Tink woke up the next day pretty excited about the easy life in the cherry-stand business. And so it was a real disappointment when Abel got the harvester to work and they spent the next two days working their butts off in the orchard instead.
But then the harvester started smoking again on the morning of the third day and finally broke down before lunch. Tink felt bad being so happy when Abel looked so upset.
It was great to be in the truck with air-conditioning and a radio and not working in the orchard with the bees and the loud shaker. But the best part was the money. Two stands down and she had another ten bucks in her pocket.
DeeDee used to write her checks every year on her birthday. A dollar for every year she was alive. DeeDee would give her other money, too, like a bunch of change to get candy at the CVS on the corner. But a pocket full of quarters didn’t feel anything like the fat roll of ones.
The crunch of car tires over gravel announced the arrival of another customer at the stand by the beach, and Tink grabbed a bag of cherries so she could run it over to where the blue sedan idled a few feet from the stand.
But Mom put a hand on her shoulder, and when Tink tried to shrug it off, she held on tight. Tink glared up at her, only to catch her staring at the blue car. She’d gone real pale. Totally white.
Tink looked back over at the car. It had Missouri license plates, and the sunlight hit the windshield just right so they couldn’t see who was driving.
Tink’s stomach went cold and her head got fuzzy.
Was it him?
Just then a woman in a green dress stepped out of the driver’s-side door. “Do you have any cherries left?” she shouted over the seagulls.
Mom released Tink’s shoulder. “Sure,” she said with a wobbly kind of chuckle, and Tink walked over, feeling like she suddenly had to go to the bathroom. Bad.
They went to the bakery next, and Swafiya had, like, seven million cherry things happening in her kitchen, including something called chutney that she made Mom try. Mom didn’t like it even though she said she did. For such a liar she was actually pretty bad at it.
Tink crossed her legs and made a wide-eyed I-need-to-go-pee expression to her mom, who caught on pretty quick.
“Can Jenny use the bathroom?”
Right. She was Jenny here. She hated that name.
“Sure. Of course.” Swafiya was wearing a pretty pink hijab today, but when she turned toward Tink to let her into the bathroom or whatever, her apron looked like it was covered in blood. Tink swallowed and stepped back.
Swafiya stopped, too. “You...?” She looked over at Mom. “You all right?”
“It’s from the cherries,” Mom said to Tink. “It’s just juice.”
Yeah. Right. Of course. Tink knew that. Cherries. For such little things, they sure bled a lot.
Sometimes she remembered Daniel on the floor of the hotel room, even when she didn’t want to. His blood hadn’t looked anything like that fake stuff in the old horror movies.
“Here,” Swafiya said, and quickly turned on a light in the tiny bathroom between the kitchen and the store part of the bakery.
Tink shut the door and then locked it. She stared at herself in the mirror and wondered what she would even say to Mom, if she did talk to her.
They used to talk all the time, nonstop. DeeDee would get angry and tell them to shut up. But it just seemed like there was so much she wanted to tell her mom—about the new kid in her class with braces and Mr. Borsen’s cat with one eye and that dream she’d had where they’d been flying and the stars got tangled in their hair.
Now, she opened her mouth and...there was nothing there.
Mom and Swafiya chatted on the other side of the door, and Tink could hear Swafiya say that once a year, for about three weeks, she went all in on cherries and sold things in bakeries all over the state and on the internet.
“Hey, Swafiya—” a man’s voice said.
Tink froze in the bathroom. She even stopped peeing.
“Hope, this is my husband, Matt,” she heard Swafiya say.
Tink finished, pulled up her pants and crept up to the door. Carefully, not making a sound, she unlocked it and slowly eased it open just a tiny crack.
Mom got real mad about eavesdropping, but Tink had survived her being mad before. And sometimes a little eavesdropping was the only way to find out what was going on.
