The Excellent Lombards(53)

Gloria covered her face and shook her head, which didn’t exactly answer the questions. “William,” she quavered, moving on to him. “You’re amazing. You’re practically grown up. You’re practically on your way to college. Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for being my friend.” He submitted to her embrace, placing his own hands on her back. At my turn she held my cheeks and one last time bore down into whatever there was to see of my personality. “Mary Frances, my Mary Frances. You’ll use your fierceness well, I know you will. Oh, my fierce Mary Frances.”

I looked at William through the hug. Was I fierce? Was he her friend? Was he crying? I wasn’t going to cry, I wasn’t.

Gloria had been a pair of hands, a sturdy back, a loving presence, in exchange for ten dollars an hour and a house, the highest-paid Lombard employee in the history of the orchard. Just like that she could leave us. We stood on the cottage porch waving her off, sobs in our throats, our arms wild flags. “Good-bye! Good-bye!”

When she turned onto the road my mother wiped her eyes, there were great purging exhales, and she blew her nose. “Do you suppose,” she managed, “do you think Stephen will feel free to come and visit now?”

My father was still waving even though Gloria was out of sight. He said, “Is there much to do to get the cottage ready for Philip?”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“Philip’s going to move in,” he said, continuing to wave at nothing.

I turned to my mother because it was surely she who was responsible for that plan.

“He can’t live with May Hill forever,” she said.



That night I happened into William’s room, the farewell comment of Gloria’s pricking my mind, and also the word forever applied to Philip’s living situation. William, Gloria had said, was practically in college. Assuming he got through the rest of high school, that is. I lay on his bed. He was at his desk, scrolling through the Posse Message Board. I said, “Do you really want to go?”

“Go where?”

“College.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But why?”

“Why?” When I didn’t elaborate on the question he said, “Imp, we’re going to college. You know that.”

“What for?”

He broke away from his work, turning in his chair to look at me. “Frankie—”

I sat up. I asked him, “What do we need to know that we can’t learn from Pa and Sherwood?”

His eyes, still dark brown as the river, widened.

“Who will pick the apples?” I said.

“Ah…the crew? It’s not like we’re out working night and day. There are, you know, Lombard Orchard employees.”

“I always pick after school.” This statement was somewhat although not completely true. William, though, hadn’t worked much for a few years because of his cushy tech job at the bike factory. When he was in seventh grade they’d started him at $12.50 an hour. They were lost, they said, without him. “I’m a fast picker,” I told him. “Papa even says so.”

“Uh-huh,” he said again. “That’s great.” He started to spin slowly in his chair. “Think of it this way.” He was taking tiny steps, a tap-dance circle on his plastic rug guard. “College is our rumspringa. Seeing the world so we can decide if we want to run the orchard. Or to get some education in case—”

“In case what?”

He swung around and stopped in front of me. “Sherwood and Pa can’t—”

“Can’t what?”

“You know how hard it is for them to make a decision, how they never talk to each other. How they don’t plan.”

“They can plan.”

“I don’t know. Ma says—”

He was talking to our mother about orchard affairs? “She says what?”

“I don’t know,” he said again. “She says the whole thing, the whole organization is maybe too complicated for—”

“Everyone,” I said scornfully, “knows it’s complicated.”

He started to turn in his chair once more, propelled by those little tappy steps. “We should see what it’s like to live in a place where people have gotten rid of their rotary phones. Join the twenty-first century.”

I said, “We can get a new phone.” He was in the nighttime of his slow spin, his back to me. “William?” I said his name as I used to, when I’d reverently asked any question of the boy who knew everything.

Instead of waiting for me to say more he started to spin very quickly, his feet sweeping the floor. Around and around he went. When I grabbed hold of his legs he and the chair jerked to a halt. “Stop spinning,” I cried.

His face, which I knew better than my own, all at once seemed swollen and ugly, his eyes flaring, his mouth wide open. “I’m not stopping!” he yelled. “You hear me?” But he had stopped. He was at a complete standstill. “I’m not,” he said more distinctly, “stopping.” I might have pointed out to him that he was mistaken in both speech and action because in fact he was no longer spinning. But who would I have been talking to? I ran out of the room and slammed my own door shut and turned out the lights and got into bed, covering my head with the pillow.