Where We Belong (47 page)

I dropped my mom off at the pharmacy, and then drove out to the property for sale. I’d been there alone one other time. But that time, I’d only looked from the road.

This time, I parked my mom’s car in the driveway. And then, as I walked away from it, I looked back and realized I was ashamed of that car and hoped nobody saw it there. Hoped the real estate lady didn’t come to show the place to anybody, because I didn’t want to be the person who was driving that old clunker. Even though it matched the condition of the house. Still, I was betting it wouldn’t match the condition of the realtor’s other clients.

I walked around the two acres. There were wire fences at the borders of the property. Not barbed wire. Just four strands of wire strung along wooden posts. The trees were planted in neat lines, and I walked up and down the orchard rows, thinking about the working-farm days, imagining the voices of the pickers. I wondered how they got the high fruit out of those trees.

I singled out a tree that looked fairly easy to climb. It had a low intersection of big limbs. I took a running start, jumped up, and got a hold on that intersection. Then I lost it again and landed on my feet in the dirt. I tried again, and this time I got a better hold and got the sticky soles of my sneakers planted on the trunk, and pulled myself up so I was sitting in the crook of those limbs. Then I stood up. And looked up. And carefully climbed higher. I could see a peach, but when I got close to it, it was hard and a little green. So I climbed even higher. I came out into the sun above most of the leafy parts of the tree and saw the mountains. I hadn’t seen them from that property before, because the trees got in the way of the view.

I just stood there for a moment, holding on. Looking. Thinking I’d never stop loving those mountains. Then I wondered how they’d look if I’d just gotten back from trekking the circuit of teahouse trails around Annapurna, in the Himalayas. I decided they would look smaller and tamer, but still pretty.

I found a peach that looked ripe, so I leaned for it. Carefully. I couldn’t quite reach, so I pulled its branch closer. Grabbed the fruit and pulled, but it held. I twisted it on its stem. It came off in my hand.

I stood on that branch, holding tight with one hand, and looked at the mountains some more, and took a big bite of peach. It was juicy and tasted like summer.

I started the climb down.

When I got back down to the intersection of limbs, I sat and held the peach in my teeth so I could grab a limb with both hands. Then I swung out and dropped and landed in the dirt on my feet with a
whump
sound, my sneakers kicking up little clouds of dry dirt. But I bit down without meaning to, and bit a piece out of the peach, which made the rest of it drop into the dirt.

“Crap,” I said out loud, my mouth full.

I almost thought of picking it up and trying to wash it somehow. But it had two bites out of it, and it was caked with brown dirt.

I left it and walked back to the house, chewing the one bite I still had.

The real estate lady was there with a buyer. A man about fifty, who looked like he could write a check for the place if he wanted it.

I stopped cold when I saw them. Swallowed fast.

“May I help you?” the lady asked. A little coolness in her voice.

“I’m Angie. Remember I came in to see you with Paul Inverness?”

“Oh, yes. I do remember you now.”

“I was just leaving,” I said.

“Did you have more questions?”

“I wanted to know if the property was fenced. Because Paul’s going to get a new dog, a puppy, and he won’t be trained not to run off. Yet. So I told him I’d come see and then tell him.”

“He’d have to put a gate across the driveway,” she said.

“Okay. I’ll tell him.”

Then they were just looking at me, and there was nothing more to say. And neither one of them looked all that thrilled that I was there.

So I said, “I was just leaving.” Again.

As I walked down the driveway, I heard the lady say, “I do have some other interest in this property. As you can see.”

Then I knew that my being there was probably only going to put pressure on this buyer to make an offer faster. That chewed a little in my stomach, but I told myself to get over it. We weren’t going to get the place anyway, so nothing was really lost.

But something felt lost.

Three days later, Rachel came for another visit. Which I was kind of excited about, because I really wanted to know how that would go.

We didn’t go camping, because my mom said she’d had it with camping. We went to that same motel where we’d stayed before.

The first night we were there, Sophie started screaming, and my mom had to drive her around for almost two hours before she went to sleep. By the time they got back, it was after eleven, and I knew it would be hard for my mom to get to sleep until she wound down from that stress. And she had work in the morning. It all added up bad.

I took my life in my hands and brought it up again.

I said, “Can you imagine how amazing it would be to live in a place that’s so far from the neighbors, nobody could even hear her? If she started to scream, we could just put in earplugs and let her wear herself down.”

“No place is that far from the neighbors.”

“This place I’m trying to get you to go see is. More than a mile from the closest house.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I told you that already.”

“I thought that was just a figure of speech. You know. A mile away. I thought you just meant a long way away.”

“Yeah. Like an
actual mile
. Which is a long way.” The timing was right, and I could feel it. I was catching her in a worn-down moment. “It couldn’t hurt you to at least look at it.”