“Nice to meet you, Matt. Sorry,” Mom said, talking to a tall man with salt-and-pepper hair and glasses, lifting the things she was carrying in her arms as a reason not to shake his hand. Mom was good at that, not touching people she didn’t want to touch.
“No problem.” Matt gave her a funny wave. He seemed like a nice guy, but that was how the not-nice guys got you. Daniel had seemed nice, too. Don’t trust him, Mom. “Nice to meet you, too.”
“She’s delivering cherries,” Swafiya said. “And Matt is taking some time off work to deliver pies. There’s a joke in there somewhere but I can’t think of it.”
“What do you do when you’re not delivering pies?” Mom asked. She was real chatty today. Mom got chatty when she was nervous. That blue car had rattled them both.
“I’m a lawyer,” Matt said. “Family law, but in a town this size you end up doing a lot of things.”
“Family law?”
“Yeah, wills and inheritance. A little real estate. Some custody stuff.”
“Orders of protection,” Swafiya said.
Mom pushed her glasses up high on her face.
“Yep,” Matt said slowly. “I do a lot of that.”
“Just making sure women are protected legally from people who would hurt them,” Swafiya said.
“I know what an order of protection is,” Mom said, sharp. If Tink talked to someone like that Mom would say she was being rude.
Orders of protection. Tink liked the way that sounded. Serious and for real.
The conversation petered out and Matt cleared his throat. “So, honey, have I got everything you need me to take?”
“Yep!” Swafiya said. She clapped her hands and flour puffed off them.
“Then I’m off,” Matt said. He gave Swafiya a kiss on the cheek, waved goodbye to Mom and walked out of the room past the bathroom.
When Tink came out, Swafiya was packaging a shimmering loaf of bread in a bag. “Cherry and chocolate this time,” she said with a wink.
Inside the truck, Tink took the bread out of the bag. It was still so warm it hurt her fingers, but she ignored the heat and tore off a huge chunk, releasing steam and the smell of butter and chocolate.
Mom’s stomach growled so loud Tink heard it and almost laughed. She handed her some bread.
“Thank you,” Mom said and took a bite, chocolate smearing across her upper lip.
“You were eavesdropping in there,” Mom said, and Tink shrugged.
“He seemed like a nice guy. Family lawyer,” she said quietly.
Order of protection, Tink thought, because she knew Mom was thinking it, too. Serious words and a lawyer man with glasses.
“Do you like it here?” Mom asked.
Tink nodded and handed her a piece of bread.
“We could move to a city. That might be fun. Museums and Starbucks and movie theaters.”
Tink shook her head. Those things were okay, but she liked that there was no traffic here. And no neighbors. She liked the way the air smelled. She liked the way her mom was here. Cracking jokes and friendly. Like she used to be.
“Yeah,” Mom whispered and put her head back against the seat, like she just couldn’t hold it up anymore. “I’m so tired of being scared.”
Me, too.
“If I could make it safe for us,” Hope asked, her eyes wet, “would you want to stay?”
Tink tore off another piece of bread. A big one, more than half the loaf, thick with chocolate and bright red cherries from Peg and Abel’s orchard, cherries they’d helped pick and clean and sort and bag. Cherries they’d delivered to Swafiya so she could make this delicious bread. Tink had never been a part of something so amazing in her entire life.
She handed the bread over to her mom.
“Yeah,” Mom breathed. “Me, too.”
Mom pulled up in front of the pharmacy/holiday shop, and Tink jumped out, so excited to see if the place was still as weird as it had seemed the other day.
The bell rang over the door as they entered. The kids were there again, the girls with their long hair in perfect slick ponytails. The slickest. And the little boy with his finger up his nose. The baby someplace with his mom. Which was fine. Tink had no use for babies.
The three older kids stood on the tiled side of the floor.
“You’ve got chocolate all over your face,” the boy said and then pointed at the box of stuff she was carrying. “You got any more in there?” He stepped forward to peer in.
Purely as a scientific experiment, Tink stepped deeper into the holiday store, and the boy caught himself on the dividing line, like he’d run into an electric fence.
