"I was, I was, no, no, um, no," Roy sputtered, as Rico's face came into clearer view, illuminated like the moon's, dark on one side. "You scared me, Rico!"

The farm hand moved forward, his large frame nearly as tall as the ladders he climbed up and down all day. On this night Rico wore a wet, grimy tee shirt turban-like around his head and a pair of of jeans. His long hair was tied tightly in a pony tail, held in place with two sappy pieces of tree twine. And in the waist band of his pants was the handle of a very long knife.

"Didn't know your Pops can really bang the old buckets, eh?" Rico said, boredly exhaling the smoke of his cigarette out of his nose before spitting a large ball of snot sideways into an overgrowth of honeysucke. "Ya, back in the day when me and your old man was in a band together, he actually thought he was gonna be famous, like some fancy cat on the cover of Rollin-fuckin-Stones, or some crazy shit like that. I would tell him to lay off the fucking acid, but he loved that shit. He ain't the same guy I knew."

Roy went to speak but his dry mouth made him nearly gag as he tried to salivate.

"Ya, now he's just fucked up. Some of us got high, and some us found God, my man. Let me ask you something, Roy, do you believe in Jesus?" -- JV

It had been the last week in July and the peaches were pregnant with juice, the branches of the trees bending under their weight. During the day the humidity was insufferable. At 10 years-old, Roy wanted nothing more than to ride his Huffy into town with his friends from school, who would make the nearly seven mile trek for hamburgers and fries at the McDonald's near the K-Mart. But there was fruit to pick.

In the early morning when the breeze moved through the trees, the long leaves curling inward in a swirl of complaint, Roy and Sarah would help Poppas load the baskets onto the tractor's trailer while Mama, El and Rico trudged through the dew-covered earth to set up the ladders. Poppas said almost nothing during the routine. Roy had many theories for his father's fondness for silence, all incomplete yet somehow connected, like a scattering of letters in a crossword puzzle.

He knew the farm was not what his father had planned on doing with his life. Sometimes, long after the heat of the day was chased from the valley by night's approach, Poppas would retreat to the supply shed at the bottom of the hill where one summer they kept pigs and then, the next, chickens. Now it was full of drums of insecticides and greasy work gloves and broken peach baskets growing out of the mud floors like primitive trees. It was there, peering through the shed's tiny window, he watched his father sit on a crate and, two drum sticks in hand, begin beating on everything before him. It was percussive chaos, as a cake pan gave up a bang, an overturned basket produced a whick-whack, an oil can ting-tinged. Shirtless, sweating, his father threw his arms about in a blur of movement. He was drumming! And it sounded good, something tribal and rich with meaning, layered.

He snuck back to the shed several more times to watch his father. Sometimes Roy would just climb into the branches of nearby apple trees and listen. Who had taught his father how to play the drums? And why did he do it in secracy? He needed to know and decided after the seventh night of watching his father nearly drop from such exhaustive practice sessions, he would ask him. The next day.

As he climbed down from the apple tree he let go of the last branch with a start. "Whatcha doin' up there, critter?" It was Rico, his shadowy outline briefly illuminated by the swift flare of his cigarette being lighted. "You spyin on your Pops?" -- JV

Richard and Ellen - Rico and El, as the family came to call them - stayed for only one harvest season, but it seemed like a lifetime to Roy and Sarah.They were mostly somber, serious and focused, disciplined about time. They were tidy with the little room they shared. It was Roy's room. Roy had to bunk up with his little sister to accommodate the hired hands, but somehow he didn't resent it. He liked the way Rico and El spoke to him directly, asked him serious questions. Rico's pale blue eyes, frightening to Sarah, were like talismans to Roy. El's raspy yet gentle voice was somehow always calming. They were like hippie apostles.
Sometimes, out on the porch at night, Roy would find himself listening intently to El as she spun Biblical-sounding stories that he had never heard in Sunday school. Often, they ended with great plagues or apocalyptic cataclysms that fascinated Roy.
The couple went from interlopers to trusted friends over night, it seemed to Roy. Although there was something about them he could never quite put his finger on. He never learned much about them, where they came from, what they had done before, where they were going. While they had fast and thorough answers to philosophical questions, they tended to give vague replies to any personal queries.
Most nights that season, long after Poppas had retired with Roy and Sarah, Margaret would stay up with Rico and El. No one really knew what they talked about.
It wasn’t long before Poppas and Margaret started arguing. -- RJ

He was only eight at the time, but he remembered the day his father had hired Richard and Ellen to work on the farm. It was the early 70's, in Western Massachusetts, and they lived in a humid valley in the Berkshire mountains, where for a brief time in July and August the hills held onto the humidity just long enough for peaches the size of softballs to grow. "Take a bite of that 'leaner,' Poppas would say to the tourists station-wagoning down the Mohawk trail. He called them 'leaners' on account that you'd have to lean forward before biting into one, or else the syrupy juice would ruin whatever you were wearing.

