It is a groggy morning after a late night. That squeal of the train still rings in Sasha’s ears, and she sits up in bed, almost knocking her forehead against her bedroom’s low gable. That steam engine’s approach is like a strike; it might as well run on tracks straight through her ear canal.
There’s no ferry today, as Sasha only drives it three days a week. Grumbling, she rolls over to check the messages on the answering machine she keeps up in her room.
The recording crackles. “Hey Sasha, Su here. Can you cover a shift at the shop this morning? Thanks, honey, buh-bye.”
It’s a new message, but Sasha has to replay the time stamp to be sure. It’s only the most recent in a line of identical requests from Su. There’s a whole tape full of the same: Pop over at the barbecue place, Cara at the school, Freddie at the library, Tammy at the hardware store, etc. None of them are very creative in their requests, just asking for her to cover the same shifts in endless cycles. Ever since she moped back into town after the breakup, the local businesses have been scraping together hours for her to work. Along with running the ferry almost on her own, she’s got about a dozen odd jobs. Not that Sasha minds. The variety is good for her. As in, it distracts her from being the lesbian-outsider twin sister of the town’s foremost orchard keeper. And it keeps her out of Lil’s hair, out of the orchard that was somehow always Lil’s and Mom’s only, and not Sasha’s at all.
Clearing her throat, Sasha drags herself free of the bed, tapping the low slant of the roof a couple of times for good luck. The house is old, and maybe a little creepy to somebody who doesn’t know it well, but the place definitely has a soft spot for her. It was so excited when she came home that it took one look at her with its wide French windows and immediately dropped half the shingles off the front of the roof. “You look like a bald-headed old lady,” Sasha had muttered to it the next day, when she’d clambered up there to do some patching.
Crumpled jean shorts off the chair. Tank top from the drawer. Chunky sweater off the floor. The weather doesn’t know what it wants to do these days, the shadows cool and the sun blazing hot. She claws through the ends of her toffee-colored hair a few times, then gives up on it, knotting it back in a bun. “You are so beautiful, as soon as I stop looking at you, I forget what you look like,” her great-aunt told her once. Her and Lil’s faces are similar, but Sasha’s features are more catalog-girl generic, which means people usually feel a little more comfortable looking at her. Then they mistake her for the friendly sister, next to Lil, who stomped her way through high school with rips in her jeans and a silver barbell piercing her tongue. But, to be honest, neither of them is too friendly.
She grabs her camera bag on the way out of her room, slinging the strap over her shoulder. Is it likely she’ll see anything worth shooting in a shift stocking shelves at the grocery? No. But she never regrets hauling her equipment around, just in case. It’ll only be a few more rolls of film, and she’ll have finally gotten somewhere with this project. She’d definitely be getting close to something. Just porting her camera around feels like grasping hold of her other self, her truer self: a cool, gay, slightly emotionally messy photographer in the big city. And how pathetic it feels to be in the xth month since her temporary move home, Sasha prefers to ignore.
Lil is coming in the front door just as Sasha clatters down the creaky old steps. A warm fall breeze is roving through the house, and Sasha can smell the fireplace, even though they haven’t lit it yet this year.
Lil is wearing clunky boots and a beat-up leather jacket over shorts and a ratty tank top. Her shaggy morning hair is half-caught in her collar. One of the biggest shocks coming home, honestly, had been Lil’s hair, which used to grow down her back, thick and glinting like a night river. She’s chopped it short, and it makes her dark eyes wider, giving her a soft effect—if you don’t know any better. No matter what she alters, there are parts of Lil that will never change. The way she walks into a room and men surreptitiously wipe their faces and straighten their ties. The way she can hold a grudge as stubborn and long as the trees. The way she will take any tool—beauty, a hacksaw, an old tin can, a sister—and find a way to wring usefulness out of it. She is a bottle of strong spirits; time will only distill her.
Lil offers her a couple of pecans, the crinkle of broken shells still caught between her fingers. A snack of fresh sunshine and sweet earth expertly cracked between her knuckles and her palm. “Heading out?”
“Yeah.” Sasha scoops the warm pecans from Lil’s palm and pops them in her mouth. “Did you see Su at the store? She left me a message to cover.”
“No. I left a note though. If you’re stocking, she’s low on candy.” Lil rests her shoulder against the doorframe. Sasha chews, the pecan flavors falling one over another: the bitter tang of flesh, the warm savory nut, a honeyed sweetness. Lil goes on, “I saw Theon.”
Sasha frowns, then—“Ouch.” A fragment of pecan shell stabs her in the gum and she spits it into her palm. The tender flavor of the nuts mixes strangely with a coppery dash of her own blood. “That ass is still hanging around town? Is he on the clock with somebody for this harassment?”
