The day they let me out of the hospital, my mother brought me a sweater with the tags still on.
It was gray. Cashmere. A size too big. She’d bought it at the department store in the mall on her way to pick me up. She held it out to me in the discharge room without saying hello.
“Put this on,” she said. “Over the gown. Before we go through the lobby.”
“I have my own clothes,” I said. “In the bag.”
“Put it on, Stacey.”
I put it on. It was soft and it smelled like the store. It came down past my hands. I think that was the point. I think she wanted to cover my arms, even though there was nothing on my arms to cover. I think she just wanted to cover something.
A nurse named Gloria walked us to the elevator. She was older, with gray braids and reading glasses on a beaded chain. She’d been on my floor for most of the three weeks I was there. She used to come sit with me at night when I couldn’t sleep. She never asked questions. She just sat.
At the elevator, Gloria squeezed my hand.
“You call that number on your paper if it gets dark again,” she said quietly. “Day or night. You hear me? There are people whose whole job is to pick up.”
“I hear you,” I said.
My mother pressed the elevator button three times, fast, like it would come quicker.
In the car, she didn’t say anything for twenty minutes. My father drove. He kept both hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road. The radio was off.
Finally, at a red light on Highway 31, my mother said, “Your aunt Linda asked where you’ve been. I told her mono.”
I didn’t say anything.
“If anyone asks,” she said, “you had mono. You were very sick. You’re better now.”
“I wasn’t sick with mono,” I said.
She turned around in her seat and looked at me. Her eyes were hard and red at the edges.
“We are not going to talk about your situation,” she said. “Not in this car. Not at home. Not with anyone. Do you understand me?”
Your situation.
That’s what she called it. That day and every day afterward. The way you might describe a stain on a tablecloth before company arrived.
I was eighteen years old. Three weeks earlier, on a Tuesday night in March, I had reached the bottom of something I didn’t have words for yet. I’d been sliding toward it for two years. Nobody noticed. Or nobody wanted to. And that Tuesday night, I couldn’t see any way up, and I had done something I’m not going to describe, because it isn’t the important part of this story.
The important part is that my best friend, Casey, called my phone eleven times that night, and when I didn’t answer, she drove over in her pajamas and climbed through my bedroom window and found me.
The important part is that I lived.
I came home to a house that had decided I was a problem to be managed.
We lived in a two-story brick house in a neighborhood called Hollow Creek, south of Birmingham, Alabama. My father sold commercial real estate. My mother chaired the hospitality committee at First Methodist and the Junior League spring luncheon. We had a dining room nobody ate in and a living room nobody sat in. We had a picture of all four of us on the mantel, taken at Gulf Shores when I was eleven, in matching white shirts.
My brother, Mitch, was twenty-two. He’d just graduated from Auburn. He was handsome and easy and everyone liked him. He was working at my father’s firm.
He was also dating a girl named Avery Lockheart.
The Lockhearts were what my mother called “a good family.” Avery’s father was a deacon and a surgeon. Her mother, Suzanne, ran half the charity boards in Mountain Brook. They had a house with columns. They had a lake house on Lake Martin. They had a family name on a wing of the children’s hospital.
My mother had been waiting her whole life for a family like that to want something to do with ours.
And now I had come home from the hospital, nine weeks before my high school graduation, and I was the thing that might ruin it.
Two days before Avery’s first visit to our house, six family photographs disappeared from the upstairs hallway.
I noticed because I walked past that hallway every morning. There used to be a row of school portraits. Mine and Mitch’s. Kindergarten through twelfth grade, alternating. Mitch in a bow tie. Me with no front teeth. Mitch with braces. Me with bangs I cut myself.
Mine were gone. Only Mitch’s were left. With bright rectangles of unfaded paint where mine had been.
Then my mother moved my junior-year portrait downstairs. The one from the year before. I was wearing a blue sweater and smiling a little, the way the photographer told me to. She put it on the center shelf in the living room, the one where nobody sat. And she put a tall white pillar candle beside it.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
“It’s for Easter,” she said. She didn’t look at me.
“It’s March.”
“Easter’s coming,” she said. “We’re getting ready.”
That same afternoon, she took my pill organizer off the kitchen counter. The big plastic one with the days of the week. She opened the silverware drawer and slipped it in, behind the forks.
“Company’s coming,” she said. “We don’t need this out.”
On Friday night, Mitch found me in my bedroom folding two shirts into a duffel bag.
I didn’t know yet that I was going anywhere. My mother hadn’t told me. I was just packing because I had a feeling. You get a feeling, when you’re the thing in a house that people step around.
Mitch stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets.
“I’m sorry about all this, Stace,” he said.
It was the kindest thing anyone had said to me in weeks.
“Sorry for what?” I asked.
But he was already walking away down the hall.
At 10:52 on Saturday morning, my mother stood in the doorway of my bedroom, six feet away from me, and sent me a text message instead of speaking.
My phone buzzed on the bed.
Every weekend be gone by 11.
I looked up from the duffel bag. She was standing there with her arms folded. Watching me pack. Waiting.
“She comes from a good family,” she said. “Don’t embarrass us.”
I picked up the duffel bag. I walked past her down the stairs.
My father was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee. He never looked up. He reached over and set my car keys beside the kitchen sink. Where I’d have to walk past them to the back door.
“Just disappear for the weekend,” he said to his coffee.
That was the rule.
My brother was bringing Avery Lockheart home, and somehow that meant I had to vanish.