The couple had come up the road on foot, which wasn't all that unusual back then. Hitchhiking, especially on the trail, was actually fairly common. But there was nothing ordinary looking about the pair. He was a tree of a man, so tall and thick, with a nest of wavy hair and sunburned muscular arms for branches. He wore a white tee shirt beneath denim overalls, with a box of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve, cradled above his right bicep.

She was so thin you could lose her by squinting. Sarah came out of the peach house and joined Roy by his side. "That lady's dress is sparkling." Ellen's poncho was covered in tiny little mirrors that refracted the bright midday light, what seemed like a thousand twinkles with every step. Her black hair galloped down her back and completely covered her ass with a jet-black curtain. Her eyes were hidden behind the largest pair of mirrored sunglasses he had ever seen.

"Hello there critters," boomed the tree. "Your folks around."

Before Roy could answer his sister offered, "They're out pickin'." It felt like a secret she shouldn't have shared.

The shimmering woman bent down and put her face in front of Roy's, his reflection distorted and tiny in her mirrored lenses. "Can you tell them they got company?" -- JV

"I mean... is she holding up? How are you? Does the room seem okay? Is she talking, or is she just doing that silent thing she does?"
Roy words washed over Sarah. She let a long moment pass before replying. "Everything's okay. Everything's going to be okay. Mom's resting." There was silence on the other end.
"Okay," Roy managed. "Tell her I love her." His voice quavered slightly. "And I'll check on her tomorrow after work." Pause. "God, it's so fucking beautiful out here," Roy sputtered. "How could I forget that."
"You okay, Roy?"
"Yeah. Sure. I guess so."
"I need to tidy things up here. We'll talk later?"
"Right. Yeah. Talk later. Bye." Roy hung up before Sarah could say goodbye.
It's just as well, Sarah thought as she folded her phone back into her purse. He had sounded a bit drunk, morose. Sarah had never liked talking with her brother when he got in his dark little moods.
She turned to her mother, now breathing slowly with occasional sighs, and gently pushed a few stray hairs back from her forehead. Looking down on the her mother's strangely serene face, Sarah thought of the good years they had. When things were normal. When Poppas was still around. Before her mother found God. -- RJ

Roy wanted to know how things were. "How's she doing?" he slurred slightly. He sounded as though he were on the other end of the earth.
Looking over at her mother, now with her head on the bed's pillow and eyes closed, Sarah felt a strange mix of emotions. That old, recognizable migraine with all the painful memories it brought. But then, what was this? Her mother next to her, resting quietly, vulnerable, no longer in charge. She looked almost like a little girl in repose. Sarah felt an unfamiliar tenderness. -- RJ

Margaret stood at the doorway of her room with her daughter behind her. It felt like she was a blockage for her escape rather than a supportive presence. The walls were Pepto-Bismal pink and the lineolium tile was scuffed and coming up in places. The window afforded a view of the green dumpsters behind the building near where a group of nurses now exhaled cigarette smoke and steam into the frigid winter air. On the wall a yellowed, homemade greeting card adorned with crayon read, "Get well soon, Grandma." Linda, the stocky nurse, her hair straw-colored no doubt from a cheap store-bought bleach job, ripped the card down with one chubby hand.

"Now, here we are. Isn't this nice Margaret? We'll let you decorate it the way you like, dear. And I think we even have a television in storage. Mrs. Cuffey's kids never picked it up after she...left us, so you're welcome to it, dear. Easy peasy. Would that be nice?"

It was then, right then, that Margaret realized she had made a mistake by living this long. God knew it didn't have to come to this. After Sam died, exhausted from four years of not enough oxygen, pain medicine or purpose, she could have taken her own life. If only she had loved him in the end. If only she had been a woman driven mad with grief, she might have been capable of it. Several of her friends who were widowed before her died of broken hearts within months of their husbands' deaths. She had waited for a similar fate, but sweet death didn't smell any love in her heart. Like the neglected trees in the old orchards she spent 40 years tending, the loveless were left to rot.

"Mom, would you like that? Mom?"

"What?"

"A television. Would you like Linda to bring in a television?"

"No. I just want some paper and a pen. And a nap. I need to lie down. Now."

Sarah's cell phone began ringing from in her purse. She frantically fished around for it before finally dumping its contents out on the bed her mother now sat on, hands folded in her lap, staring out the window. Linda came back in the room with a small notepad and a pen and quickly exited.