“He didn’t even make me a new offer. I wouldn’t have taken it, but the last number he gave us was insulting.” Lil scatters husk bits on the porch through the open front door. “So keep an eye out today. He might sniff around you too.”
Sasha grimaces. “He’s such a creep.” He hasn’t approached Sasha yet; he seems keenly aware of whose orchard it is, who belongs here and who doesn’t. Something in that realization stings, and Sasha moves on. “I might go out to the Keller Orchard later.”
Lil nods, a line furrowed between her eyebrows, a familiar twist of sympathy and probably a little judgment. It’s hard to tell with Lil, the line where her hurt turns to anger. “Nice old people. I think they moved out to Nashville. They told everyone it was to be near their youngest, Caleb, but Mrs. Keller confided in me that it’s because they couldn’t afford the place anymore. She cried so hard the day they left.”
It’s the kind of everyday tragedy that offers no easy response. Sasha finds herself just wincing, humming vaguely. These miserable, dime-a-dozen pains built into this land—Sasha has a hard rind against them. Can Lil’s heart really afford to dwell and break and rage over every departure? Sasha’s heart, burdened with other sorrows, cannot. “Well…it’s the next spot on Dale’s list.” One of her million or so half-done projects since coming home has been going out with Dale, the local land surveyor, to all the moldering properties that frame the town for appraisals. Lately, he’s been sending her out on her own to get photos for him. Sasha takes a leap: “Want me to pick you up on the way over there?”
Lil looks tempted and a little amused at first—she’s never been all that good with a camera, though she was once one of Sasha’s very first, most amateur subjects. But her smile fades as quickly as it’s born. “Better not. There’s a broken bit of fence near the gate, and I think the shaker is breaking down. There’s so much to do…” she trails off.
“Right. No, I know.” Sasha feels a pang of guilt at even posing the invitation and thus reminding Lil how overwhelmed she is. At the same time, Sasha hasn’t worked in the orchard in years. It’s so fully Lil’s space; she suffuses it like a perfume until you can’t walk among the trees without feeling her presence. Sasha is never invited out there, and she never quite volunteers either. If Lil wants the help, she’ll ask, won’t she?
It hasn’t always felt this way. When they were children, Lil would sneak into Sasha’s room at night, and they’d become nothing but voices, twin whispers and muffled laughter in the dark.
But Lil has been a little more stubborn and solitary since Sasha left for New York. Sometimes Sasha hears her murmur in her sleep from her bedroom a floor up and wonders what she won’t say while awake.
“Let me know if you see him,” Lil says after a pause, eyes finding Sasha’s, a key to a lock. Or anything else out there, she adds silently.
Sasha nods. “You got it.”
Lil wanders into the kitchen. There’s a distant sound: a stream of water washing into the coffeepot’s echo chamber.
Sasha lingers there, listening for another word from her sister, just long enough to catch the machine’s classic burble as it starts brewing. Then she shoulders her camera bag and sets off down the road in the only direction that it now runs: toward town. The other way goes past another property or two before it hits the CLOSED sign and the silent bulldozers beyond. She scuffs up dust walking on the shoulder even though a car hasn’t passed the house since she woke up. She passes the familiar neighbors: the Preston Orchard, the kudzu-covered columns of the old Devereau house that has been turned into at least three apartments now. Across the road, there’s—
Odd. Sasha pauses there, her bare ankles tickling in the dust. There’s a light on in Honeysuckle House. The Finch house. It’s crumbly redbrick, one of the finer houses in the town, and maybe the oldest. The Finches were town founders, which means they were a poor hick family somewhere else who got here when the getting was good. Mayor Finch retired the year after Sasha moved away, but people were always hoping his son, Jason, would step up. That was before, though. Nobody’s been living there since Uncle Russ had to go to hospice.
She can see into the old parlor with its stuffy upholstery and heavy curtains. She used to tag along here with Lil when Jason’s parents weren’t around, gawking at its museum interior, at the jeweled candies glittering in crystal dishes. Perhaps those sweets are still waiting in there, tropical fruit colors long desiccated, collecting dust.
The light left on inside flickers.
Frowning, Sasha pulls out her camera and snaps a picture.
“Come on. I don’t expect you to like it, but I do expect you to cooperate,” Lil murmurs, stroking the rough, healthy bark of a tree clamped in her beat-up shaker. The machine is missing a few teeth, but she hopes she can get one more season out of it. Just one more. Nothing but a handful of hulls, and a shower of leaves wants to fall from the tree. Lil switches off the shaker and retrieves her favorite pole, shaking it in the canopies instead.
It’s a tentative noon, the heat beginning to fade like an old letter this time of year, and the ache in her back is probably going to get worse. But the harvest isn’t stopping, and she needs every good harvest she can get.
