Apricot brandy by Lynn Cesar Read Free Book Online Page A

her , when she drank and let Dad in… .
    She’d shot herself in the mouth with the brandy cannon to make some kind of discovery and now she had made that discovery, not foreseeing that the price of it was supposed to be her life. Because of that long, long chance— one in a thousand at least!— of a dead round, she accidentally still had her life. She had her discovery as well: that drinking was a hurt she did herself in homage to the hurt Dad had done her. A whiskey sour was a glass of Dad. And now that Dad had vandalized himself, a glass of Dad was a glass of Death.
    Karen sighed out a long shuddering breath. She tenderly gripped that cartridge as, long ago, she had gripped her stuffed rabbit, and settled down to sleep.
    At last! At long, long last! She could quit drinking.
    She sank into a feeling of deep solace, the feeling… here suddenly was more lost memory. Precisely the feeling of snuggling down into Mom’s arms, for a nap, when she was small. She remembered Mom’s eyes, staring from that photo just before she’d squeezed the trigger. So… Mom was here, too.

VII
    Awaking in the late afternoon, Karen gingerly re-entered her body, cautiously hefted her limbs. No trace of last night’s unearthly tenant, no alien will in her muscles. That tenant had been pure booze and her own sick heart. Absent booze, that tenant was no more.
    Still, she stood stretching timidly at first… .
    Outside the living-room windows stretched her new horizon of plum trees, all of them heavy with ripe fruit. It vividly came back to her, just how it had felt, when she was six or so, to look out these windows and watch Mom and Dad when they joined the pickers in the harvest.
    Up on their three-legged ladders, filling their hip-sacks with plums, while everywhere among the trees there were other ladders, and hats bobbing amidst branches, and crates on the grass filling up with purple fruit. What a glorious bright business it had all seemed! By the time she was eight they were letting her help and by the time she was ten, letting her up a ladder.
    Not long after, though, her parents stopped joining the pickers. In his fifties, Dad began spending more time reading in the shed. He was still physically powerful and did everything necessary around the orchard, but no more than that.
    Karen must put her hand to this place, must treat it as she willed and drive its ghosts back into the ground. She would mess with those plum trees, pick some of them. See if Fratelli’s was still operating in Gravenstein and might give her a few bucks a flat.
    There was bread in the pantry, old, but toastable. She made toast and coffee, ate greedily, enjoying how the house felt simply like a house. A place where she planned a day’s work, a place she could change any part of she chose. Eager— with the sun declining— to be outside, she almost forgot to call Susan before rushing out.
    Karen was glad to get their answering machine, to make this quick. “Hey hon, sorry for not calling, it was… overwhelming here at first. But listen, it’s going well now. I feel like I’ve crossed a line. It’s going better than I hoped. I’ve got to rush out before dark. I’m gonna pick some plums! I love you. I’ll call you.”

    * * * *
    The Big Shed, they’d called this, the roof’s rafters twelve feet high. The picking ladders covered one whole wall and the others were hung with long-handled pruners and branch saws, the props also leaning there in standing stacks— notched planks for supporting branches getting too heavy with fruit. Packing flats were stacked on one end of the long central bench. The cardboard separators, dimpled like egg cartons, were there, too. Karen still liked the feel of this big interior, its dust-motes shot with rays of late sun through gaps in the siding. It felt full of a benevolent, earth-loving energy.
    A pouch on her hip, some flats and separators, some parrot-beak shears for all the wild twigs and suckers— she brought these out to