“You’re the girl who doesn’t talk,” the younger sister said.
In books middle children were always sneaking around unnoticed, because the parents were always too busy with the oldest and youngest. Tink looked forward to studying her habits.
“What’s in the box?” the younger sister asked and then, like it wasn’t even there, stepped right over the line.
“Maryanne.” The mom, Janice, appeared out of nowhere. She looked extra fancy today with a pretty skirt and high heels. “You know what will happen if she catches you over there.”
“Too late.” The witch lady, Carole, came up from the back. Her hair was even crazier today, silver, black and gray, all wild around her head. She wore a pair of loose bright yellow pants and a T-shirt that said Fuck The Patriarchy.
Tink gasped with delight at the shirt and looked over at her mom, who stood there like she didn’t know what to do.
“Are those for me?” the woman asked, referring to the cherries in Tink’s arms.
Mom nodded. “There’s more in the truck.”
“Well,” she said. “Let’s go get them.”
Mom and Carole stepped out the front door and were back a second later with the cherries.
“Go ahead and take that stuff into the back,” Janice said to Tink. “And you guys,” she said to the kids. “Go play in the schoolyard.”
The kids took off at a run.
“Don’t run!” Carole yelled as they burst out the back door.
“You want to go?” Janice asked Tink. “The school is right there.”
Her mom would say no, that was for sure. In fact, she could practically feel her saying no from right behind her.
Which might be why she did it.
She took off, and as she hit the door and ran down the stairs, chasing those kids and those slick ponytails across the parking lot and then the street, into the school playground with the spaceship—it was like she was breaking something.
Stretching it so tight that it had no choice but to snap.
Hope watched Tink run out the door, and if there hadn’t been two women watching her, she would have run out, too. But she was stuck, locked down in some strange place where she didn’t want to seem like that overprotective mom, the one who couldn’t let her ten-year-old out of her sight.
Even though she had reasons.
“Avery, my oldest, will look after all of them. If you’re worried,” Janice said.
“I’m not worried,” she lied. “Thank you.”
Carole came out from a back room with muffins and scones and set the tray down on the counter next to the coffeepot.
“You want a cup of coffee?” Carole asked.
“Don’t do it,” Janice said. “Your stomach will never be the same.”
“Stop your slander,” Carole said to her daughter.
“I’d love a cup of coffee,” Hope said and pulled out one of the stools. Those tiny thimbles of coffee in the morning with Peg were not enough to get her through a day of cherry season.
Carole poured her a big mug. She smelled like patchouli and cherries and something else...something a little funky beneath it all. “You are the spitting image of Peg when she was your age. The hair’s different, but the freckles give you away.”
“You guys were good friends?”
Carole nodded. “For a time. A long time actually. We went to school together and she inherited the farm and I inherited this building, and everyone else in this damn town is a fool. So we stuck together.”
“You’re not friends now?”
Carole pushed away from the counter.
“Sorry,” Hope said. “I don’t mean to pry.”
“No, honey, it’s all right,” Carole said. “We’re two stubborn old ladies, and a long time ago I thought she made a real bad mistake and I said some things I probably shouldn’t have.”
“Probably?” Janice said. “Saying things you shouldn’t have is kind of your thing, Mom.”
Carole scowled at her daughter. “But now that I’m old and wise I can see that she was hurting and I just made things worse. She didn’t need my judgment. She needed my support. And I messed that up.”
“What was the fight about?” Janice asked. She reached for a muffin and her mother slapped her hand.
“Those are for customers. And you need to stay on your side of the line.”
“Not sure if you noticed, Mom,” Janice said, “but you don’t have any customers.”
“What was the fight about?” Hope asked. Peg seemed so alone out there on the farm, choosing to never venture to town and driving so far out of her way just so she wouldn’t see anyone she knew.
Carole pursed her lips. “Sorry, honey, that’s your aunt’s story to tell.”
