My sister's husband drove me home

Galas came off on the twenty-sixth, which was a Friday. You pick Galas in passes because of the color. You go through the block and take the ones that are colored up and leave the rest, and then you come back in a week, eight days, and take the next ones. Usually three passes. Two if the block's even and I've never seen one be even.

They were paying twenty-eight a bin on the last pass. Twenty-six on the first one. I think the middle one was twenty-seven, actually. It goes up because there's less fruit hanging so you're walking further to fill, that's all that is. It's not a bonus or anything. I do seven bins, eight on a good day. Guys who've been doing it their whole life do twelve. My tío Chuy did fifteen in a day one time in Fujis and everybody still brings it up, and I'm pretty sure it was fourteen.

Your hands go black by the end of the day from the sap and the dust. It's on everybody. You can't get it off with the hose and you just wait for it to wear off in the shed.

A bad tree is one where the fruit's all inside on the spurs. You clip a stem wrong or put a thumb in one and that's a cull, and on a bad tree you've got four or five of them in the bag before you even get to the bin. A good tree you stand in one place and fill half your bag.

Anyway that was the last day. I ride with Chuy usually but he'd gone in at four that morning and he left as soon as they shut the block down and I was still tying my bag off. So Beto said he'd run me back. He's married to my sister. Marisol, she's twenty-six, and they had Lily in February.

Beto runs a crew. In cherries it's like forty guys. It's nine or ten in the fall.

They're pulling that block out anyway. My dad heard it off the guy who runs the tractor. Every Gala on that side of the lateral, and they're putting Honeycrisp in because that's what's paying now, which everybody's been saying for like three years and nobody did it.

So we get in and he backs out onto the dirt, and then instead of going up to the road he goes down the end row. Last row before the ditch, where the trees are junk from the wind. He didn't say anything about it. He just went down there and put it in park and shut it off.

I figured he had to look at something. Sometimes they're checking sprinklers, or somebody left a ladder out and it's going to get hit by the tractor. He didn't get out.

We sat there about forty minutes. I know that because the clock said 6:18 when he shut it off and it said 6:55 when he started it again. So thirty-seven.

He rolled his window down and got a pack out from under the seat and lit one and said don't tell your sister. That was the whole thing he said about it. He kept it out the window between drags, way out past the mirror.

Then he held the pack over and I took one. I don't smoke. I took it anyway and he lit it for me off his and I held it and let it burn down and I don't think I hit it twice.

It was quiet because the engine was off. You could hear the pump running over in the next block and a car go by on the road every so often. There was a Gatorade bottle in the door pocket with the label peeled off it and I kept looking at that.

He asked was I going back to school. I said maybe Yakima Valley in the spring. He said good, do that. I told him what they were paying on the last pass, twenty-eight a bin, and he said that's not bad for Galas. Then a while after that he said the shed pays better than it looks once you're on nights, and I said I know.

He had his arm up on the seat back. That's just where you put it, there's nowhere else for it in that truck.

Then we didn't talk for a long time. It was a long time. I kept coming up with things to say and then not saying them. Like a guy dropped a bin off the forklift on Tuesday and it split and that's not even a story, that happens every year, but I had the whole thing ready in my head and then I didn't say it.

He asked me if I had a girl and I said no and he said okay.

Then he lit another one off the first one.

Somewhere in there he said his knee's been bad since June. He looked over when he said it. I said something stupid like yeah. And then more of nothing.

I was looking out my side most of it. I don't know. I don't know what he was doing in there. It was 6:18 when he shut it off, or 6:16, and that clock's wrong anyway, Marisol set it in the spring and she — I don't know. Thirty-something.

I've been through it like a hundred times. Nothing happened. He didn't say one thing you couldn't say in front of my mom, except the cigarette.

But he shut the engine off.

Then he looked at the clock and said your mom's going to have food, and he started it up and backed the whole row out, because there's no room to turn around at the ditch end. Like a quarter mile in reverse with his arm across the back of my seat and his head turned around. That took a while too.

He came in and ate. Everybody was over because it was the last day. My tía Rosa made the thing with the corn that she does, and she put a second piece on my plate after I said no, which she's done since I was about ten, because I'm skinny and it's a whole conversation at every single meal. Beto had Lily up on his arm and ate with the other hand. Marisol was telling him about a bill from the clinic. The Mariners were on with the sound off.

He was completely normal. He was so normal that I started thinking I made all of it up in my own head, and then I'd remember the clock, and then I'd think, no, guys sit in trucks. My dad sits out front in his for twenty minutes before he comes in, some days.

He puts guys on the crew in April. He put my cousin Danny on and Danny can't pick, Danny does like four bins and half of them get graded out.

I haven't said anything to Chuy or anybody. What would I even say.

Sundays everybody eats at my mom's. He sits across from me because that's his spot, on the end by the door, and Marisol sits next to him. He asks me how the shed's going and I say fine, because it is fine.

Last Sunday he asked me to hold Lily while he got up for something and I held her.

The shed starts on the eighth and it's cold in there and you stand on a mat all day.