It was Roy calling. Dammit, he would be drunk. Sarah thought about not answering it. The estrangement between them had deepened around what to do with their mother. Once she died she was certain she would probably never see Roy again, and she was resigned to this, even relieved by it.

She hadn't forgiven the old woman either. But she wasn't stuck like Roy. She was unstuck. She was moving. Forward. Thousands upon thousands of dollars of therapy had allowed her to remember and then decidedly forget. Only when the migraines came, like the one she now felt filling her head with a sickening pressure, was she back there, squinting in the August heat, skin itching from peach fuzz, afraid...--JV

Henry rolled his chair – he called it his limousine – back through the sliding glass doors. He didn’t have to look down, didn’t have to navigate really, just kept his eyes on the new woman. “Make way for the limousine,” he would often call to orderlies as he wheeled into the dull linoleum and tile lobby. Today though, he was silent. There was a new game afoot, a new story to unravel.
Ignoring Linda’s hen pecking, Henry pulled up to the side of the reception desk. He rested his arm on the low counter and looked over at the new addition. Who was this woman with the sharp, high cheekbones, the delicate, long fingers, the wrinkles like river deltas radiating from the edges of her mouth, the smoldering glow in her dark eyes? She had a strange wildness about her, Henry thought. She must have been a beauty once.
Henry didn’t try to hide his gaze. He wanted her to see him looking, wanted her to notice. This was what made living here tolerable after all. Every week or two, a new one came in. They brought their histories, lifetimes of tears and joy and anger and love and loss and dreams and nightmares. Henry always wanted in.
More often than not though, the intrigue faded quickly. The new charges were riddled with Alzheimer’s or they had stopped caring or they were lost in their own static or they were just plain dull.
She was different. No way to hide it, Henry thought. Before one of the candy striper ladies led her and her daughter away for a tour of the place, she glanced over at Henry. For the briefest of moments their eyes met. There was anger in her gaze, but something else too. Fear, Henry thought. She was scared. - RJ

"Henry! Henry! Come in here! You are going to catch a death of cold!"

Fat bitch. Who do you think you're talking to? That's what he wanted to say. Linda was his least favorite nurse after all. One of these young women who talked to all the residents in a louder than necessary voice, like provincial Americans speak to non-English speaking foreigners. We're not all deaf you dumb fucking cow!

He didn't say any thing of the sort. He just pretended not to hear her, taking the last few drags of the cigarette he was't permitted to have. That's when he noticed her.

The wind blew through her white hair like a gust through a snow drift. The younger woman with her, undeniably her daughter, kept trying to hold her arm, but the woman with the wild, snowy hair kept shrugging it off. "Sarah, if I needed a damn cane, I'd buy one!"

He admired her spunk immediately, but that admiration was bittersweet in his quick realization that the staff of Pine Grove would break her. Probably quickly. Poor old gal. His welcome to new "residents," who were lucid, contained a laundry list of survival tips, which he would surely attempt to impart to this woman, whose tall build and graceful features, whose pin-straight posture and clean lines, made her instantly out of place in the home's dreary reception area. Yes, although it probably woulnd't save her, he would share what he had learned over the last five years:

1) Never ever eat the pork chop dinner
2) Only take half of any of the pills they give you
3) Take walks when ever you find an unlocked door
4) Never play chess with Bill
5) Never sass Ms. Beth
6) 3 AM is the best time to sneak out
7) Make a copy of any keys you can lay your hands on during the weekly Wal-Mart trip
8) Don't watch television
9) Avoid Dr. Stevenson
10) Don't tell anyone they hit you.

Right now though, it all seemed distant. Pine Grove, the past might as well be tiny stars flickering in the slate sky overhead. Right now, Roy just wanted to breathe. The sharp night air felt good. The ground underfoot, hard with frost, crunched with each step. Maybe, Roy thought, he would start running through the orchards, over the sloping hills, just keep running. Never come back. -- RJ

Three more shots sent him outside for air. He took deliberate steps, his boots crunching on the gravel drive and then slightly slipping on the little pockets of ice on the trail leading to the orchard. As a child he had loved smashing the iced-over puddles with rocks from the stone wall, and he and Sarah would venture out onto the larger puddles, scaring each other as the spider-webbing cracks sounded like snapping tree branches echoing off the barn's steep sloped roof.

"What are you going to do with her, Roy? Just throw her in a home? She insisted we not do that to Dad, but we're going to do that to her?" Sarah had been furious. Roy had actually checked to make sure his seatbelt was on when her vocal pitch started to ascend and he realized she wasn't watching the road nearly as much as is prudent for safe driving.

