Keel never came in. Instead, my old man showed up at my tables. He was tanked.

"What should I get you, beer or coffee?" I said.

He thought for a second, then waved his hand in the air. "Get me coffee. I had enough to drink."

When I came back to the table with two cups of coffee, my dad said, "Were you busy tonight?"

"Usual dinner crowd," I said, and sat down. I put my elbows on the table and held my coffee cup up between both my hands. My dad sat back in his chair and curled one hand around his cup. He spent so much time outside his skin was deep red. I thought his eyes looked like cool water in all that fire.

"Jesus Christ," he said. "This place is a G.o.dd.a.m.n hole."

I didn't think he came in just to insult my workplace, but I didn't know what he was doing there. Then I figured he just wanted to talk, because he said, "Yeah, s.h.i.t, Vangie, I admire you coming back here night after night. It's not easy coming back to a place you hate. Jesus Christ, I know that."

"It's all right," I said. "It's a job."

"Are you doing all right, Vangie?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean are you doing all right? Are you okay here?"

I panicked for a second, because I thought maybe he somehow knew something about Kevin Keel, but then I looked at his face and saw he didn't know anything. He was looped and he wanted to talk. That was all.

"I'm all right, Dad. I'm doing all right."

"Well, I never see you anymore."

"I'm okay."

"Truck running good?"

"The truck's fine."

I tried to meet his eyes so I could nod at him, but he just kept staring off. He got like that sometimes when he drank. Forlorn. I'd been seeing the look for years.

"You don't have to worry about me," I told him.

"Ah, the h.e.l.l," he said. "I don't have anything better to do."

For a little while I let myself wonder what it would be like to have a father I could talk to, but I stopped myself. Still, there was something about my dad that I couldn't deny. A lot of times when I was little, he was the one who came to find me hiding under the bed after I got yelled at by my mom. If I was crying, he'd tell me to stop, since it made my blue eyes all red. I didn't know how he knew something was wrong with me that night, but he did. It meant something to me just to have him sitting there.

My dad and I sat together a little longer, not talking but just sitting. When I started to get customers again, my dad stood up, left me a five-dollar tip for his cup of coffee, and said, You take care, honey. Then he was gone.

AFTER THAT one night, I never went back to Dreisbach's. Whatever else I had to live through, I did not have to go through dreading Kevin Keel every day. Dreisbach's was a good job, though, and I hated to see it go begging, so I called June up and told her to apply.

"They'll need someone right away," I said. "They'd be too big, but I could give you my uniforms."

"What happened?"

"It's a long story," I said. "What do you think? Do you think you want the job?"

"It's got to be better than sewing shirt collars," June said. "But what are you going to do? Are you sure you want to quit?"

"I already quit," I said. "It's done. I'm going to hire on at the orchard."

I didn't say anything to her about Kevin, and I knew I wouldn't. I didn't want her to know how I'd drawn our lives together in a circle, hers and his and mine. I did tell her about how long Del was going to be in detox.

"You shouldn't be alone," she said. "Come out and stay over. Ray and Luke are in Potter County all next weekend."

"I don't know. I don't think so."

"Oh, come on. We'll get stoned. It'll be like the old days."

I told her I'd come out if I could, and then I hung up the phone. All I wanted to do was sleep, but when I did try to sleep, I could not stop hearing Keel's voice.

Good p.u.s.s.y doesn't just lie there.

Is it sore?

I'm almost done.

I could not get those words out of my mind, and I decided June was right-I should not be alone. Even though she was in some ways the last person I wanted to see, because she was connected to Kevin, she was still my best friend. So I made a promise to myself that no matter what I felt like when the day came, I would go and spend time with her. It seemed worth a few lies to keep her friendship and not have her know what I'd done.

That night I could not sleep, so I got up and went down to the kitchen. I didn't know what to do with myself. I played a couple of hands of solitaire, which seemed like the kind of thing a person should do if they were up late and couldn't sleep. But it didn't interest me, and after a while I stopped and just sat instead, playing with the salt and pepper shakers. I hadn't moved anything on the table since Del left. There was a grocery list he'd made for me for the next time I went shopping so I wouldn't forget the foods he liked. The list was all written in his bad spelling: frys or tots, hamburger, lunch meet, cap crunch, corn, razors and shave cream, min. steak, ravioly. The list was written on the back of an old note from him that said dont do dishes I'll do when I get up. At the time, I'd done what the note asked and left the dirty dishes for him-and then ended up washing them all a few days later when they were still sitting in the sink and starting to stink.

I both liked and didn't like seeing the list and the note. I liked seeing them because they were proof that Del had been here, that we had shared some sort of life, and I didn't like them because they made me wonder if he was coming back. In any case, seeing his handwriting made me feel alone.

Dels bone-handled knife also lay on the table. He carried it almost all the time, and I wondered why he hadn't taken it with him the night he disappeared. No matter how many times I saw that knife on the table or fished it out of Del's pocket before I washed his jeans, it always surprised me, and it always made me wonder. When Del carried it, did he think he would need to use it, or was it the kind of thing that just having it with you meant you surely would not need it? Did he believe he could use it against a person? Even if I'd had a knife when I was with Kevin Keel, I didn't know if I would have been able to use it.

