told her I’d call the realtor when I got back next week.”
Ruth screwed the red plastic cup back onto the thermos until the threads bit tight. “Well,” she said, standing up and brushing dry grass from her cotton slacks. “The sun isn’t waiting on your realtor. We’ve got sixteen trays left and four hours of decent light.”
By three o’clock, the juice had dried in tight, shiny varnish up to their elbows, sour-sweet and tacky wherever an arm touched the table. The high school kids left at three-thirty, their knees dusty, each carrying a plastic grocery bag of soft cots that were too ripe for the boards.
At a quarter to four, Daniel tipped the last field lug on its side and rolled four bruised apricots out onto the damp pine table.
Ruth looked down at the fortieth tray. The bottom third was bare wood, a two-foot gap of empty redwood slats staring up at the rafters.
“Thirty-nine and two-thirds,” Daniel said, wiping his forehead with the clean part of his upper sleeve. “Not bad for an old woman and three kids.”
“I’m not putting a two-thirds tray in the yard,” Ruth said.
“Ruthie. The boxes are empty.”
“The boxes are empty because those boys didn’t touch the top of the grandfather tree when they picked yesterday. They used the ten-foot tripod and called it a day.” She was already untying her apron, tossing it onto the sawhorse. “Get the twelve-footer off the hooks on the sulfur wall.”
“I am seventy-seven years old,” Daniel said to the rafters, though he was already putting his knife back on the magnetic strip. “My doctor in Encino told me not to get on a step-stool to change a hallway bulb.”
“I’m going up, not you. You’re holding the legs.”
“Like hell you are.”
“You don’t know where the strong limbs are on that tree. Step on the north crotch and you’ll go right through the rot and break your hip, and then Cathy will have to drive all the way down here to shoot me.”
They hauled the three-legged orchard ladder between them out into the bright glare. It was old spruce, gray and splintered, bound with wire under each rung, lighter than aluminum if you knew how to balance the flare of the base. They planted the two wide feet outside the drip line of the old tree and jammed the single pointed leg through the dry weeds into the clay.
Ruth clipped a canvas picking bucket over her shoulders by its web straps and went up four rungs before Daniel could get in front of her.
“Hold the left stilt,” she told him. “The ground’s soft where the gopher worked in April.”
Daniel braced both hands against the flared spruce rails, planted his boots wide, and tipped his head back, squinting through the lattice of small, heart-shaped leaves. Up inside the canopy, the air was five degrees cooler and smelled of old sap and dust. Along the highest whip-shoots, where the pruning shears hadn’t reached for three seasons, hung a bucketful of small, deep-gold Blenheims, spotted burgundy like bird eggs, warm as blood to the touch.
Ruth reached up, her cotton shirt pulling tight across her shoulder blades, and rolled four fruits into her palm.
“Throw a couple down,” Daniel said from below. “Let’s see if they’re just pits and leather.”
“They’re the best ones on the place. Crown fruit always gets the sugar.” She reached higher for a cluster near the iron tie-rod, stretching until her left shoe came halfway off the fifth rung. The pointed leg of the ladder sank two inches into the hidden gopher run with a dry scritch.
The spruce frame lurched sideways. Ruth caught the main limb with her forearm, her hip bumping hard against the side rail, while six inches below her heel, Daniel’s hands locked around her ankle over the top of her heavy cotton sock.
His grip was startlingly hot and solid, his thumb pressing right into the hollow behind her ankle bone, steadying her weight onto the rung before the ladder stopped shivering.
Neither of them moved for three seconds. From across the cyclone fence came the brief, cheerful double-beep of someone locking a sedan in the corporate parking lot.
“Got your foot?” he asked, his voice right by her knee.
“I’ve got it,” she said. Her heart was thumping once, hard, against the canvas strap of the bucket.
He didn’t let go of her ankle until she had both soles flat on the wood. Even then, his palm lingered for half a beat against the rough rib of her sock before dropping back to the spruce rail. “Come down from there. You’ve got enough.”
