The Peach Rebellion - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

WENDELIN VAN DRAANEN was a classroom teacher for many years before turning to writing full-time. Her first Sammy Keyes mystery, Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief, won the coveted Edgar Award. She is also the author of many beloved stand-alone novels, including Flipped, The Running Dream, Wild Bird, and The Secret Life of Lincoln Jones. She lives in Central California with her husband. You can read more about her work online at WendelinVanDraanen.com or follow her on Twitter, Tumblr, or Instagram at @WendelinVanD--or on Facebook: @SammyKeyesBooks.
 

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1

Peggy

Reunion

Each year, as the sweet smell of peaches filled the June air and ripened into summer, I found myself looking for Ginny Rose Gilley. For seven summers, I held on to a fading hope that she’d show up at our orchard, just like she had the summers I’d turned seven, eight, and nine.

The first summer she didn’t come I was devastated.

Where was she? How was I going to survive harvest without her?

Growing peaches may sound romantic, but when your family owns twenty acres of them, reality is quick to replace fantasy, and when picking season is in full swing, farms all over need help with harvest, including ours. Especially ours. There’s no shaking a peach tree to get the fruit down, or using a machine to harvest it. Peaches need hand picking, and every summer field workers swarm in to help.

The summer I turned ten, pickers came, but Ginny Rose and her father did not. That left me spending long, hot days sorting peaches in the field with strangers, and my family certainly didn’t fill the void. Bobby, who was twelve and full of himself, and Doris, who was thirteen and full of spite, bossed me around, while Father ran the crew and Mother gave birth to twins.

“They’re boys,” I heard Father say when Willie and Wesley were born, his breath gusting out on a big sigh of relief, as though he could see himself resting at some future date.

Mother, on the other hand, seemed condemned to never rest again. Those babies cried. And fussed. And cried some more. “Boys,” I heard her mutter, and in it was a whole wide world of weary.

My mother had been my only ally. Oh, my grandmother Nonnie, who lived with us, used to be, but the older she got--or maybe the older I got--the more she seemed to disapprove of me. And now they were both overoccupied with the twins and had little patience for my misery.

“They’ve surely moved on,” Mother said that first summer, when I complained about missing Ginny Rose. “Maybe they’ve gone back to Oklahoma. You should hope for them that they’ve found something better than fieldwork,” she said, changing Willie’s diaper.

“But Ginny Rose is my friend,” I whimpered. “My best friend!”

“You have plenty of friends, Peggy,” Nonnie said, changing Wesley’s.

“Not like her!” I wailed.

Nonnie raised an eyebrow in Mother’s direction, indicating her disapproval at my tone. Nonnie is Father’s mother, and that eyebrow of hers has done my mother in on more than one occasion.

“Well,” Mother said to me, ignoring the eyebrow as she finished pinning the diaper tight, “friendship won’t feed their family, and that’s the same for us. Now go out there and do your part.”

I did do my part. From dawn to dinner, I sorted peaches brought down by the field hands, hauled buckets of drinking water out to the orchard, and helped load wooden lug boxes of fruit high on a truck bound for the cannery. I did my part until peach fuzz coated my arms and face, until it permeated every pocket, every seam, every fiber of my being. I did my part until the trees were bare and the sickening rot of fruit on the ground buzzed with flies. I did my part until I never wanted to taste or touch or smell another peach for as long as I lived.

Anyone who’s lived this life knows--farming’s a roll of the dice, a prayer to the skies, and work. Endless, body-bruising work. And every nickel we earned seemed to be needed for repairs, supplies, and equipment.

But even farmwork can be fun when you’ve got a friend. Nonnie was right--I did have other friends--but Ginny Rose was special. Maybe that was because we did the same work--fieldwork. Words can’t really explain what it’s like, so mostly I didn’t feel like talking about “my summer vacation” to other friends, or at school. Our family rarely went anywhere. And during harvest? We never took a day off, not even Sundays.

Summer meant working the farm.

Dawn to dark, we worked the farm.

So there was that, but there was also the way Ginny Rose could make me laugh. We’d giggle about everything, including Bobby, who was as bossy then as he is now, and Doris, who’d rather sting us with insults than work alongside us. Having Ginny Rose around made the days go by fast.

So even as I got older, even as I moved from working out back in the orchard to working out front at our fruit stand, I missed her. I missed us. But this summer after the month of June came and went, I finally stopped hoping she’d reappear. I’d be seventeen soon. It was time to let her go.

Besides, so many things had changed since those summers with her. The war had started and ended, rations were over, Franklin Delano Roosevelt--who’d been president for as far back as I could remember--had died, and Harry Truman was now in charge.

And the biggest change of all?

Everyone seemed more hopeful.

Also, if I’m being completely honest, instead of pinning my hopes on a friend who’d disappeared, I was putting them on Rodney St. Clair, a classmate who had already appeared at the fruit stand four times since school let out in June and had been especially friendly to me when I’d seen him at the Freedom Parade on the Fourth of July.

So that was where my mind was--firmly and fondly focused on sweet thoughts of Rodney St. Clair.

And then, suddenly, there she was.

“Ginny Rose?” I gasped. She was standing in front of the fruit stand, blue-eyed and freckled, her strawberry-blond hair braided in one long tail, just the way I remembered.

“Peggy!” she squealed. “That is you!”

We threw our arms right over the stand, right over the peaches, right over the years that had divided us, and wrapped each other tight.

I held on to her shoulders as we pulled apart. “Where have you been? Do you know how much I’ve missed you?”

“Aw!” she said, her eyes going glassy. “Honest?”

“What do you mean? Yes, of course! You were my best friend.”

“Aw!” she said again, this time looking away as she blinked back tears.

“So what happened?” I pressed. “Where have you been?”

She shrugged noncommittally. “We moved around a lot. You know that.”

“But . . . where? Mother said you might have gone back to Oklahoma.”

Ginny Rose shook her head. “Papa lost everything there, so . . . no.”

“But . . . are you still . . . are you still farmhands?”

“No. Papa found other work during the war, but he still hopped from job to job. We never really put down roots anywhere.” She brightened. “But he’s got a permanent job at the Ferrybank switching yard now.”

“At the rail station?”

She nodded. “The job comes with housing and a little piece of land. We’re plannin’ to stay.”

“That’s wonderful!”

“All of us are tired of movin’ around, and the Littles love that trains roll by.”

“The Littles?”

“Oh!” she said, and her cheeks went rosy. “There’s two more Gilley girls now. Katie Bee--she’s six--and Bonnie Sue, who’s seven. And of course there’s Anna Mae, who’s ten. So that makes four, and I’m mighty glad for all of ’em.”

I couldn’t help bouncing on my toes. “My mother had twins! They’re boys and the same age as your Littles!” I...