The Peach Keeper (5 page)

“Since my dad died.”

Colin’s shoulders dropped a little. “I was sorry to hear about what happened.” Her father had been hit
and killed trying to help someone change a tire on the interstate during what would have been Willa’s senior year in college, if she hadn’t flunked out. Another thing her father hadn’t known about. “He was a great teacher. I had him for chemistry in eleventh grade. He had a dinner for his AP students here at his house once.”

“Yes, I remember.” She’d hated those dinners, actually having kids come to her house to see how she lived. She would hide in her room and pretend to be sick. There was nothing wrong with the house, it was just old and small, nothing like the mansions half the kids lived in.

“I’ve thought a lot about you over the years, what you were doing, what mischief you were getting yourself into.” He paused. “I had no idea you’d been here the whole time.”

She just stared at him, wondering why it mattered.

He circled the living room again, looking around, then didn’t seem to know what else to do, so he sat on the couch with a weary sigh. He ran his fingers through his dark hair. His hands were large. He was a big man, with a big presence. No one had seemed to notice that in high school. His time away had changed him, had given him a confidence, an air of independence, that he didn’t have before. “So what are you doing these days, Willa Jackson?”

“I own a sporting goods store on National Street.” There. That sounded responsible, didn’t it? Normal and practical.

“What do you do for fun?”

She gave him a funny look. What kind of question was that? “Laundry,” she answered, deadpan.

“Married?” he asked. “Kids?”

“No.”

“So no progeny to teach how to TP the high school lawn, or decorate the teachers’ cars with peanut butter, or put scandalous quotes on the school marquee, or switch the items in the school lockers of the entire graduating class?” He laughed. “That was a classic. It had to have taken all night.”

It was like it was a fond memory to him. But she’d purposely not revisited her pranks in years. And she hadn’t given Colin a second thought. Now, suddenly, she was remembering the look on his face when she’d been escorted out of the school by police after pulling the fire alarm. The whole school was out on the lawn.
It was her
, they’d whispered.
Willa Jackson was the Walls of Water High School Joker!
Colin Osgood had looked completely poleaxed. Though whether it was because it was her or because he couldn’t take credit for her pranks anymore, she didn’t know.

They stared at each other from across the room. She watched as his eyes traveled down her body, and she was about to call him on it when he said, “So, are you going?” He nodded to the invitation still in her hand. “To the gala?”

She looked down as if surprised to find the invitation there. She put it on the computer table, giving it a dirty look, as if this was all the invitation’s fault. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“So you only go to parties that have something to do with you? Your birthday party, for example.” After a short silence, he frowned and said, “That sounded funnier in my head. Sorry. Everything suddenly starts to seem funny when you’ve been up for forty-eight hours. I laughed at a speed limit sign on my way over here. I have no idea why.”

He was sleep-drunk. That explained a lot of things. “Why have you been up for forty-eight hours?”

“Couldn’t sleep on the flight from Japan. And I’ve been trying to stay awake all day so I could go to bed at a regular hour and not get hopelessly lost in the time difference.”

She looked toward the window. “Did someone drive you here?”

“No.”

She met his eyes. They were dark and unnerving and very, very tired. “Are you okay to drive home?” she asked seriously.

He smiled. “That was a very responsible thing to ask.”

“Let me get you some coffee.”

“If you insist. But the old Willa would have found some way to take advantage of this situation.”

“You have no idea who the old Willa was,” she said.

“Neither do you, obviously.”

Without another word, she turned and went to the kitchen, where she managed to spill both the coffee grounds and the water. She just wanted to get her father’s old percolator going so she could give Colin a jolt of caffeine and have him be on his way.

“Do you go up to the Blue Ridge Madam often?” Colin called from the living room.

“No,” she answered. Of course he’d get around to that.

“So you weren’t planning a prank for, say, the big gala?” He actually said that hopefully.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Willa mumbled.

Leaning against the kitchen counter, she watched the percolator as it gurgled and took its time. When it had finally made enough for a single serving, she poured some into a cup and took it to the living room.

He was still sitting on her gray microsuede couch, his hands on his knees, his head resting back against the cushions.

“Oh, no,” she said, panicking as she set the cup down on the end table. “No, no, no. Colin, wake up.”

He didn’t stir.

She reached over and touched his shoulder. “Colin, I have your coffee. Wake up and drink some.” She shook his shoulder. “Colin!”

His eyes opened, and he looked at her, a little unfocused. “What happened to you? You were the bravest person I knew,” he murmured. Then he closed his eyes again.

“Colin?” She watched for a telltale flutter of his long eyelashes, thinking maybe he was playing some game with her. “Colin?”

Nothing.

She stood there for a moment, stunned. Just as she was about to turn, she caught a whiff of something sweet. She inhaled deeply, instinctively wanting to
savor it, but then she nearly choked when it landed on her tongue with a bitter taste. It was so strong she actually made a face.

That, her grandmother had described to her once after making a particularly bad lemon cream pie, was exactly what regret tasted like.

The thick morning mist in Walls of Water, common because of the nearby waterfalls, was famous in itself. There wasn’t a single store on National Street that didn’t sell those touristy Jars of Fog, gray-glass jars visitors could take home with them to remind them of their stay. Willa figured it was a lot like living near the ocean. When you see it every day, sometimes you wonder what the big deal is.

