The Jodi Picoult Collection Read online

  “Wash them,” Sam suggests. He starts to walk outside and leaves my mother standing beside me, gaping.

  “He’s a hell of a host,” she says to me.

  Sam explains the different sections of the orchard as we walk through it en route to see my uncle. The top, which we drove past, is the commercial section, which gets sold to supermarket chains. The bottom is retail, which ripens later and gets sold to local farmstands and the general public. Each section is sectioned again according to the type of apples grown. The lake down at the edge of the orchard is Lake Boon, and yes, you can swim in it.

  At one point he calls to a tall man who is cutting branches off one tree. “Hadley,” Sam says, “come meet Joley’s relatives.”

  When the man approaches us I see that he isn’t old at all. He has sunny hair cut irregularly, and soft brown eyes. Like the cows, I think. He smiles at me first. Then he shakes my mother’s hand and introduces himself. “Hadley Slegg. It’s nice to meet you, ma’am.”

  “Ma’am,” my mother whispers to me. She raises her eyebrows.

  Hadley drops behind Sam and my mother so that he can speak to me as we are walking. “You must be Rebecca.” I am thrilled that he knows me. I don’t even ask how. “What do you think of Massachusetts?”

  “It’s pretty,” I tell him. “Much more quiet than California.”

  “I’ve never been to California. I’ve heard things, of course, but I’ve never been.” I’d like him to tell me what he’s heard but he doesn’t elaborate. “You still in school?”

  Nobody has asked me about school in the longest time. “Are you?”

  Hadley laughs. “God, no. I finished with that a long time ago. I wasn’t the best student, if you know what I mean.” He waves his hand out over the trees we’re passing. “But I like what I’m doing, and I’ve got a good job thanks to Sam.” He looks at me a little more closely. “So you’re a swimmer?”

  “How did you know that?” I say, amazed.

  “I can see it through your shirt.” How stupid of me. I am wearing my “GUARD” bathing suit under this T-shirt because it is so hot today.

  “I was a lifeguard in San Diego. Not a real ocean guard, but just at a pool.” I look at him, but I get embarrassed and turn away.

  “That’s tough work,” Hadley says, “a lot of responsibility.” He raises his hand to his head and ruffles his fingers through his hair. I smell strawberries. “You know, I could take you around and show you how this place works. It’s kind of interesting, really.”

  “I’d like that.” I had been wondering what I would do all day on a farm full of busy people. “I could help, if there’s something I’d be able to do.”

  Hadley smiles at me. “Hey Sam, we’ve got some cheap labor. Rebecca is going to work for free.”

  Sam, who has been talking to my mother on and off, twists around so he can see me. “Okay. You can shear the sheep next time they need it.” He grins. “Unless your mom wants to do it.”

  At this point, my mother starts to run across the field. “It’s Joley,” she shouts. “Joley!”

  Uncle Joley is standing on a ladder, wrapping green tape around a branch of a tree. He sees my mother but makes no motion to stop wrapping the tape. He winds it slowly and carefully, and I watch Sam smile as he does this. Then he holds his hands to the branch for a moment, and closes his eyes. Finally he climbs down the ladder to where my mother is waiting, and hugs her.

  “Looks like you survived the trip, Rebecca,” Uncle Joley says to me when he walks closer. He kisses me on the forehead. He has not changed a bit. He turns to Sam and Hadley. “I assume you’ve all met.”

  “Unfortunately,” my mother mutters, looking at Sam, and I’m positive he can hear her.

  Joley looks from Sam to my mother, but neither one says anything else. “Well, it’s great that you’re here. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

  Sam says, “Why don’t you take the rest of the afternoon, Joley. On account of you never see your sister.”

  Joley thanks him and takes my mother’s hand. “Are you all right?” he says, looking deep at her, as if the rest of us have disappeared. It makes us uncomfortable, though, and Sam starts to head back to the sheep pen. Hadley watches Sam leave and asks if I want to stay with Joley or learn abut pruning. I consider staying—I haven’t seen my uncle in a long time, after all—but on second thought I tell Hadley I’d like to go with him.

  Hadley takes me through the retail orchard, pointing out various types of apples by tree. Some of the names I recognize: Golden Delicious, Mcintosh, Cortlands. Most are foreign: Gravensteins, Miltons. “They sound like the names of mailboxes on a very rich street,” I tell Hadley, and he laughs. He stands very tall when he walks, and from my position it looks like he touches the sun.

  He takes a deep breath as we come to the corner where the lake hits the orchard. “Smell it?” he asks, and there is mint all around. “It grows wild here.”

  “Did you grow up in Stow? You know so much.”

  Hadley smiles. “I grew up on a farm in Massachusetts. Hudson. But my mom sold the place when my dad died. She lives in New Hampshire now. In the mountains.” He turns to me. “You grew up in San Diego?”

  I glance up at him. “Do I look it?”

  He picks a reed from the water’s edge and clamps it between his front teeth. “I don’t know. What do people from San Diego look like?”

  “Well, they’re usually blond and skinny and real airheads.”

  I mean it as a joke, but Hadley stares at me so intently that I think he will burn a hole through my shirt. He starts at my feet and winds up looking at my eyes. “Two out of three,” Hadley says. “I won’t tell you which two.”

  We walk for a while along the shore of Lake Boon, letting the cattails whip around our knees. At one point Hadley reaches down and very casually plucks a tick from my thigh. He tells me about Uncle Joley, and about Sam. “Joley just came in here one day, and I have to tell you I was a little jealous—I’d been working with Sam for seven years and here this city boy struts into the place and can work miracles. But it’s true, no doubt about it. Your uncle—Cod that sounds funny—can heal things. He’s saved more dying trees single-handedly than I don’t know what.”

  I am impressed. I want to try to touch a tree myself, to see if this skill might be inherited. Hadley keeps talking. His voice had a strange twang to it—a Boston accent, I guess it’s called—with weird A sounds and missing Rs. “Sam took over the orchard when his dad had the heart attack. Parents live in Fort Lauderdale now, in Florida. He’d had ideas though, for a while. His dad walked out the frontdoor of the Big House, and that very day Sam had tractors uprooting and moving trees.” He surveys the land up the hill. “I mean, it looks good now, and it turned out all right, but that’s not something I would have done. Sam’s like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “A kind of gambler, I guess. It’s a real risk to move around well-rooted trees, and he knew that—he’s smarter than me when it comes to agriculture. But the way it was here, well, it just wasn’t the way he saw it in his mind. And he had to make all the pieces fit together.”

  Hadley sits down on a cluster of rocks on the edge of the lake and points to the tree overhead. “You hear that cardinal?”

  There is a noise like a squeaky toy—high and low and high and low and high and low. Then out of the branches flies a bright red bird. The things this guy knows, I think.

  “It’s really nice of Sam to let us stay here,” I say, making conversation.

  “No insult to you and your mom, but he’s doing it for Joley. Sam isn’t really big on visitors, especially women from California. He’s been griping about it all week, actually.” He stops and looks at me. “I guess I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

  “Well, that’s all right. He seems to have it out for my mother. She fell into a pile of manure before and he didn’t do anything to help her.”

  Hadley laughs. “Not much you can do if someone falls in a pile o