“Okay, fine. Come by the pharmacy at noon, and we’ll go on my lunch hour. You can drive, and I’ll eat on the way.”

Just before the last bend in the road, I got a little twist in my stomach. What if I saw something completely different from last time? A bunch of construction trucks in the driveway, or the For Sale sign taken down?

Then I told myself that was stupid. It had only been a few days.

I looked over at my mom, who was in the passenger seat, wolfing down a sandwich. She had tuna salad on the corner of her mouth.

“What?” she said.

I pointed to the corner of my own mouth, and she wiped it off with a fresh tissue from the box at her feet.

We rounded the last bend.

The sign was still there. The driveway was still empty. But when we got closer, there was something on the sign that hadn’t been there before. A strip of red, a few inches high and maybe a foot long. When we finally got close enough, I read it out loud.

“Sale pending.”

I stopped, right in the middle of the highway. Which didn’t matter much, because there was nobody else on it.

“Shit,” I added. Without much energy.

“Just wasn’t meant to be,” my mom said.

I said nothing. I was busy being stung. Because I’d thought it was.

“Well, that’s two gallons of gas we’ll never get back. Let’s go, kiddo.”

Instead, I pulled into the driveway. She probably thought I was turning around. Until I shifted into Park and turned off the engine.

“What are we doing?”

“I just want to get a peach. I didn’t really get one last time. I’ll get two, and it can be your dessert.”

“Isn’t that sort of… trespassing?”

“I don’t see who it’s going to hurt. By the time the sale goes through, those two peaches would be rotting on the ground, anyway.”

I jumped out before she could say more. Trotted down the driveway and around the house. Down a row between the trees. I wanted to find the one I’d climbed last time, but it wasn’t where I thought it was, and I didn’t have much time.

I picked one that looked doable and got a good running start. I jumped up, grabbed a limb, and planted my left sneaker.

It slipped.

I came down hard on my knee in the crook between two branches. I was wearing shorts, so there was nothing to protect the skin of my knee. But it was worse than that. My knee not only slammed the tree but slipped off again. So I sort of slid off the branch with all my weight on my knee. Next thing I knew, I was in the dirt with my left ankle twisted painfully underneath me.

I looked at my knee. It felt completely numb. The skin was both scraped off and peeled back. Other than the dirt and bark ground in, it was weirdly white. Like the size and scope of the thing hadn’t hit it yet. Then dozens of little drops of blood sprang up, and became big drops of blood, and met each other, and formed a pool.

I had to fight back these stinging tears, which only made everything worse. That urge to cry when I get hurt unexpectedly is like crying when I’m mad. It takes a thing that’s just plain bad and turns it into bad and embarrassing, both.

I got to my feet. Well, foot. By then, the blood was running down my shin and onto my sneaker. I tested my weight on my left ankle, but it didn’t go well. I hopped back to the car, using most of my energy to hold back those hot tears.

My mom had shifted over to the driver’s seat. She didn’t see me. She was looking off into the distance. I had to hop around to the passenger side and knock on the window. She couldn’t see what was happening, because I was too close to the car. She gave me a shrug, like she didn’t know why I didn’t just get in.

I gave up on getting any help from her, opened the door, leaned in, and stuck my hand into the tissue box, grabbing about ten at once. I folded the stack in half and pressed it onto my knee to try to stop the bleeding.

Then I had to figure out how to lower myself onto the seat with only one hand, while standing on only one foot. Finally I gave up and just flopped down, refusing to say “Ouch.” I picked up my bad leg with my free hand and put it in the car, then straightened out and closed the door.

“Did you hurt yourself?” my mom asked.

I wondered where she’d been for all that. Where she was now. I didn’t ask.

“I just scraped my knee.”

“That must have been quite a scrape,” she said, pointing to the blood trail.

“I didn’t have anything to press on it. Now that I do, it’ll stop.”

She started the car and pulled out of the driveway without saying much.

“Don’t drop me at the motel,” I said. “Drop me home. We have more first-aid stuff there. And Paul will have anything we don’t.”

“You sure you’re okay?”

“Nobody ever died of a skinned knee. That I know of.”

“Too bad about that peach. I was looking forward to that.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.”

She pulled up at the bottom of Paul’s driveway. Shifted into Park. I just sat there and stared at her. After a bizarre length of staring time, she looked back.

“What?”

“Could you please drive me up the driveway? I twisted my ankle.”

“You didn’t tell me that. You just said you skinned your knee.”

“Well. Now I’m telling you. I twisted my ankle.”

She shifted into Reverse, backed up a little, and pulled up the driveway. Drove me right up to the bottom of the apartment stairs.

Rachel was standing on the stairs. Our stairs.

“Now, what’s
she
doing?” my mom asked.