The mist was just beginning to disappear with the rising heat as Willa got into her Wrangler the next morning and drove toward the nursing home. Thankfully, Colin had gotten up and left sometime during the night, taking his disappointment that she wasn’t still secretly pulling pranks on the town, that she wasn’t still eighteen, with him.

She wished he’d never come to see her. She was doing the right thing being here. She’d grown up. The whole point of being here was so she
didn’t
disappoint people anymore.

“Hi, Grandmother Georgie,” Willa said brightly when she got to the nursing home and walked into her room. Her grandmother had already been dressed and put in her wheelchair. She was sitting, slightly stooped,
by the window. The morning sun on her white hair and pale face made her seem almost translucent. She’d been a beautiful woman in her day, with wide eyes, high cheekbones, and a long, thin nose. Sometimes you could still catch sight of that beauty, and it was like looking through enchanted glass.

Her grandmother had been showing the first signs of dementia when Willa left for college. That’s when Willa’s father had moved her in with him, into Willa’s old bedroom. Two years later, she’d had a stroke, and he’d been forced to move her to the nursing home. Willa knew the decision wasn’t easy for him, but he’d managed to get her into the nicest facility in the area. After her father died, Willa took his place coming to visit her, because she knew that was what he would have wanted. He’d adored his mother, and pleasing her had been his life’s ambition.

Willa had always thought her grandmother was sweet, but she’d been one of those people with invisible thorns, preventing others from getting too close. Georgie Jackson had been a nervous, watchful person, not at all frivolous, which Willa had found extraordinary, considering how rich the Jacksons had once been. But after her family had lost their money, Georgie had worked as a maid for various wealthy families in town until she was well into her seventies.

She’d always been quiet, like Willa’s father. Willa’s mother had been the loud one in the family, and Willa could still remember her laugh, a sweet staccato sound like embers popping. She’d been a receptionist at a local law office, but she’d died when Willa was six. That
had marked the phase when Willa used to like to play dead. She used to pose herself on the couch, completely soaked, as if she’d drowned there. She would drape herself awkwardly across the car hood, as if she’d been hit. Her favorite death was Death By Spoons, in which she would lie on the kitchen floor, douse herself with ketchup, and stick spoons under her armpits. At that age, Willa hadn’t understood death, hadn’t seen it as a bad thing if it had happened to someone as nice as her mother, and frankly, she’d been fascinated by it.

Once her grandmother had caught her having an imaginary conversation with her mother, and had immediately opened all the windows and burned sage.
Ghosts are horrible things
, she’d said.
You don’t talk to them. You keep them away
. It had hurt Willa, and it had taken a long time to forgive her grandmother for denying her a link to her mother, for making her scared of it, no matter how silly.

All those superstitions were gone from her grandmother’s memory now. Her grandmother didn’t even recognize Willa anymore, but Willa knew she liked the melody of voices, even though she no longer understood the words. So this was what Willa did several times a week; she came and talked about what was on the news, what the trees looked like this time of year, what was selling in her shop right now, what improvements she was making to her dad’s house. She told her grandmother about the new couch, but not about Colin.

She talked until the food-service lady brought Georgie’s breakfast, then Willa helped feed her. After
her tray had been cleared, she gently washed her grandmother’s face and sat back beside her.

She hesitated a few moments before she brought the invitation from her back pocket. “I’ve been debating whether or not I should tell you about this. There’s a party at the Blue Ridge Madam next month. The Women’s Society Club is celebrating the formation of the club. Paxton Osgood wants to honor you at the party, which I guess is nice. But you never talked about it. I don’t know if it really meant anything to you. If I thought it did, I would go. But I just don’t know.”

Willa looked down at the invitation and did the math for the first time. She realized her grandmother had been only seventeen when she’d helped form the club. That had been the year her family had lost the Blue Ridge Madam, the year she’d given birth to Willa’s father.

It pained Willa to think of it now, but she’d never been particularly proud of being a Jackson when she was younger. But the older she got, the more she came to appreciate just how hard her family had worked to support themselves, how no one but her had ever cast their eyes down in shame at what they had lost. Willa had already faced and accepted that her grandmother could no longer tell her things she wanted to know about her family, that she’d missed all the opportunities to ask her when she was clear-minded, or to ask her father while he was alive. But times like this she still felt it acutely, all the
I love you
s she should have said but didn’t, the things she wished she could go back in time
and change, how she should have made them proud of her instead of constantly worrying them.

Willa looked up from the invitation and was surprised to find that Georgie had turned her head and her light gray eyes, the same shade as Willa’s, were looking directly at her, as if she’d recognized something familiar in what Willa had said. It hadn’t happened in literally years, and Willa was so surprised that her heart picked up speed.

Willa leaned forward. “What is it, Grandmother Georgie? The Blue Ridge Madam? The Women’s Society Club?”

Georgie’s left side was rendered useless from the stroke, so she moved her right hand over to Willa’s. She tried to get her mouth to move, to form words.

It took a few tries before Willa recognized one word:
peach
.

“Peach? You want peaches?”

Her grandmother’s face suddenly went slack, as if she’d forgotten. She turned back to the window.

“Okay, Grandmother Georgie,” she said as she stood and kissed her head. “I’ll make sure you have some peaches.”

She wrapped a shawl around her grandmother’s shoulders and promised her that she’d be back to see her soon.

With one last look, she turned and left the room.

It was silly to expect something profound. That she was trying to communicate at all was enough.

She stopped at the nurses’ station to see if there were
any medical notes, then asked if her grandmother could have peaches with her next meal.