Peaches

Before
    That summer, at a bar on Mertie Creek, two truckers by the names of Saddle Tramp and Mad Dog emerged from a night of drinking booze and listening to Kenny Chesney on the jukebox to find girls’ underwear—one thong, one Days of the Week (Sunday), and one monkey face—lying across their windshields. That same summer, rotten fish of an unidentified variety was found in the vent openings of several bathrooms at the Balmeade Country Club, and nobody suspected the connection. In late August, Lucretia Cawley-Smith was forced to admit to herself that she loved her oldest daughter best. Jodee McGowen stopped wearing seagulls on her nail polish for good. And on September 1, a migrant worker by the name of Enrico Fiol left Georgia carrying a tuft of dog fur in his shirt pocket.
    Through it all, the Darlington Peach Orchard, with a past as shady as the grass under its tallest trees and a future teetering on the edge of extinction, stretched itself over the summer like it had every summer previously—softly, quietly, and shyly, like a belle walking up the stairs of her first ball.
    That spring, Murphy McGowen, sixteen, of Bridgewater’s Anthill Acres Trailer Park (whose mom, Jodee, had dated, in chronologicalorder, the WRUZ Praise DJ, Horatio Balmeade, and one of the Bridgewater High School Statesmen football players), did not notice anything that might be interesting about the orchard, her town, or existence in general. Murphy was missing from her own life and she didn’t even know it.
    Walking by Hidden Creek Primitive House of Worship one Sunday, Murphy didn’t know that Birdie Darlington, of Darlington Orchard, was inside, stuck between her parents like the peanut butter in a sandwich that was falling apart, wishing she was anywhere else, although she wasn’t sure where. Nor did Murphy know that Leeda Cawley-Smith was four miles away getting a maple sugar massage at her family’s B & B, wondering how she could look like a million dollars but feel like twenty cents simply because her sister, Danay, was lying next to her, looking even better.
    So, that spring morning, Murphy just kept walking, staring at the sign out in front of the church with the weekly message scrawled in black block letters. This week’s message was Let It Be.
    It was funny. That was probably her least favorite Beatles song—and Murphy had a tiny tattoo of Ringo Starr beside her left-lower-back dimple. Murphy wasn’t about to buy into the message. But then, if she had, the summer would never have come to be what it was.
    Birdie and Leeda might never have found their answers. Two truckers would have been less three undies. And Murphy would have never realized she was missing from her life at all.

Chapter One
    E very spring since she had turned thirteen had started the same way for Murphy McGowen. She started feeling restless at the very same time as the crocuses began busting out of their buds every year. She’d start to want to bust out of her skin too, into a skin that lived, say, in New York, or Paris, or Buenos Aires, anyplace that wasn’t Bridgewater, Georgia. Outside the historic downtown district—which was basically unlived in and which barely any tourists came to—the town was mostly a strip of motels, fast-food joints, and traffic lights.
    From then on, each spring had started with
    A. The restlessness
    B. The ache in her chest for the thing she didn’t know was missing
    C. The guy with the hand up her shirt
    At fifteen, there was also the addition of the other hand, down the pants—usually cords, sometimes army surplus, all three dollars or less at Village Thrift. The boys she hadn’t bargained for; they had just sort of come. Because like many girls in Georgia, Murphy was as girl as a girl could be. Green eyed andsmooth skinned with beauty marks here and there on her cheeks, with brown wavy hair and high apple breasts. Like most young girls at the Piggly Wiggly on any given day, she was more juicy than fine, more sexy than delicately beautiful. In a word, Murphy McGowen was yummy. A few more words that had been used to describe her were brilliant, bold, and rotten.
    Her favorite spot for C. was the edge of the Darlington Peach Orchard, just two miles out of the center of town, but what felt like a million miles from anything resembling the Piggly Wiggly. Most of Bridgewater felt like a collision of old southern big-porched homes and a giant strip mall. The orchard, with its endless acreage and overgrown greenery, felt