26

It is after one in the morning when Chase pulls the T-bird around to the back of my house and parks by the steps. Dad’s two pickups are both there. He’s home.

“You okay?” Chase asks.

“I’m not the one who got beat up,” I say.

He runs his fingers along the back of my neck. “I mean about being back home.”

I look over at him. “I don’t know. A lot’s going to depend on my dad, I guess.”

I turn toward the house, taking in the porch, the back door, the wicker rocker, and I feel as if I’ve been away for a hundred years.

“Why’d you do it?” I ask. I don’t have to explain. He knows I’m talking about him going against the Klan, against his dad.

He shrugs. “They were going after Gator. You know? And making trouble for the pickers. It wasn’t right.”

“You could’ve stayed out of it.”

Chase doesn’t say anything for a while. Maybe he’s wishing he had looked the other way. There have been times when I’ve wanted to do that myself. Times when I did. Although it shames me to admit it.

When Chase turns to me, he has the strangest expression on his face. He leans over and pulls me into his arms. “Let’s take off someplace,” he whispers in my ear. “Leave good old Malevolence and never look back.”

“Benevolence,” I say, even though I know he said it wrong on purpose.

“Yeah, right. So are you in?”

I rub my cheek gently along the side of his face that doesn’t have the gash or swollen eye, feeling his soft lips against my ear. And for one brief moment I almost say yes. I am just so happy to be with him again. But then I think about Delia and Gator and Rosemary. I think about Travis Waite still out there walking around, a free man.

“I can’t leave here,” I tell him.

“And I can’t stay,” he says.

I stare at him. I don’t believe what I’m hearing.

“You know what’ll happen if I stay here. Especially after last night. It’s not safe for you either. But at least your dad will watch out for you. It’s different with me and my dad. And there’s Willy. The Klan. They’ll make my life a living hell, if they don’t kill me first.”

His lips brush my ear. “I’m sorry, Dove.”

We hold each other. The warmth from his body floods through my own. I want to keep holding on to him forever.

“You’re going to graduate in a few weeks. You’ve got finals coming up. You can’t just throw all that away,” I tell him. Or me—you can’t throw me away either, I want to say. But I don’t. I lay my head on his chest.

“I’ll figure something out. Maybe I can take the exams through a proctor at another school.”

“Where will you go?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know. California, maybe. I know a little about growing oranges. Maybe I can get a job.” He lifts a strand of my wild hair and tucks it behind my ear.

“California!” I can’t believe he’s going to just up and leave. “Chase, don’t do this, okay? Please don’t.”

Chase gives me a smile full of sadness.

“There’s got to be another way. Maybe you could find a place of your own over in the next county. Get a job or something.” I curl up close to him. “I can’t do this all by myself,” I whisper. And I know he understands what I mean.

He kisses the top of my head. “I’ll think about it, okay? Maybe I can stay with a friend of mine over at Florida Southern for a while.”

Florida Southern is only a few miles from here, so I’m starting to feel a little more hopeful when Chase suddenly leans across me and opens the passenger door.

When I don’t move, he says, “I have to go, Dove. They’re probably already out looking for me. I promise I’ll call you as soon as I figure out where I’ll be staying.”

“Someplace not too far from here,” I say as I climb out of the car. “Okay?”

He gives me that lazy lopsided grin of his and shakes his head. “You make me crazy.”

I stand on our back porch, watching his T-bird head down the dirt road. “I love you too,” I whisper to the cloud of dust rising from his rear tires.

I sit in the rocker on the back porch for the next few hours, feeling as if I am the only person left on the planet. After a while a soft orange glow spreads along the horizon. I take off toward the groves.

I am halfway to the first row of Valencia trees when I hear the back screen door slam shut. Dad stands on the porch holding a mug of coffee in one hand. He looks over at me. I stop walking and wait for him.

He comes up beside me. “Delia phoned a few minutes ago. She told me what happened last night.”

I don’t say anything.

“I’m sorry, Dove. Maybe if I had been there I might have been able to stop them.” Dad takes a swallow of his coffee and we start walking again.

I want to say, But you weren’t. So it happened. Instead, I give him a shrug. “It’s good you weren’t there,” I tell him. “I mean, I’m glad you weren’t.”

“How you holding up?”

“Fine.” I start walking faster. Dad falls into step beside me.

“Chase okay?”

“Yes. No thanks to your friends.” I don’t tell him that Chase is thinking about leaving town. I can’t bring myself to talk about that right now.

“How could you join the Klan?” I ask. “How could you do that?”

Dad looks away. “It’s complicated,” he says.

“Complicated? The Klan is about hate, Dad. You don’t seem like a hateful person to me.”

“It’s not like that, Dove. Most of the folks in these parts, they’re law-abiding, churchgoing family men. They don’t want trouble,” he says. “It’s just lately that things have been getting out of hand. I went to a few of their meetings so I could try to talk them out of this business with Gator, but Travis and Jacob weren’t having any of it. They were worried about the pickers organizing. They figured if they made an example of Gator, the others would back down. I never thought—” He takes a swallow of coffee. He doesn’t finish that sentence.

