Apricot brandy by Lynn Cesar Read Free Book Online Page B

the nearest tree and went back for the ladder. Despite having years of experience carrying extension ladders hooked on her shoulder, she found the picking ladder, which flared at the base, a more awkward matter and was running sweat by the time she had set it, its third leg slanting through the bristly branches, and finally climbed up into the tree.
    Karen kept on sweating after that, a good two hours and more. Wherever she leaned in, she was assailed by ear-poking, eye-poking, mouth-poking twigs. You thought you saw them, then poke — there was another one you hadn’t seen. Her relationship to the tree quickly became one of attack and counter-attack, and repeated assaults with the parrot-beaks. Each time she climbed down with some plums, she stood in a litter of twigs and her tennis shoes trod a muck of fallen fruit mouldering in the deep weeds. Each time she re-set the ladder, she fought a new battle with the clippers, the smell of decay floating up around her.
    When the sun set, there were four flats of plums to carry back into the big shed. And, under a sky half rose, half violet, she was glad she’d stuck with the struggle. She felt sweat-drenched and purged, felt so much herself, with the night coming on.
    She’d get up first thing tomorrow. Could pick Dad’s special trees in the yard, yeah— peaches and apricots should fetch more than plums. Go into Gravenstein in the afternoon with seven or eight flats. See how the town had changed.
    Time for a shower. What the hell, she’d rinse down right here under the hose… . A little afraid of that bathroom at night, are we? Well, so what? Take things at your own pace, get your mind back, get strong.
    Dropping her clothes on the ground, turning the hose onto her scalp, Karen sent cool water spiraling down her nakedness. Wonderful, this garment of water. She stood wearing it, stroking it on her skin.
    She carefully wrung out her hair and scraped the wet from her skin, watching the dark just beginning to congeal around her. Suddenly it seemed terribly blatant, terribly reckless of her, standing naked in front of the trees like this. It seemed the whole two hundred acres, and everything in them, beheld her, discovered her there in its midst.
    She shook her fist at the orchard and carried her clothes into the house. A nice clean T-shirt and jeans. Hot tomato soup, more toast, and a dish of plums.
    Next, another fire. The night was cool, but it was really the movement and the noise of the blaze she wanted most. Karen settled into the couch with her thriller.
    The story seemed terribly thin, but that was okay. She clung to the sketchy characters, their faint voices and unlikely actions, while underneath hearing and feeling the house around her, its shadows and silences testing her calm. This was to be expected. She would conquer the place one night at a time, by enduring it, defying it, coldly sober—
    What was that she was hearing? Hard to separate from the fire’s low noise at first. Far out on the drive… gravel crackling.
    Dad. His truck rolling in from a night drinking in town, Mom out of the state, visiting her sister… .
    Realer possibilities followed this deep-buried reflex of fear. Marty Carver, on some nasty personal errand. Or more likely that Kyle, a big-sounding man, laying the courtesy on thick, while realizing that now there was only a woman here, a woman alone.
    An engine, drawing nearer, then shutting off just out front, as Karen pulled open the hall closet, plucked out the shotgun she’d found. She worked the slide and a shell sprang out. She retrieved it and threaded it back into the magazine as feet mounted the porch steps— thank god that old son of a bitch had at least taught her how to handle weapons.
    But the knock on the door was delicate and the voice— calling, “Karen?”— was Susan’s. In her relief, Karen pulled the door open with the shotgun still clutched in one hand.
    “Karen, I’m sorry, but I just had to— ” and then she took