The knife scared me, but I picked it up and released the catch-careful because the last thing I wanted was a gash in my hand and more physical pain. I studied the blade and the handle a long time. I tried holding it different ways and felt the weight of it against my fingers. Then I pressed the blade back down with the palm of my hand against the blunt side until I could latch it again.

I knew so little about Del. I knew what his face and body looked like, I knew what his voice sounded like, I knew how he screwed and I knew how he slept, but I knew nothing about him. I knew a few things, yes-how much he hated his old man, that he liked to draw and hated to hunt-but that was all. If I ever asked him what he was like when he was little, he'd say, "I don't know. A regular kid. I don't remember." Whenever he did tell me some kind of story, it was about a time he stole something or got in trouble. I knew nothing of how he got to be the person he was with me.

But I didn't know how I got to be the person I was, either.

19.

AT Parmelee Orchard, I didn't need to fill out an application or have an interview-the place hired anyone who showed up in the orchard yard. Anyone crazy enough to pick over a ton of pears a day for minimum wage could have a job.

When my dad found out what I was doing, he said, "Jesus Christ, Vangie, that kind of work'll break your back if you do it all your life."

"I'm not going to do it all my life."

"Be glad you have your diploma, then, and don't have to. Women who work like that-that's why they look the way they do. They're wore out."

When he said it, I thought he was trying to discourage me, but by the end of the first day of work, I knew he had just been telling me the truth. I had to pick about one hundred bags of pears a day-twenty-five hundred pounds -just to make minimum wage, and I did not get anything beyond minimum wage unless I broke the hundred-bag mark. That was the amount of fruit the orchard set as its daily standard for ground crew. Even though the standard was a little less for ladder crew-eighty bags -it was lucky for me they put most of the women on ground crew. At least we did not have to lug old, rotting wood ladders through the orchard rows.

When you picked a pear, you did not tug it or yank it. You lifted it. The pear was attached to the tree by a ball-and-socket joint, "the same kind of joint you have in your hip," the orchard boss told us. To pick the pear, you lifted until that joint broke. The stem/leg came away with the pear, and the hip stayed on the tree. The joint was the easiest thing to break if you knew how, and not so easy if you didn't. Of course I became expert at it. Every pear I picked, I slipped into the picking sack I wore strapped around my neck and waist. When I had a full sack, I emptied the pears into one of the packing crates in the orchard rows, and the foreman punched my count card.

That picking sack was a h.e.l.l of a thing. It was really what made the job hard. The sack was said to hold twenty-five pounds of pears, and I knew from the feel of it that it held at least that amount. But if I had a few extra pears in there-if the foreman sent me back to the trees because he thought my bag needed a few more pears to level off- I knew I could easily be carrying twenty-six or twenty-seven pounds. That was all to the orchard's advantage, because they were only paying me for twenty-five. But I guessed if I wanted a job with an exact science, I probably shouldn't have been working at Parmelee Orchard.

When my sack was full of pears, it was easy to want to arch my back and give in to the weight, especially if I'd been working a few hours. Joe Spancake, the foreman, was always after us to walk straight up, and he harangued us when we dumped off our pears.

"Don't be walking like pregnant women, now. Pull your hips in under you and your backs won't hurt so much."

Most of the time I was good about not arching, but when I was tired or wasn't thinking, I gave in to the bag. If Joe caught me, he'd cinch the picking bag tighter to my waist so the weight would be as close to my body as possible, and so the tightness would remind me.

"That ought to do you for a while," he'd say.

After two days, I could clear out the bottom of a tree in a few minutes, so Joe turned me and a couple other women out into the rows first, and we set the pace for the whole crew. I got so I could pick with both hands going, my eyes scanning the branches for the next pear, bringing the green fruit into my sack by feel. It was hard to pick that fast and talk, so I really did not talk to any of the other women on the crew until breaks. By the end of the third day I broke the hundred bags a day mark with 106 bags of pears, and by the start of my second week at work, I was picking over 120 bags a day-over three thousand pounds of pears.

I started picking at seven in the morning and worked on through to four-thirty, with a half hour for lunch and two fifteen-minute breaks. In the morning, the dew was so heavy on the gra.s.s that my feet got soaked and the skin of my toes turned white and peeled from the dampness. My dad told me to get waterproof work boots, and that helped that end of things, but there was nothing I could do about the way the straps of my picking sack dug into my neck. Oh, I could wrap a towel around the straps to try to pad them, but in a little while the towel was wet and would rub at my neck anyway But I would not quit. Something in me liked to work that hard. My fingers got nicked and rough from the picking, I got calluses on my neck from where the straps of the picking sack rubbed, and I could feel how strained my neck and back were sometimes, but that was all part of it. I could do the work, no matter how hard, and something about that made me glad.

