The Day Sixty Neighbors Picked Grandma’s Peaches

I knew that. I had seen the bruised fruit in the grass. I had told myself it did not matter to her. I found out on that porch that I had been wrong.

My name is Lorna Crabtree. I am 45 years old, and I manage a school cafeteria.

In the summer I run the free lunch program out of the same kitchen, so I am up at five most mornings and on my feet till two.

My daddy was Grandma’s oldest boy. He died in 2015, a heart attack in his own pickup in the church parking lot.

After that, Dewayne was the only one of her children still living close by.

I want to be fair to my uncle, because the rest of this story is not kind to him, and he is not a bad man. He is a tired one.

Dewayne is 62. He has run a backhoe for the county for thirty-one years.

Both his knees are bone on bone, and the doctor has been after him to get them replaced, but he cannot afford the time off.

He has mowed Grandma’s place every Saturday since Granddaddy died, eleven years now. He fixes her gutters and her well pump and her porch rail.

He drives her to the foot doctor. And I do not think anybody had said thank you to him in a long time.

So I understood where it came from. I did. A man that worn out hears “can you help me pick the peaches” and all he can hear is one more week of work.

But he did not say “I can’t.” He said they were not worth picking. He said let the deer have them. He said it to his mother about the trees she had kept alive since before he could drive.

I sat with Grandma after the mower went quiet and Dewayne rode it off down the road toward his place. She picked up her tea and set it back down without drinking.

“He’s right, I guess,” she said. “It’s a lot of work for a lot of peaches.”

“Grandma, do you want them picked?”

She looked out the side window toward the orchard. You could see the first row from where she sat, the branches hanging low with fruit, a few already gone soft on the ground.

“I just hate to see them wasted,” she said. “Your granddaddy used to say a peach on the ground is a prayer nobody answered.”

I could have gone after Dewayne right then. I could have called him that evening and told him what I thought of how he talked to his mother. My mouth wanted to.

I didn’t, because they were Grandma’s trees and she wanted them picked, not a fight.

If I picked a fight with Dewayne, she would spend the rest of the summer feeling like she had caused it. That was the last thing she needed.