Lil was taught the history at the heart of her work by older keepers. Before a technique for their propagation was invented by a man named Antoine, a gardener enslaved in Louisiana, pecan trees naturally flourished all along the rivers. Every fall, they sustained the first communities that called the land home—and were companions to them, offering shade and nourishment when they were forced to walk through strange, unknown country.
Trees are as unpredictable as any other living thing. Kudzu, aphids or rosette, drought or scab: these could kill a harvest. But there wasn’t always a reason. Some years they produce multitudes, and suddenly, they stop. For years at a time even good living trees might go dormant for unknown reasons.
Lil has her own ideas: healthy orchards dry up when good keepers must leave, replaced by indifferent ones.
A faithful keeper can spend decades acquainting herself with each individual tree. The health of its branches. How many decades it has stood; how many more it might last, long after its caretaker is gone. Used to care, suddenly deprived, maybe it takes time for land to remember it is meant to be wild. She’s seen it often enough. Beyond the old Cooper place, beyond the abandoned Winston trees, lies anonymity. The silence, the unmoored storylessness of real poverty. The houses out there are abandoned. Broken-down trucks and old farm equipment bake like dinosaur bones in parched grass. The pecan trees out there don’t produce so much as a blossom, and they stoop low, their bare branches poised in protective barricades. The Coopers are gone; the Winstons haven’t produced in years. The Kellers now too, their land left to fester.
But row by row, species by species, Lil’s trees are flush this year with healthy pecans. Each morning when she checks the nets that lie below the trees, they are teeming with ripe nuts. It’s certainly a mast fruiting, plentiful and rich. The husks are smooth all over, no cracks, and the healthy ones fall onto the grass with the lightest prod of her pole. The wonder of it still fills her.
Lil pauses halfway through topping off another bag and braces her hands on the small of her back, feeling her stiff muscles ache as she breathes in the sweetness of pecans all around. It’s fine. She’ll rest when the harvest is over.
Lil has lost count of how many times she’s promised herself that she’ll rest later. A day of rest would be a blessing, nothing to do but walk around with Sasha, snapping pictures. When Sasha first returned, Lil believed it would be a new start, the two of them bearing the burdens of the family land together. Sasha’s first night back in the house, Lil enjoyed the best sleep of her life, her soul shored up with the presence of her sister sleeping in their old room. Only Sasha doesn’t ever want to stay. In a way it’s like she never came back at all. She spends her days doing odd jobs for everyone in town. Everyone except Lil. Sasha shows no interest in the orchard’s upkeep, in Lil’s struggle to stay afloat.
It’s a stone in her shoe, a constant, quiet ache. But Lil is too sharp even at the best of times, too prone to passion, and Sasha too untethered. In an argument, Sasha won’t fight. She’ll flee. At least, she reminds herself, Sasha is here. That’s all she needs.
It has to be.
The wind shifts, the leaves rustling in an idle gossip. There’s a different stir in the air now, and Lil glances back at the house—
“Hey!” He’s standing on Lil’s back patio, waving broadly.
Jason is in the orchard.
Even though he shouldn’t be there, hasn’t been there in years, he’s impossible to mistake; no one in the town, or maybe the world, is as blond as he is. In summer, his hair brightens to the color of a crisp lemon. It’s like he absorbs energy straight from the sun, and there on her porch, he glows with it. Now he’s here, cool and breezy in his linen pants and boat shoes.
All at once, everything inside of her flares at his sheer audacity. Lil throws down her pole and stomps across her ground. How had she not felt him here until the moment he called? It’s unsettling. She should have known the instant he crossed her borders. “‘Hey’? That’s what you have to say to me? ‘Hey’?”
At least Jason has the decency to cringe. “Surprise,” he tries. The waving hand now pushes into his hair. “I’m kinda glad you, uh, dropped your weapon back there.”
“Ballsy of you to come here without an invitation.” Though he had one once, hadn’t he, the most honest part of her whispers. “What do you want, Finch?”
Jason snorts, bends his head. Shaking it, a stubborn smile still hanging on, he seems about to make some classic retort (never very clever, that last word he always wants to claim), but he doesn’t speak. Only keeps shaking and shaking his head like that, looking down at the graying and thirsty wood of the back porch. There’s something awful and endless about that motion, like he might never stop, like a door swinging free on a loose hinge. Finally he looks at her again, and his dark, coffee-bean eyes are glassy. “Uncle Russ died,” he says, in a cracked teenage-boy voice she hasn’t heard in a long time.
Lil gasps through the ache that blooms in her chest. Uncle Russ was Mayor Finch’s quirky bachelor brother. By far the jolliest family member, Russ was known to sleep outside with his vegetable plants if they were ever struck with blight. He raised the best tomatoes in the county and made his tobacco money off the miracle potions he whipped up for other people’s gardens. He’d moved into Honeysuckle House to take over the family land after Mayor Finch died and Jason’s mom relocated to Mobile. “When?” Lil asks.
