“Shut up,” she said, sighing as he touched her cheek. “Don’t tell me who I love.”
He slid his hand to her neck, leaned down, and kissed her forehead. “Me,” he said.
“No. I can’t love you.”
“Can’t, or don’t?”
She pulled her face away from his hand. She looked over his shoulder, through the trees toward the orchard office, catching a glimpse of the twinkle lights. “I have to go,” she said.
“Please stay.” His breath was warm on her forehead, and that traitorous heat snuck in, coiled in her belly. She wanted to wrap her legs around him, let him push her up against the tree, let the bark chafe her jacket and scalp. She wanted to do with him what she did with that sweet boy in the night house. Rutting, she thought, and her whole body flushed.
She pushed his chest and stepped around him. “Go home to your daughter, Adam. To your wife. To your fucking family. You love them.”
“Jess—”
“Shut up!” She pulled her hat lower and covered her ears. She ran through the trees to the car, hands to ears, blocking out his voice behind her. In the driver’s seat, she fumbled with the keys, her fingers numb. All of her, numb, frozen with fear.
Who, What, Where, When
Sixteen feet up a ladder, Paul Overton scraped dried paint off the fascia boards of the orchard’s cleaning shed. The dry flakes fluttered down, dusting the tops of his boots and the ladder rungs and the gallon of Old Forest Green at the bottom. The extension ladder, propped at a steep vertical pitch, snapped against the roof like a sail in sharp wind with each jerk of his arm. He knew better. His father had taught him how to set a ladder, but these days he was having trouble remembering what day it was. Who, What, Where, When, Why, How: the journalist’s credo. Get it in the lede, tight, no frills, and now fuck all if he couldn’t do it for himself. Who? Who knew anymore. What? Good question. He couldn’t remember what was on the grocery list or what he was about to say in the middle of a sentence or what bills were due when. He couldn’t remember what to eat, when to sleep, when to go to work, where he was when he woke up or how he got there or why he couldn’t stop the ball of rage expanding in his stomach.
Instead, his head was cluttered with images. He kept seeing Caryn: how she rose earlier and earlier in the weeks before she couldn’t get out of bed at all; he’d find her in the kitchen, lit by the streetlight, sheet creases in her cheek. “I don’t want to sleep,” she’d say, staring out the window, at the sun on the cusp of rising. “I don’t want to miss any more of it.” (Why: Because she was dying, at motherfucking thirty-four years of age.) He kept seeing Sean on that bike. (When: Two days ago, four months after they buried his mother.) The boy swerved toward the curb at the same moment Paul realized he’d fallen too far behind to grab him (Why: Because he’d been lost in thinking about his late wife), and then Sean was off the curb and into the street, and Paul was shouting and running faster than he’d ever run. He heard the squeal of brakes as he flung himself toward the bike and knocked Sean to the pavement. Both of them lay on the hot street, the bumper of a car above Paul’s shoulder, Paul’s left wrist ballooning and Sean with a scraped elbow and knee.
And so Paul had brought his boy—and himself—home, to figure out what to do next. Stay in Phoenix? Sell the house? Donate her clothes? And fuck all if now he hadn’t added a film reel of his childhood to the images clogging his mind: his father carrying this aluminum ladder around the orchard, leaning it on a pecan trunk and then climbing high into the branches. His mother, her cloud of hair shaved into the sink the week after his father’s funeral. Dani Newell beneath him, her skirt up around her waist. Jess Winters, her hands flailing. And now, now, the news about the bones. He didn’t think he could take one more picture in his head. He scraped until he was out of breath and had to grab the roof with his injured hand to keep from flying backward.
Paul rested his forearms on the roof and took a sip of coffee from the mug he’d set on the attached paint tray. He tried to catch his breath. The morning air was still cool, a bit humid, rich with the smell of dirt and citrusy tang of the pecan trees. At home in Phoenix, it’d be well over 90 degrees. He’d grown to love the wild, never-ending summer heat, when it was 100 degrees at midnight when he stepped out of the newspaper office after filing a breaking story. He’d go running at that late hour—the best way to get rid of any simmering anger, which had over the years led him to throw and break tools, to kick and punch through drywall, until Caryn got him to see a counselor. After his run, he’d stop to stretch, the sidewalk still hot under his fingers, and then he’d go home to his wife and baby son. He’d step inside, and except for the glow of a nightlight in the hall bath, all was dark, the windows blocked with blackout curtains to help with the heat and with Caryn’s bouts of insomnia. A silence like the orchard, solemn and protected among the trees. He found his way to them with his eyes closed. “Where are you?” Caryn would say, flinging out her arm from the sheets, and he’d say, “I’m right here.” And he would think of another sense of right: restored, safe, healthy. Yes, he’d think, touching his wife’s cheek. He was right, here.
He craned his neck and looked at the symmetrical rows of trees, shaggy now with their tooth-edged leaflets and bent with the weight of the ripening pecans. Paul used to run inside those trees, up and down, for miles. He’d been assured by the linearity, the routine in a world upended by his father’s sudden death. In these days he’d been home, he’d been running them in the early mornings, taking the eastern rows to the river path on the far end. He’d then loop the town, waving to Stevie Prentiss at the old lake and to the woman who walked in the bright green visor and to Angie Juarez on her way to the shop, but otherwise keeping his head down.
Though he had yet to admit it, he knew why he had come. This visit was more than a visit. He was trying this on for him and Sean, seeing if he could be here again, if he could move from journalist to pecan orchard owner, from city to town, from his future to his past. His mother told him he was welcome to stay as long as he needed. She told him she could help with Sean. She said, “This is your home, son.” But was it? He couldn’t explain the relief he felt (and guilt for that relief) away from here. He couldn’t tell her he’d only felt able to make a family once he’d left this place where everything had fallen apart. Nothing was right, here. Of course, now the family he made had fallen apart too. Caryn was gone, and Paul had no choice but to change. Who: a widower, a father of a four-year-old boy.