Classes, if not school altogether, helped with the perspective. In history, Mr. Manning began a unit on the Holocaust, and he assigned the comic book Maus. Jess read half of the first volume in one sitting, holding the book tight to her knees in bed. When she put it down, she let out a long exhale—as if she’d been holding her breath the whole time. She’d had to read Anne Frank before, but these scratchy black-and-white comics made it more real and true than the mythic nightmare she’d imagined. Somehow, the writer had even made her laugh at times. Her head spun with the size of the story, with how to hold all its truth inside. How did the world not rupture because of that event? Like, literally rip in half. She got up and pulled the torn birthday card from her wastebasket. She taped it together and stuck it instead in the back of her desk drawer. She fell asleep clutching the book to her chest, her finger marking a page.
The next day in Humanities, Ms. G began an art unit on the pre-Impressionist period. Artists were shifting to realistic paintings, which irritated the Salon, which Jess understood to be a bunch of dudes in charge of the art then. Ms. G showed slides of the work, pausing on a French painting called The Floor Planers, which showed three shirtless men on their knees scraping a wooden floor. This was scandalous, Ms. G said, not because they were shirtless but because they were workers. The Salon did not value depictions of ordinary life, working life. In their view, that was not the subject of art. “But look at that light,” Ms. G said, and she touched the screen, tracing the shine on the floors and on the men’s muscled backs. “Shivers!” she said, holding up her arm, and Jess got them, too. “The beautiful in the ordinary,” Ms. G said, and Jess wrote it down. Of course, the lights were off and half the rest of the class was sleeping, so Ms. G took off her shoe and chucked it against the wall, yelling, “Wake up! Wake up!” Under her breath she added, “Christ on a crutch.” Jess laughed her father’s loud honk, forgetting to try to hide it.
At lunchtime, Jess knocked on Ms. G’s classroom door. Her teacher opened the door with a smile, welcoming her with sweeping wave. The radio was on low, streaming classical music.
Jess went to her normal seat at the back of the room. She dropped her hefty book bag, pulled her brown lunch bag out of it, and slid into the desk before she realized another girl was there. She was sitting across the room under the James Baldwin poster, her face tipped toward a book on the desk.
Jess knew her name was Danielle Newell. They were in trig together. Dani, the teacher called her. In math, she always knew the right answer although she never raised her hand. When Ms. Simmons asked a question and it was clear no one would answer, she would turn to Dani, who would answer without prompt. “That’s right,” Ms. Simmons would say, and the class seemed to groan and sigh and hiss in one shared breath. Jess admired how Dani never flinched, never looked behind her. Straight ahead or down at her book, her shoulders straight.
Ms. G said, “Dani, this is Jess. Have you two met?”
Dani raised her hand in greeting without looking up from the book. As always, she wore her dark hair in a low ponytail. An enormous pair of eyeglasses, the lenses as round as navel oranges, dwarfed her small face. She looked tiny in the desk, childlike.
Ms. G stared at Dani’s head and then looked at Jess. “I’ll be over here, grading, if you need anything. Stay as long as you like.” She turned the volume up on the radio.
“Thanks,” Jess said. She pulled out a bruised banana and a PB&J, squished on one side from the weight of her books. She opened Maus and began to read. The room filled with the strains of piano and violin, the wheeze of the heater, the shuffle of papers, a few loud sighs from Ms. G, an emphatic scratch of her pen. Out the window, fat white clouds moved fast across the blue sky, and when she leaned forward, she caught a glimpse of the snow-tipped Black Hills, of the lump of black mountain she knew now was a slag heap from the old mines. She tried to chew her sandwich without noise, pressing at her clicking jaw, which her mother blamed on the rubber bands.
After a few minutes, though, she settled into the peace. Mouth full, hunched over the desk and immersed in the comic, she glanced up to brush a strand of hair out of her eye. As she did, she caught Dani Newell staring at her, her eyes wide behind the huge frames. Jess smiled, because of those ridiculous glasses. Dani looked away, but Jess thought she saw her mouth twitch.
In March, Jess interviewed for a part-time job working weekends at Overton Orchards, the pecan orchard about a half mile from her house—an easy walk, an easier bike ride. Her mom delivered mail at the orchard and had got to talking with Iris Overton, the owner, who said she was looking for some help with answering phones and with the gift shop.
Iris was tiny, maybe five feet tall, with little tan bird arms and legs, and she kept her head shaved. Like Sinead O’Connor, but silver. Jess thought she looked a bit like a pinball, and in fact she had the energy of one. She bounced into the room wearing large rubber boots, with a rake slung over her shoulder.
After introducing herself, Iris said, “Have you met my son Paul? He’s a junior, too. Tall? Needs a haircut?” She raised her arm over her head and stood on her tiptoes.
Jess shook her head. “Not yet.”
“You might see him here sometimes, but it’s track season, so he’s out running all the live long day. Or off with his girlfriend.” Iris smiled. “Takes after his dad. Took after.” Her smile faded. “Beau died last year. Unexpectedly. His heart,” she said, placing her palm on her chest.
Jess’s throat tightened. She kept saying she didn’t care if her father lived or died, but such a picture, one with her father cut out, didn’t fit, either. She hadn’t spoken with him in three months now, though he’d called and left messages on the machine she shared with her mother. Call me, honey, I love you and miss you, beautiful girl. Blah blah blah. What did he expect her to do? Get over it? She was the daughter he didn’t choose.
Her voice hoarse, Jess said, “I’m sorry.”
Iris said, “Honey, don’t I know it. Listen, don’t worry about that. The job’s yours if you want it. Now I can’t pay much, four bucks an hour, but it’s not nothing, right? Let me guess: you’re saving for a car?”
Jess nodded.
Iris laughed. “I was the same way. Let me show you around.”
She gave Jess a tour. The main building, a cabin with heavy wood beams and a green tin roof, housed the gift shop and office. It was built in the early 1900s by her husband’s family when the mines still flourished and the town was flush. In the 1950s, when the mines went bust, the family turned to farming, which in that climate was best for crops, cattle, poultry, or dairy—or, her husband later learned, pecans, planting the first row in the 1970s when he inherited the land. Their house was off the back, connected by a covered breezeway. Beyond was a large barn, the cleaning shed, where they processed the pecans during fall harvest. Iris explained the three primary seasons: In winter, the dormant season, they planted new trees and replaced dying ones, pruned limbs, repaired the tools and cleaning sheds. In spring and summer, the growing season, they tested irrigation lines, watered, fertilized, mowed, and checked for insects and root rot. In late summer, the shells ripened, turning green and round as the pecan nut formed. Come October, the shucks would toughen and break open as the nut reached maturity. Time for harvest.
“Fall, all hell breaks loose,” Iris said. “Our busiest time. The shaking season.”