Jason swallows, gaze escaping quickly out toward the orchard. “Early yesterday morning.” Uncle Russ had been in hospice for more than a month—long enough that everybody had gotten a little comfortable; nobody believed he might really die. The look on Jason’s face makes it clear he still can’t imagine it. “Took me all day to get down here from Durham.”
“I’m sorry.” Russ used to invite her to sit with him whenever she picked up some elixir or other for the trees. They’d kick their feet up on the porch, watching for fireflies and sipping sweet tea that tasted like golden sunshine, and she hadn’t even known—
Lil tries to breathe normally. “Come inside if you want.”
On closer inspection, Jason’s New-England casual is rumpled, face worn from travel—and older too, different in indecipherable ways. He stands in her kitchen, fiddling with the novelty salt and pepper shakers: two swans, their necks intertwined. “I knew you wouldn’t want to see me,” he admits. “But I—uh. I didn’t want you to hear about Russ from somebody else. And I—” His voice stutters out. His hands are shaking. “That house, Lil. God. It’s so quiet in there.”
That’s what happens when people leave. Lil doesn’t say it. For once, she can hold her tongue. She lets her thoughts, her anger, turn cool and distant. Like the pond. “Sit down.” Lil washes dirt and sweat off her hands.
“I just talked to him a few days ago.” Jason eases into the chair as if he’s afraid it will shatter under him. “He was doing well.”
She fills the kettle, sets it to boil on the gas stovetop where Mom used to make countless meals; where Sasha perfected the few Puerto Rican recipes learned from their father in the brief time they spent with him; where Lil has cried, late at night—the only time she will let herself feel the weight of solitude and work. The low hiss fills the kitchen as she stuffs dried lavender into a teapot and braces her hands on the counter, which is still slightly crumby from her morning toast. She doesn’t know what to say.
Jason traces a faded paisley in the pattern of the tablecloth. He doesn’t know how to be still. “He was really tough,” he says finally. “Guess everybody around here is.”
“We have to be,” she replies and pours boiling water over the lavender, the smell wafting up around her.
A pause. She fiddles. Russ’s face floats behind her eyes and she swallows back tears. She was never good at grieving in front of other people. Even when Mom died, Lil couldn’t shed tears at the funeral. Only after, when she was alone, did she let herself…
When she turns back with the mugs, Jason is hunched over the table in what used to be his chair, resting his forehead in his palm. She sets one mug down and retreats to the counter.
“I know—” She expected it to be difficult to say, like coughing up a knife. But in the face of his pain, her old resentments begin to feel small. “I know he was really proud of you. Loved bragging about you. Any time you called him, everyone else in town heard all about it.”
Jason squeezes his lips together like she’s struck him. The mug, a hand-painted ceramic made by Sasha’s first real girlfriend, is probably burning his hands. “Russ was the only Finch I could ever really talk to,” he manages. “He always said he’d come up to see me in Durham but—his health just wasn’t…” He loses his place again and swiftly washes the thought down with boiling tea. “Um—ow.” The bracing punch of a burned tongue summons a sort of choked laugh. Apparently recovering, he takes a hard pivot. “I heard Sasha’s back?”
Lil keeps lingering at the counter. “Who’d you hear that from?”
She can feel his eyes on her back now. “Lou.” Lou, who runs the junk shop and brews his own eyebrow-sizzling variety of moonshine, was Uncle Russ’s best friend. “He’s always had a soft spot for her.”
Lil twists around to face him. He still has a tiny bump in the cartilage of his nose; she remembers the football that put the kink there. She sips her tea for strength. “I’ll tell her you say hi. Or you can find her somewhere around town. She’s usually out.” A polite person would invite him for dinner, but Lil has never been accused of politeness.
“Okay.” Jason is watching her again, maybe discovering those hard-to-define differences in her face too. He scoffs quietly. “You still hate me, don’t you?” He stands up to peer at her, and even though he hasn’t really made a move toward her, he’s still too close. “Hey. I don’t want bad blood with you. You know how I—”
I don’t hate you, she longs to say, almost does, has to swallow it back.
“I’m not having that fight with you again,” Lil replies. She puts down her mug and comes toward him. “Not today. For Russ. Also not ever, and that’s because of you.”
They glare at one another for a long moment. Then Jason takes a step back. “Understood,” he says tightly. “Then I’ll see you around, Lil.” He turns to go, head ducked, and he doesn’t look back.
“Sure,” she relents. She doesn’t breathe right until he’s gone and the screen door has bumped closed. She slumps against the counter, and at the faintest jostle, a couple of fresh, healthy pecans spill from the bowl she keeps there.