“Okay.”
“You didn’t think I’d let you molder down there for the next twenty years, did you?” Black says. “You didn’t think you’d be done with this forever?”
GLORIA
There’s a peach tree in her backyard, stunted and small. It never bears any fruit, because the climate in Denver isn’t right for it—the summers are too short and never get hot enough, the winters are far too cold. The soil is too sandy and rocky. She sometimes wonders who planted the tree to begin with, what hopeful person flipped through a Burpee catalog and ran their finger along the slick pages and stopped on a peach tree, already imagining the taste of the fruit, the way the juice would explode from the flesh at the first bite and run down their arm, dripping all the way to their elbow. And then that tree came in a brown box, the roots wrapped up in a burlap sack, and it was planted in the backyard, in the sunniest corner, but it only grew a little every year, twisting and bending like an old man, and nothing ever bloomed on those scrawny twigs. And there it still is, right outside the dining-room window, bare branches shaking in the wind. She’s thought about having it cut down, clearing that spot and having a concrete pad poured, where she could put out some nice lawn furniture in the summer, but she never seems to get around to it. It’s not as if her schedule is crammed full, but she forgets the tree, doesn’t think about it again until a time like this, when the cold is creeping in through the cracks around the windows and the peaks of the mountains are covered in snow.
She’s been in this house for the last seven years, creeping around like a mouse, hoping that no one in the neighborhood would recognize her, make the connection, and so far she’s been lucky. It would be easier to pick up and move to another town where Jacky wasn’t much more than a story on the evening news, a city where people didn’t accuse her of being some kind of dragon lady, and she’d tried to move, rented a house in California after Jacky was sentenced, drove out caravan-style behind the moving truck, through the mountains and desert and into a part of California that was so green it made her eyes hurt. The house she’d rented had a pool shaped like a kidney bean in the back, and the privacy fence was covered in a creeping bush that blossomed in great clouds of pink. It was all so quaint and normal, and no one recognized her; she never once heard someone mention Jacky’s name—Jacky’s case was national news, she still sometimes saw it mentioned, even so many miles away, but it wasn’t as bad, and California had plenty of its own problems.