“Did you know my mom?” Hope asked.
“Not very well. Your mom was a little too wild for my taste.”
“Oh my god, Mom,” Janice said. “Do you even hear yourself?”
“What? She was scary.” Carole looked over at Hope with a shrug. “No offense.”
“None taken.” She smiled thinking about it. “Mom could be a bit...”
All at once it became hard to find a word to describe her mom. Something easy that would make these women smile and understand her to some extent. And what a shame that she felt compelled to do that. That they all did. To classify and categorize each other into roles that everyone could understand. Because it was simpler.
Hope had been overprotected and ignored in equal parts and in unpredictable ways as a kid. She wanted to tell them Denise had been a good mom, the way she had the other day with Peg, even if Hope wasn’t entirely sure what she could point to to prove it. But then that felt horrible because Hope herself was such a mess, she had no business judging anyone.
And the truth under all of it was that right now she’d do anything to have a mom. For just a minute. To anchor down one part of her world that was completely out of control.
I want my mom.
Hope put her hand over her face.
“Mom,” Janice sighed. “Look at what you did.” Janice put her arm around Hope’s shoulders and half helped, half pushed her onto one of the stools in front of the coffee counter. “And, yes, I’m stepping over the line, you old bat.”
“I’m sorry,” Carole said, blinking wide eyes like she didn’t understand how they’d gotten there.
“No,” Hope said, trying to get them to stop fussing. “It’s fine. It’s just... My mom... She died a year ago.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” Carole said.
“I wrote Peg a letter,” Hope said, attempting to make a laughing sound. “But I never heard back. The Wright women have a real lack-of-communication thing going.”
She lifted the sunglasses carefully to wipe her eyes, trying to keep the fading bruise from showing.
“The sunglasses aren’t fooling anyone, honey,” Carole said, dry as dirt.
“Yeah,” Janice agreed. “You can take them off if you want.”
Hope was frozen on the stool. Honestly, who were these women? They were so invasive. She didn’t want to take off the sunglasses, thank you very much.
“Here,” Carole said, setting a small ginger cookie covered with big chunks of sugar in front of her. Oh, she loved ginger cookies, and Tink hated them, so she could eat this without—
“Are you nuts? Mom!” Janice grabbed the cookie out of Hope’s hand, and Carole shrugged. Shaking her head, Janice said, “It’s a weed cookie. My mom, in the absence of human emotion, is just trying to get you high. It’s how she copes with everything.”
Weed cookie? Oh my god. This day.
“Do you want it?” Carole asked.
Sort of. But she shook her head.
“Might help with that eye. Looks like it hurts,” Carole said, fishing with real intention.
“No, I better go get Tink. We have a lot of work to do.”
“Tink?” Janice asked.
Crap. She was losing the thread all over the place. “Jenny’s...ah, nickname.”
“How are you liking the farm?” Carole asked. “I helped Peg out with one cherry season when I was younger. Hardest summer of my life. She asked me to come back the next year and I laughed at her.”
“It is hard.” Hope laughed. “But it’s a good hard, you know?”
“That’s what Peg always said about it. Too bad you’re not sticking around. The old bat could use the help.”
That was undeniable. And what was growing more undeniable was how much she would like to stay. Tink, too. Getting her to leave this farm for parts unknown was going to be hard.
Janice nodded and stepped back, giving Hope space to get to her feet.
“I’ll walk out there with you,” Janice said.
It wasn’t much, a walk from the store across the street to the school where their children were playing, but at the moment, threadbare and alone, it felt like more.
“You know,” Carole said, “Peg and I had big dreams that you two would be friends.”
“Mom, stop being sentimental. It’s creepy,” Janice said.
“Do me a favor, would you?” Carole said as they walked toward the back door. “Tell Peg I miss her.” Carole popped the whole cookie in her mouth and somehow managed to get out, “And if she wants to talk, my number hasn’t changed.”