“Need a bucket more,” she said, though her hands were trembling slightly as she plucked the last cluster within reach.
They finished the fortieth tray at four-thirty, the two of them standing shoulder to shoulder at the table, cutting twice as fast as they had at dawn, not speaking, their thumbs moving in unison until the last two orange cups nestled into the bottom right corner against the redwood rim.
Then came the heavy work. They slid the trays off the rail cart two by two, walking backward and forward across the scraped dirt of the drying yard. It took twenty trips. They laid them out in four rows of ten, edges touching, forming a solid rectangle of glowing orange halves across the bare brown earth. Already the yellow jackets were finding them, buzzing low and drunk in the late afternoon heat, while the cut surfaces of the morning trays were beginning to glaze over with a thin, shiny skin that would hold the juice inside while the sun drew the water out.
A white municipal hybrid rolled slowly down the dirt driveway, raising a polite little plume of dust that drifted into the weeds.
Marisol Tran got out, holding a legal clipboard against her chest with one arm and a piece of rolled foam-core board under the other. She was thirty-four, wore sensible flat shoes that were already ruined by the orchard silt, and looked at the forty trays with the earnest terror of someone who had read about agriculture in a graduate seminar.
“Mrs. Abernathy,” Marisol called, picking her way carefully around the rusted rail tracks so she didn’t step on them. “Oh, look at that. I brought a camera in the car, do you mind if I document the layout for the interpretive kiosk? The historical commission was hoping we could laminate a photograph for the pavilion.”
“Take what you want,” Ruth said, wiping her sticky hands on a wet rag from the bucket. “Just don’t walk upwind of the trays. Your shoes kick up dirt.”
“Right. Of course.” Marisol stopped obediently four feet from the wood frames, checking where the tiny breeze was coming from. She unrolled the foam-core mock-up, holding the curling corners flat with her thumbs. It showed a laser-etched bronze rectangle mounted on a river boulder, with a tiny silhouette of a tree at the top.
ABERNATHY HERITAGE GROVE, the print read. ESTABLISHED 1911. ACQUIRED BY THE CITY FOR PUBLIC ENJOYMENT. Below that was a gray box marked [INSCRIPTION: 15 WORDS MAX].
“The foundry in Oakland needs the final text by Monday morning if we’re going to make the October dedication,” Marisol said, offering a pen that had a little plastic sunflower taped to the cap. “Everyone on the committee felt it should come from the family. Something about the valley’s agricultural legacy, or your grandfather, or what the land meant to you.”
Ruth looked at the gray box. Behind Marisol, the late sun was hitting the western wall of the glass office building, turning four hundred square windows into blinding sheets of copper that threw a strange, doubled heat back over the fence into the orchard. Daniel stood by the water spigot, washing the sugar off his paring knife under the trickle of the hose, keeping his back turned so it wouldn’t look like he was listening.
Seventy-six summers, Ruth thought. Seven hundred tons of fruit, three dogs buried under the walnut tree by the ditch, Walt’s reading glasses still sitting in the medicine cabinet because she hadn’t needed the shelf space, and one bus ticket she had never bought.
“It’s just trees, Marisol,” Ruth said. “You prune them in January, you thin them in April, you cut them in July. If it freezes in March, you go broke.”
Marisol’s smile faltered slightly, though she kept the sunflower pen held out. “Well, even a short sentence. Just so people walking their dogs know what used to happen here.”
“I don’t have anything to put on a rock,” Ruth said. “Give me the weekend. I’ll call your office Monday before nine.”
“Monday at nine is great. Monday works.” Marisol backed toward her hybrid, pausing to snap three quick photos of the trays with her phone before getting in and turning around in a three-point arc that missed the well house by an inch.
When the dust settled back onto the gravel, the orchard was very quiet. The office workers beyond the fence had mostly gone home; the parking lot was three-quarters empty, the asphalt radiating a dry, tarry smell through the chain-link.
