All he could really remember was the faint, sweet smell of apple blossoms and a pair of rough, weathered hands lifting him onto someone’s hip. If she cared, why didn’t she fight to keep him? If she didn’t care, why leave him anything at all? I’m not selling, Caleb said finally, surprising even himself. Not until I see it.
There was a brief pause on the line. Just long enough to feel calculated. Of course, the man replied smoothly. But our offer won’t stand forever. After the call ended, Caleb walked three blocks to the Greyhound station and bought a one-way ticket west. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t being placed somewhere. He was choosing where to go.
The Greyhound dropped Caleb at a sunbleleached stop outside Peyonia just afternoon. The town looked the way small western towns often do. Quiet, stubborn, holding on. A feed store with a faded John Deere sign. A diner advertising green chili burgers. Pickup trucks angled along Main Street like they’ved been parked there since 1987.
The Mercer orchard sat another 12 mi out, past stretches of brittle grassland and irrigation ditches running low. Caleb borrowed directions from a cashier who eyed him with mild curiosity and said, “That old place?” Thought nobody owned it anymore. By the time he reached the property line, the sky felt enormous and indifferent overhead.
The first thing he noticed was the silence. No hum of sprinklers, no rustle of healthy leaves, just wind pushing through dry branches with a hollow rattling sound. The farmhouse leaned slightly to the left. Its white paint long surrendered to sun and weather. The porch steps sagged in the middle. A barn door hung crooked on one hinge.
The orchard beyond it looked less like rows of trees and more like a graveyard. gnarled trunks, brittle limbs, bark split by years of drought. This was it. This was what she’d left him. Caleb stepped between two rows of trees, boots crunching over hardpacked soil. He crouched and pressed his palm against the ground. It felt hot and stubborn, like it had forgotten how to be soft.
