Page 7 of Under the Orchard’s Spell

“So, how big of a deal is it that the fruit is ripening at weird intervals?” I ask, pushing out thoughts but also already bracing myself for a fresh round of bad news.

To my relief, Val lifts a shoulder. “Not at all. We’ve just gotta adjust our picking schedule.”

“The start date?”

“Nah. We’ll start the last day of September, same as always. I just mean the order we’ll go. You have your uncle’s aerial photos up at the house?”

“In the kitchen.”

“Good, we’ll just—” Val stops short, her gaze caught on a branch just above the parked Gator.

I follow her eyeline to a pear. Like the others, it’s still small since it’s only early September. Unlike the others, it’s coated in a white-looking sheen.

“Wax bloom?” I ask.

Val reaches toward the pear and rubs her thumb against its surface. Oddly, the film doesn’t budge. Eyebrows pinched together, she studies her thumb, then her eyes flash to me. “You notice anything off lately?”

“Off?”

“About the land. Unseasonable weather. Unusual temperature changes. Since I was last here a month ago.”

A month ago. When three pairs of boots turned to one.

When they left.

The woman I called my best friend.

The man who was always, always, always supposed to be there for me.

I swallow, sorting through memories of those hazy, sticky-with-grief days that followed. In my bleary state of semiconsciousness, I barely registered what was happening outside the darkened bedroom, but…

There was the fog. The one that prowled over hills and across grass. Crept up trunks, swallowing my trees into silhouettes. Grew so thick that, when I leaned a temple to a cold window, I could barely see more than a yawning wall of gray.

“There’s been some fog,” I say evenly. “Especially in the mornings.”

Val’s eyes dart between me and the tree trunks, lips pressed. Then she shakes her head as though clearing it, wipes her hands against her Carhartts, and hoists herself onto the driver’s seat of the Gator.

“Hey,” I say, scrambling in next to her. “Are you going to tell me what that was?”

She shrugs and punches the gas, throwing us both backward. “Nothing,” she yells over the roar of the engine. “Someone wasn’t paying attention to the sprayer.”

After we get back to the house, we kick off our work boots in the mud room—damp with grass and dew—and head to the kitchen, with its gingham wallpaper, ancient Frigidaire rattling in the corner, and Formica countertops riddled with stains from hundreds of tea bags. The early fall weather is temperate enough that I can throw open the windows and allow the sheer curtains to dance over the sink. I pour us each a glass of iced tea and Val tugs off her pilled neckcloth so she can dab at her sweaty brow while helping me unroll an aerial photograph of the farm.

When he found out I wouldn’t be moving onto the orchard alone, Uncle Martin paid someone in town to take these photos with a drone.

“We might know every rock and tree and creature on this land,” he’d whispered as I laid out the photos on his bedspread. “But not everyone can paint with all the colors of our wind.”

And though his face had taken on a waxy pallor, purple bruises tracked up his forearms, and he could barely sit up even with the stack of pillows wedged behind his too-thin back, he tweaked my nose and grinned.

In times like these, despite the evidence, my mind still whispered, He’s going to pull through. There’s no way this man is going to die.

I swallow past the tightness in my chest and tap my finger to the block of trees Val and I surveyed this morning. “So, Thompson the first week. And then we’ll move onto the Dethman block?”

My aunt takes a big swig of tea and plops in a chair, rattling the ice as she squints at the photo. “Thompson block first sounds right, but I don’t know about a week. How many other people do you have picking?”

“Just you and me. I thought I told you that?”

We had the conversation a month ago.