Because the monotony of the day would have grown if I only looked forward to its end, I learned to enjoy the bits that could be enjoyed: the cool breeze that came through the orchard rows in the first part of the morning; the good taste of the first green pear I ate during the day; the time in the morning when the coolness stopped and sun warmed my back between the straps of my picking bag; the curious way my arms and hands felt at the end of the day, after picking for eight hours-so light I might have flown away. On our water breaks, Joe Spancake sometimes brought his dogs into the rows, and if I had a chance to sit for fifteen minutes-drinking warm water from a shared cup, leaning back against my sack and hugging on a dog-I felt happy. I did not think about anything except how good it was to sit on the warm ground in the shade of a pear tree, or how much I loved whatever crazy dog was by me-the Lab dark as a Hershey bar, or the golden one who liked to put his big front paws on my sleeves. Kevin Keel did not enter my mind, and Del's overdose did not enter my mind, and my own lies did not enter my mind. I didn't think of anything that hurt.

The orchard wasn't anything like Noecker's. Even though I picked pears all day long and carried over a ton of them around on my belly each day like I was pregnant with the lumpiest, greenest, hardest baby, I never stopped liking pears. They were the best thing to cool thirst on a hot afternoon. In some ways, eating a green pear was even better than drinking water, because the taste of a green pear was easy going down in a way that the metal taste of the orchard water was not. Sometimes we found yellow pears under the trees, splitting open in brown stripes, and some women on the crew coveted them. Not me. I only wanted green.

THOUGH DEL was not permitted telephone calls, he was allowed to write, and not long into his treatment, I started getting letters. The first ones were short and were about what his days were like, but it was not long before he started writing about s.e.x. After he started that, I didn't hear too much about group anymore, or about how he had to wash the floors as part of his communal contribution. Instead he wrote: G.o.d I miss having s.e.x with you and 69 too. When you have my c.o.c.k in your mouth and you hum, I don't know why that does it for me but it does every time. My c.o.c.ks hard just remembering. As days go on all I can think about is when I will see you again. What is the first thing you want me to do Vangie? Will you want me to lick your p.u.s.s.y untill you come? Sometimes I think what its like when I have my toungue inside you and I almost come from thinking of it.

Well Vangie are you wet now? I've re-read your last letter a few times and even though I know what your gonna say I get a hard c.o.c.k for you every time. I miss your smell and taste of your p.u.s.s.y its like I need it or I can't sleep right. Miss you and love you. Your lover, Del.

I read his letters over, too, and sometimes they turned me on, and sometimes I thought, G.o.d, all we talk about is f.u.c.king. The letters made me feel both close to Del and farther away from him than ever. I tried to explain to him what I meant, and he said this: Its hard to talk about things because I'm here but, I understand what your saying. No it is not just f.u.c.king between us, though I miss that. To me you are ideal. No one knows me better than you and I know you are the only girl I ever really loved. I said that word before to others but, it was wrong. I know that now. You can put things better than me but I hope you understand me now. If not we will have to talk about things when I get back.

Other than that I miss your kisses and your warm wet p.u.s.s.y and you sucking my c.o.c.k! Ha ha, no I miss everything about you. I promise that when I get done here you'll trust me and things will be different. I hope you f.u.c.k the h.e.l.l out of your self and come for me. Maybe you'll come all over the next letter you write me. I love you, Del.

And after I healed, I did m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e, over and over. I wanted to prove to myself that my body was the same as before. Those o.r.g.a.s.ms were just for me, though. I never did come on a piece of paper to send to Del.

20.

LUKE and Ray kept changing the weekend they were going to Potter County, so when I finally went out to stay with June, it was a month after the night I f.u.c.ked her brother. I was long done with my antibiotics, and the little tears in my skin had healed. The little split at the base of my c.l.i.toris had healed that way-a tiny forked place.

I did not have to tell June anything about the OD, because by then she already knew the story, like everyone in Mahanaqua: Del had been found in someone's yard after he walked away from a party.

"Do you hear from him a lot?" June asked. "Is he doing all right?"

"He's all right. They're making him talk about his feelings."

"What was going on with him?"

"I don't know. I'd be the last one to know."

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know what I mean," I said. "Tell me about you."

"Vangie."

"I don't want to talk about it," I said. "I came out to get stoned with you. You talk."

"What do you want to know?"

"Everything," I said.

"All right. I stopped it all for a while. How's that?"

"What did you stop?"

"All of it. He was doing crazy stuff. Luke. So I stopped everything. Went home for a couple days."

She said the three of them had been at a party and Luke kept trying to kiss her in the upstairs hallway, even though Ray was just downstairs. When she'd pulled away from him, Luke just laughed at her. Later, when she went outside for air, Luke followed her and tried to pull her to him again.

"I said to him, 'Don't you feel anything? Ray's just inside. He's not stupid.' And he said, 'He's not stupid, but he doesn't know a thing about you.' "

"What did you do?"

"I told him I wasn't the one who started it. And he said, 'You didn't turn it down, either.' I didn't sleep with him for two weeks after he said that."

"But you're sleeping with the two of them now."

"I know."

She stopped talking then, and we just sat there at the table, drinking. The whole house was quiet.

"Why don't you leave Ray?" I said. "You haven't ever really loved him, have you?"

"I love him. I don't love him the way I love Luke, but I care for him."

"They're brothers."

"They were both strangers to me."

"June," I said. I waited a bit and then I said, "You can't keep playing the game."