They had gotten together for another lunch. It seemed to him that's what people of a certain class did when confronted with some form of domestic crisis, convene a series of meetings, usually over food, under the guise of finding a credible solution, usually by throwing money at the problem. Sarah could have been a consultant on this method of conflict resolution.

When her teenage son started smoking pot, she paid to send him to boarding school. When she suspected David, her husband, was sleeping with the real estate broker they had used to buy their house, she hired an expensive private detective to take hundreds of inconclusive pictures of him running errands, most of them on Sarah's behalf. And when her body started responding to the unkind urgings of Earth's gravitational pull, she more or less purchased the breasts and ass of a 23 year old. But suddenly money, it seemed, was a shortcut in solving the problem of what to do with their mother. Suddenly she insisted on taking the high road.

"Sarah, there is no way she can stay in that house, not one month longer. She will be fine at Pine Grove. It's a good facility."

Facility. The word had all of the charm of a just-pulled hand grenade. It made him think of Lysol and pee and crazy people. The government lab that he worked in was a facility. No, Pine Grove was not a very pleasant place, he knew this. But he decided he could put her there without remorse. Especially after what she had done to him. --JV

Roy and his sister had driven over in separate cars, alone in their thoughts. Coming up the long dirt drive, Roy's late-model Buick had soaked up the ruts, heaving like a pleasure boat cutting through whitecaps. The twisted, bare apple trees had flashed by in the headlights.

Roy thought of this as he worked the sponge across the wall.

Why not take his time, he thought. Why not give the old place an honorable sendoff, a last hurrah? Why not really scrub those damn walls, look around a bit, soak in some memories? He dropped the sponge in the bucket.

Walking to the pantry, Roy ran his right hand along the narrow hallway wall. The faded wallpaper's crazy little red robins and jays were still perched on berry bushes and slender branches after all these years. "This is for you guys," Roy said softly as he reached into a small cabinet. He pulled out a fifth of Old Turkey, untouched since his father's last ambulance trip six years ago. With a nod to the wallpaper aviary, Roy poured a finger's worth into a cloudy tumbler and threw it back. - RJ

Her instructions were ridiculous, yet, perhaps out of guilt he walked slowly to the pantry for a plastic bucket. The new owners -- who he was sure would refer to the property in sentences like, "We'll be down at The Farm this weekend," and "You both should join us at The Farm this fourth." -- would no doubt hire a battalion of cleaners to nearly gut the place before another army of hired helped carted them in on moving day.

The warm water ran down the faded paint under the glare of a single bulb, vulgar in an ugly shadeless lamp. He watched his ten foot shadow fold where the floor met the opposing wall, his giant silhouetted arms moving the sponge up and down, the suds from the dish liquid mixing with decades of nicotine leaching from the cracked and chipping plaster. - JV

Roy hadn't come around much the last few years. He didn't leave the bank until well after dark most days, and the twins always seemed to be catching something. But he knew no one had scrubbed the old house’s walls, let alone dusted them, since Godknowswhen.

He hadn't even nodded in assent to his mother's request, only met her gaze with blank eyes. She had smiled slightly, her lips creasing almost imperceptibly. -- RJ

He imagined the deep gouges in the chairs upholstered arms were made just then, as if the seemingly dusty rag-doll of a person rocking back and forth before him had just dug in with her yellowed nails, clear through to the creaking wooden frame. A woman grasping at what's left.

It wasn't true. He came expecting, half hoping, for some clawing and scratching that simply didn't happen. The old bird didn't have any fight left in her.

The fabric had worn away over the inglorious span of 50 years. Disintegrated, really, under the sheer weight of historic routine. Roy couldn't reconstruct in his mind what the furniture had even looked like when he was a child, let alone imagine the rocker in 1959 when his father had proudly supervised the two farm hands as they hoisted it from the back of the green Ford F-1 pickup truck that had more or less fossilized right near the mound of earth where the barn had been. Like the truck, the chair had always been a pulverized artifact, its sentimentality and charm beaten out of it by the numbness in which he guessed she now took comfort.

"Mom, Sarah is here." His mother gave a faint nod, closing her eyes as she did so, looking tiny and resigned in her tattered grey sweater. "Let's not keep her waiting, huh? I've put your bags in the car."

As she shuffled through the kitchen of the farm house -- now emptied of the old pine table and the chipped family china, of the old post office clock his father had restored and the old tin bread box once full of Pecan Sandies and marshmallow Pinwheels -- she stopped and spun slowly round, as graceful as a tiny pink jewelry box ballerina.

"Scrub the walls," she said. He had no answer before the ancient wooden door creaked gently shut behind her. - JV