I left at 10:59.
I backed my old blue Corolla out of the driveway and drove to the end of our street. At the stop sign, I looked in my rearview mirror.
Mitch’s Jeep was turning onto our street from the other direction. Avery Lockheart was sitting in the passenger seat. Blond. Laughing at something he said. Her hand out the window, riding the wind.
She never saw me.
That was the point.
I didn’t know where to go. I drove around for an hour. I sat in a Waffle House parking lot. I almost called Casey, and then I didn’t, because Casey had already climbed through one window for me and I didn’t want to be the kind of person who needed rescuing twice.
Then my phone rang. It was Casey.
“Where are you?” she said.
“Waffle House on 31.”
“Why?”
I told her.
She was quiet for a long moment.
“Go to Mamaw’s,” she said. “Right now. I’m calling her.”
Ruth Tanner was Casey’s grandmother. She was seventy-one. She owned forty acres of peach orchard in Chilton County, about forty-five minutes south. She’d been widowed for fifteen years and ran the farm by herself, with two hired men in summer and a German shepherd named Biscuit year-round.
I’d met her twice. At Casey’s birthday parties. She was small and brown and tough as a fence post. She wore men’s work jeans and a straw hat and a man’s watch with a cracked face.
When I pulled into her gravel driveway, she was standing on her porch.
She looked at my car. She looked at my duffel bag on the passenger seat. She looked at me.
She wiped her hands on her jeans. She didn’t ask anything about the hospital. Not one word.
“Hands first,” she said. “Questions can wait till supper.”
She handed me a pair of cotton work gloves and walked me out into the orchard.
It was late March. The trees were just finishing their bloom. Pink petals all over the grass like somebody had thrown a party and forgot to clean up. Tiny green peaches the size of marbles were starting to show on the branches.
“Too many,” Ruth said. She reached up and pulled one off. Then another. Then another. They dropped on the ground. “Tree’ll try to grow every one. Wears herself out. Ends up with a hundred little sour peaches instead of thirty good ones.” She showed me. “You leave one every six inches. Pull the rest. It’s called thinning.”
“Doesn’t it hurt the tree?”
“It saves the tree,” Ruth said. “A tree trying to carry everything breaks her own branches.”
We thinned peaches for four hours. My shoulders ached. My hands blistered under the gloves. My mind, for the first time in months, went quiet.
Late in the afternoon, Ruth stopped beside a tree at the end of a row. It was gray and bare. No blossoms. No leaves. No little green peaches. Everyone else’s trees were covered. This one stood there like a skeleton.
“This one died?” I asked.
“Everybody thinks so,” Ruth said. “Hard freeze in February. Took her by surprise. Hired man wants to pull her out with the tractor.”
She took off one glove. She pressed her thumbnail into the bark of a low branch. She scraped. A little curl of gray came away.
Underneath, there was bright green.
“Brown means dead,” Ruth said. “Green means she’s living.” She put her glove back on. “She’s just taking her time. Some of ’em do. Leave her be. She’ll leaf out by May.”
I looked at that tiny strip of green under the gray bark.
I carried that sentence home with me.
Green means she’s living.
The weekends continued.
They didn’t stop after Easter. They didn’t stop after graduation. They didn’t stop when Mitch proposed to Avery that Christmas and my mother cried happy tears into her napkin for the first time in my life.
Every time the Lockhearts came, I left.
A locksmith came on a Tuesday in May and installed a keyed lock on the outside of my bedroom door. My mother carried the key on her key ring. When company came, my room was locked. With my things in it.
“So nobody wanders in,” she said.
My toothbrush went into a zip-top bag in the glove box of my car. So nobody would see two toothbrushes in the upstairs bathroom. My mail disappeared from the kitchen counter before Avery visited. My car wasn’t allowed to stay on our street. Not in the driveway. Not at the curb. Not even down the block.
The texts always came a few days ahead.
Be gone by 11.
Sometimes noon.
Once, for a Fourth of July cookout, 9 a.m.
I spent most of those weekends at Ruth’s. She never asked why I kept showing up. She just handed me gloves. In summer, we picked peaches. In fall, we pruned. In winter, she taught me to graft.
That’s when you take a cutting from one tree and join it to the rootstock of another. You cut both pieces at an angle, so the living layers under the bark line up. Then you bind them tight with tape and wait.
“The green has to touch the green,” Ruth said, holding my hands steady over a branch. “That’s all grafting is. You get the living part of one thing to touch the living part of another. If it takes, they grow into one tree. If it doesn’t, it dies.”
“How do you know if it took?”
“You wait,” she said. “And then one spring, she buds. And you know.”
I bought a yellow spiral notebook at the Dollar General in Clanton. In the back, I started keeping tally marks. One mark for every weekend I was ordered out of my own house.
Then I started adding dates.
Then years.
When I turned twenty, my mother started charging me four hundred dollars a month for room and board.
“You’re an adult now,” she said. “Adults pay their way.”
I was working full-time by then at a garden center in Pelham. Hollis Nursery and Landscape. I’d started out watering. Within a year, I was doing orders. Within two, contractors were asking for me by name. I knew which trees would survive an Alabama August and which ones would fold. I knew how to tell a sick root ball from a healthy one before it was out of the pot. I knew how to read a graft.
I paid my mother four hundred dollars a month.
I was paying rent for a room they could lock me out of.
One night, when I was twenty-one, I was drying dishes in the kitchen next to my mother.
