He's married to my sister

It rained nine days. My uncle counted them out loud every morning from the shop door with his coffee.

People hear rain and figure you put a jacket on and keep going. You don't pick wet fruit. It bruises right where your fingers go and it won't show for two weeks, and by then it's in a box at the shed in Grandview with a grade on it and my uncle's name on the ticket.

We ran Cosmic Crisp that fall, which is the one they made at the university over in Pullman, and people talk about it like it cured something. Thirty a bin. It was thirty-two two years before that and nobody ever explains where the two went. A bin runs about nine hundred pounds. You're not filling one in an hour, and a guy who tells you he fills one in an hour is describing a bin his cousin helped him with.

Ten months of the year I do tires and alignments at a shop on Yakima Valley Highway. August to the end of October I'm on my uncle's crew. I'm five four, so there, it's out of the way, everybody else gets to it inside a minute anyway. That's why they send me up the ladder. I'm light and I don't take all day about it. I complain twice a morning, which my uncle says he can work with.

The bunkhouse is behind the shop. He built it himself out of a container and some framing and it sleeps eleven if everybody's agreeable. Mattresses on pallets and a propane heater you have to hit before it lights. The TV doesn't pull anything in, so it's the Spanish station out of Granger from when you wake up until somebody shuts it off at night.

By the fourth day the cards were just something we did. Two grown men had a real argument about a charger. My uncle brought down a case of Tecate and made a speech about it being the last one, and then there was another one.

Beto's on the crew because my sister asked my uncle, and my uncle says yes to my sister. He married her in 2023 at the church on Sixth and I carried tables for the reception. He's from Wapato. His laugh is too big for a room that size. The baby was eight months that October and she wasn't sleeping, and he'd tell you about it with the times attached. Up at one. Then again at four.

Two guys quit and went home Thursday once it was clear it wasn't letting up, and everything in the bunkhouse slid over one. That's how he ended up on the mattress next to mine.

He talked about the truck payment. He's got a thing where he works out what he owes out loud. Four eighty a month, plus the tabs, and he got the tires from us at cost, which he brings up because he brings it up.

Then he quit talking. It went a long time that way. He put his hand flat on my back, on the shirt, not under it, and I didn't move it. I was twenty-one and I'd never done anything with anybody.

It was quiet because it had to be, and it didn't take long, and nobody woke up. In the morning he was up before me rolling his blanket, asking the room if anybody had seen his other boot, loud.

I was in his truck before it got light. Same as the nine mornings before.

The heater in that Ranger doesn't do anything until you're past Outlook. He said the ground would be too soft for the tractor for a couple more days. I said yeah. That's everything we said between the shop and the block.

There were eleven days left in the season and we picked them. He'd set the ladder and stand on the bottom rung to hold it and I'd go up. He handed fruit up to me once, which makes no sense at all.

When it was over my uncle put him on at the shop for the winter, on tires, in the bay next to mine. My uncle signs my hours.

So he's at my mom's curb in the dark and the two of us are under the same roof until six. We've never been anywhere. There's nowhere to go. There's a motel off the freeway at Grandview and I know exactly how that reads on a statement somebody else opens.

A guy came in Tuesday with a Silverado pulling right and he was sure it was the alignment. It was the tires. Cupped all the way around on the front, inside edges gone. Beto pulled the wheel and held it up so the guy could run his hand over it, and the guy ran his hand over it and bought the alignment anyway. Beto didn't say anything about it to me until we were washing up, and then all he said was the man's daughter was sitting in the truck the whole time.

My mom does Sunday. Everybody comes. My uncle sits at the end where he sits and asks people about their brakes.

Beto walks the baby around the table with her up on his shoulder and pats her back on a count. She's got the sock that's always coming off. He puts it back on her about nine times a meal.

My sister said he's been better since he started at the shop. Her name's Yesenia. She said the shop suits him. I said it's warm in there, anyway. My uncle said we ought to get out there earlier, that the rack sits cold till eight for no reason. Beto said we're already there at five forty. My mom asked if anybody wanted more.

The kitchen's narrow. I was stacking plates and he came in behind me with the baby and put a hand on my back to get past, the same place, and then he was at the sink running water for a bottle and talking to my mom about her dryer.

Monday he was at the curb at five twenty with the heater going. He'd done my side of the windshield along with his.