His mother and grandmother walked away into that awful place. Prison and hospital combined. A place of a thousand voices, none of them talking to each other. His grandmother curtained away in her white linoleum semicircle, waiting. Looking ahead to ten or twenty years of waiting.

She shouldn’t be here, Galen said. It’s better to maybe wander off and die than just wait here in a prison.

That’s true, Helen said. She’s still my mother.

She’s a bitch, Jennifer said. Who cares what happens to her.

Yeah, Helen said. Maybe you’re right.

What if Jennifer says that about you someday?

Huh, Helen said.

I wouldn’t do that, Mom.

You might. It’s true. You might. And that’s fine.

The engine was cooling off, pinging, and it seemed that all its heat was being transferred to the interior of the car. Galen’s entire body was a slick. The windows down, but no breeze, and the outside air almost as hot.

Galen opened his door and stepped out, dizzy. Jennifer followed, her face wet with sweat, hair up in a ponytail. We’re getting a place with air-conditioning, she said. I don’t care where the house is, or how big it is, but it has to have air-conditioning.

Galen walked in a slow circle in the sun. There was no shade. The black pavement radiating. Humans had invented all the shittiest ways to live. Rest homes, cars, pavement, stuck in deserts like this, places you wouldn’t want to live even one more day. It would have been a better plan to walk around naked and never invent anything. That way, you’d have to head for a creek or a lake or at least some trees. You’d never just stand around in a thousand-mile oven.

I can’t believe she’s here, Galen said. And I can’t believe this fucking pavement.

Whoa, Jennifer said.

I’m serious. Every square foot is nothing less than tragic. It’s a sign of how fundamentally stupid we all are.

Down with the pavement.

I’m serious.

I know. That’s why you’re a freak.

Galen kept his focus on the pavement, walked a tight circle, around and around with a feeling that the center would melt, a great vortex that would pull him down. We’re criminals, he said. Leaving her here.

Maybe you can get her to suck it.

Fuck you.

Not anymore. But I think Grandma would be into that. You could close those curtains and she could gum away at it and forget where she is.

What the fuck? Why are you like this?

You could come back an hour later and get it again, because she won’t remember. You could do it all day. Jennifer laughed.

Galen walked away toward the glass doors, but he was only partway there when his mother emerged.

She shouldn’t be here, he said. Even if she walks off and dies, it’s better than being here.

His mother ignored him and walked past. She got in and started the car, and he knew she’d leave without him, so he slid into the passenger seat, damp from his grandmother.

What was the amount on that check? his mother asked as they pulled onto the road.

It was enough, Helen said.

How much?

None of your business.

Well, I just want you to know this. I don’t want to see you or Jennifer ever again.

That’s not a problem.

I mean that. Not ever again. You are never to show up at the house again.

Like I said, that’s not a problem. It was the plan, in fact.

Yeah, Jennifer said. We already talked about it.

But the reason I’m telling you is in case that check doesn’t work out for you. If the check doesn’t work out, you’re going to want to come to the house.

The check will work.

But if it doesn’t, here’s the deal. If I ever see you again, you get nothing. But if you stay away, I’ll get Mom to write checks for Jennifer for college each semester.

Galen pounded the dashboard with his fist. So angry he couldn’t speak. He felt that if he spoke, he would hit his mother instead of the dashboard.

I’m not paying for anything expensive. Just a state school, but I’ll get Mom to write those checks if I never have to see you again.

Galen punched his own thighs. He was afraid of what he could do. He folded his arms in tight and closed his eyes and tried to just get through the time. Trapped here right next to her.

Chapter 18

The figs ripe. Hot still air thick with their scent. Galen in the tree pushing at a fig with both hands until its purple skin burst open in a seam, exposed, and he sucked at the meat, delicious fruit. The stickiness all over his face and hands.

Galen knew he was eating to cover his grief. He would never see Jennifer again. It felt as if a section of his chest had been removed, and in its place, a gravity hole becoming increasingly dense, an impossible weight.

He wrapped his legs tight around a limb, hung beneath it and walked out the limb with his hands, strung himself as far as he could to reach two figs, enormous and heavy, their bodies hot and slack from the sun. So ripe inside the skin had become translucent.

Galen, his mother called.

He thought of not answering. If he just never answered again, what would happen then?

Galen, she repeated. She’d come out the back door onto the lawn, carrying a tray of finger sandwiches.

Not the finger sandwiches, he said.

There you are, she said, but it didn’t sound the way it usually did. No delight in her voice, as there’d been only a few days ago, before the cabin. It sounded more now like she’d located a target.

I’m having figs for lunch, he said.

I have something to tell you.

Well I can hear from up here.

She set the tray down on the wrought-iron table. Galen could see the table’s leaf pattern, and it seemed lovely to him for the first time. Heavy and old, but lovely.

I’ve made a decision, she said.

I can’t wait to hear.

You were all my world once upon a time, she said. You really were. I wanted a baby. I don’t know why. And if I could go back now and make it never have happened, I certainly would. But for a time there, having a baby was a magical thing.

Thanks, he said. For that part about wanting to go back.

Shut up and listen. I’m giving you a gift right now. I’m letting you know the whole thing.

Galen wanted to scream, but he felt a little afraid, too, so he only readjusted lower on the limb, found a more comfortable position in a vee with one of the main trunks. Holding the two figs in one hand.

I saw the world opening. I’m not sure what I saw, exactly, or how I could have believed any of it, but maybe it was something like imagining how we’d play in the walnut orchard, playing tag through the trees. Yellow mustard and wildflowers, and laughter. Maybe something like that, from the best moments of my own childhood in the orchard.

She wasn’t looking at him. She was gazing off into the orchard, and she had her teacup held in both hands, but just floating there, not drinking from it.

This is sounding like an after-school special, he said.

You want to make everything small. That’s what you’ve done. You’ve tried to make everything small. But I’m going to continue on anyway, because this is important to me. It’s important to me to let you know, just this once.

Fine, he said.

There was some feeling about it, some feeling about you. It was that Christmas-morning feeling, something really as innocent and pure as that. What I imagined was joy. And I think what I wanted, really, was to remake my own childhood. I wanted to go back and fix everything and live it the way it should have been.

His mother still hadn’t looked at him. It was disconcerting.

There was supposed to be a man. And I thought I had found that man, but when I told him I was pregnant, I watched everything just fade and die. It was less than a minute. It really was that fast. Everything he had felt for me just went away.