Daniel turned off the brass spigot, gave the hose a coil, and hung his curved knife back in the fourth slot on the wooden strip above the sink. He reached for his canvas jacket hanging on the nail by the door and took his car keys out of the pocket.
It was six o’clock. Every year, at six o’clock, he washed his hands to the elbows with the yellow bar of laundry soap, put the empty pan dulce box in the trash barrel, shook Walt’s hand when Walt was alive, kissed Ruth once on the dry skin beside her cheekbone after Walt was gone, and drove south before the twilight made his eyes ache against the oncoming headlights.
He walked over to the trunk of his sedan, lifted the lid, and shifted his small leather overnight bag closer to the latch to make room for the lug of whole apricots Ruth always sent home with him for his neighbors.
Ruth stood by the corner of the drying yard. The shadows of the propped Blenheim trees were stretching long and blue-gray across the dirt, reaching the first row of trays.
In five days, the halves would shrink into dark amber cups, wrinkling around the edges. On the third day, someone had to walk down every aisle and shift each piece by hand so the bottoms didn’t stick to the wood and tear when you took the scraper to them. In seven days, she would slide them into cotton sacks, tie the necks with twine, and hand the gate keys to Marisol Tran. And by then, a realtor in Van Nuys would have a metal sign pounded into Daniel’s dead lawn by the dead lemon tree, and he would be a thousand miles north, watching the rain hit someone else’s driveway.
She looked at the open trunk of his car. She looked at the forty trays, tens of thousands of small orange cups holding the last of the light.
“Daniel,” she said.
He turned from the fender, holding the lug of fruit against his belt. “Yeah?”
“Who’s going to turn them on Monday?”
He looked down at the lug in his hands, then out across the forty boards. A single bee was crawling lazily along the rim of the nearest tray, too heavy with sugar to fly back to the hive.
“You’ve turned forty trays by yourself since Walt died,” he said gently. “Takes you two hours in the morning.”
“My wrist is stiff,” she said. “You said so yourself at nine o’clock.”
Daniel didn’t smile. He set the lug of apricots back down on the bumper of the car. The valley breeze moved through the top of the grandfather tree, rattling the dry summer leaves like brown paper.
“Takes five days to dry a heavy crop,” he said, looking across the thirty feet of scraped dirt between them. “Six if the marine layer comes over the hill in the morning.”
“Seven,” Ruth said. “These were off the old wood. They’re full of water. You can’t sack them before Friday, or they’ll mold in the bag.”
“Cathy’s expecting me to call that woman with the listings on Wednesday.”
“Phones work from here,” Ruth said. “Unless you left yours in the nail apron.”
Daniel stood very still by the rear wheel of the sedan. The copper glare had faded off the office windows across the fence, leaving the glass dark and flat, reflecting nothing but the pale band of sky over the hills. Slowly, he reached into the trunk, lifted out his leather overnight bag by its worn handles, and shut the lid with his elbow.
“Walt’s old razor still in the bathroom?” he asked, walking back toward the shed.
“Bottom drawer,” she said. “Behind the witch hazel.”
He set his bag down on the concrete apron beside the door and came out to the edge of the drying yard, stopping beside her. He didn’t go inside. He lowered himself onto the upturned redwood lug they used for a step, his knees giving a small, dry pop in the quiet, and patted the corner of the box beside him.
Ruth sat. There was barely enough room for the two of them on the eighteen-inch crate; his linen sleeve brushed her bare forearm, where a missed streak of dried apricot glazed the skin. He reached over and laid his hand palm-down over hers on her knee. His fingers were cool from the hose water and smelled faintly of carbon steel and yellow soap.
Across the yard, the forty trays held the last pink light from the western pass, each halved fruit glowing like a tiny oil lamp set out on the dark earth.
“You going to tell that girl what to put on her rock?” Daniel asked after a while.
Ruth watched a moth flutter down into the first row, settling on the edge of the redwood frame.
“Let them dry in the sun,” she said.
Daniel’s thumb moved once against her knuckles, then rested still. Neither of them got up to turn on the porch light until the trays had gone entirely dark.