I think about all the trucks and cars at Eli’s last night, and how there were only a few left by the time they got to Spudder’s. I want to tell my dad that God-fearing, law-abiding folks don’t let the things that went on last night happen. They try to stop them. They don’t look the other way. But I don’t have any right to be preaching to my dad, not after that day in front of the movie theater. I have to trust that he will figure this out on his own. Maybe he already has.

“Delia say how Gator’s doing?” I ask him.

“Holding his own.” Dad rubs his eyes like he’s got a bad headache. “I tried to get her to take him to the emergency room. I said I’d help her, but she doesn’t want to move him.”

“Delia told me you called her to warn her that Travis and them had Gator,” I tell him.

Dad nods. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to. I know in my heart he’s trying to make amends.

We don’t talk for a while. We just walk down the road and try to keep from sinking in the softer sand.

There are still a lot of oranges on the trees. Usually most of the picking is done by now. But the slowdowns have put everything behind schedule. I don’t expect any of the pickers to show up this morning. Not after what happened last night. The fruit will probably hang on the trees until it rots.

Dad reaches for an orange. He bounces it up and down in his hand a few times. “Ever hear of the golden apples guarded by the Hesperides? The ones Hercules stole?” He hands me the orange.

I shake my head. “I don’t think so.” I roll the orange back and forth in my palms. I like the feel of the thick, coarse skin in my hands.

“They were oranges. That’s what they called oranges, golden apples. It was the fruit of the gods, the fruit of kings and emperors. It was centuries before everyday folks ever tasted one of these. Now anybody can walk into a supermarket and buy himself a can of frozen juice from golden apples, nectar that once only passed the lips of the gods.”

I think about this for a minute. “It seems to me when the Lord made orange trees, He intended the fruit to be for everybody in the first place. And it’s a good thing it worked out that way,” I tell him. “Otherwise you’d be out of business.”

Dad burps a little surprised chuckle. “You’re right.” His dimples deepen. A sight I haven’t seen in weeks. It about snaps my heart in two. From the look of things, he is going to be out of business anyway.

I dig a hole in the orange with my thumb, peel it about halfway, and squeeze the juice into my mouth.

Dad looks over at the sunrise. “I fired Travis,” he says.

“I heard.”

“I’m going over to Winter Hill this morning, see if I can’t hire some pickers to help finish up the season.”

“Most of the crew leaders got their citrus pickers lined up when the season started. Probably only stoop laborers are left over there now,” I say. “Those folks only pick row crops. They don’t know anything about picking fruit. They could damage the crop without somebody overseeing them.”

“I can train ’em,” Dad says. “And oversee them. At least until I can find a decent crew leader.”

“Decent in what way?”

We’ve come to an open crossroad in the groves where the produce trucks travel. The dirt is packed down harder here. “Somebody who’ll treat the pickers fair,” he says. He looks over at me. “You want the job?”

I can’t be sure if he’s teasing me or not. But then he grins, and I know he’s just pulling my leg. “I’ll help with the interviewing,” I tell him.

He nods. “Fair enough.”

“There’s always Travis’s crew,” I say. “They won’t work for him now, which means they’re all out of a job.”

“I don’t think they’ll want to work for me either.”

I shrug. “Maybe if you get a good crew boss for them.” In the back of my mind I’m thinking maybe Eli would like the job. Or maybe Gator, if he decides to stay around here.

We walk a little farther, not saying much. Overhead, the unpicked oranges glow like bright orange lightbulbs in the morning sun.

“Last night—none of that would have happened if I’d done something about Travis years ago. I just didn’t see it.” Dad stops walking to finish the rest of his coffee. “You grow up with somebody, you see them the way you always have. Travis was a hell-raiser. But I never thought he was dangerous—that he’d—” Dad shakes his head. “I thought it was an accident—But even if it was, we shouldn’t have covered for him.”

“It was a hit-and-run,” I remind him.

Dad waves his hand back and forth. “I know. I know that.”

“You going to turn him in?”

Dad lets out a little snort. “I swear you get more like your mother every day.” He smiles and looks away when he says this, like some memory is lighting him up inside. When he turns back to me, he says, “You never give up, do you?”

“No.”

“That’s my girl.”

“Well, are you?”

“I don’t know, Dove. There’s other folks to consider.”

I know he’s thinking about Travis and the Klan and what they might do. Not to him, but to me. I put my hand on Dad’s shoulder. It’s not like I’ve forgotten about the things he has done—or didn’t do. I can tell he’s feeling bad about some of those things. Like me, I figure he’s got his own “Adequate of Hell” to live with.

“You’re right, there’s other folks to consider,” I say, knowing darn good and well we aren’t talking about the same people.