Pippin

Chapter One: The Slack Side

The call came at 6:40 on a Tuesday morning in the middle of September, while Teddy was standing at the counter of the rental apartment kitchen, eating dry cereal out of the box because she had forgotten milk again.

"He's on the floor of the kitchen," Noreen Credle said. Her voice had the flatness of somebody who had already done the crying part and put it away for later. "He's breathing and he's talking, but the words come out sideways. I've called the ambulance. Dorothea, I want you to drive slow. Do you hear me? Drive slow."

"Which side?" Teddy asked.

"What?"

"Which side of him isn't working?"

A pause. "His left. His left arm won't come up when I ask it to."

Teddy put the cereal box down. She could see, with a clarity that frightened her later, the exact square of linoleum where her father would be lying—the one by the stove with the burn mark from 1994, when her mother had set a pot down wrong.

"I'll be there in an hour," she said. "Noreen. Don't let them take him to the little hospital in Ruckersville. Tell them the university."

She woke Cecily by turning on the overhead light, which was cruel, but there wasn't a gentle way to do what she had to do next.

"Granddaddy's had a stroke," she said. "Get dressed."

Her daughter sat up slowly, sixteen years old and furious even in the first three seconds of consciousness. "I have a chemistry test."

"I know."

"I have a chemistry test, Mom, it's twenty percent of the—"

"I know, Cecily. Get dressed."

They drove north on 29 with the sun coming up orange over the Southwest Mountains, and neither of them said anything for twenty minutes. Teddy kept both hands on the wheel. She had a habit, when she was frightened, of making lists in her head, and the list assembled itself without her permission: rehab, insurance, the cider barn roof, the crew coming for the Staymans in eleven days, the taxes, the taxes, the taxes.

"Is he going to die?" Cecily asked.

"I don't know."

"You always say you don't know."

"That's because I usually don't."

Cecily turned her face to the window. She had Gavin's chin and Teddy's stubbornness and her grandmother's long hands, which was a thing Teddy noticed sometimes and never mentioned to anybody.

The hospital smelled like every hospital. Teddy found her father in a curtained bay in the emergency department, and the first thing she thought, unforgivably, was how small he had gotten. Garland Grieve had been six foot two once. He had lifted forty-pound crates two at a time into the bed of the Ford until he was seventy. Now he lay under a thin white blanket with his left hand curled at his side like a leaf gone over, and when he saw her, the right half of his face pulled into something that wanted to be a smile.

"Teddy," he said. It came out thickened, but it came out. "Trees."

"The trees are fine, Daddy."

"Pick 'em—the—" He stopped, hunting. His eyes went wide with the effort, and Teddy saw the panic underneath, the man trapped behind the glass of himself.

"Staymans," she said. "Twelve days. We'll get them."

He closed his eyes and breathed.

A neurologist with a young face and old shoes explained it to her in the hallway. An ischemic stroke, left middle cerebral artery, moderate. There would be recovery—there was always some recovery—but the left side would likely remain weak, the left leg unreliable. Speech would improve with therapy. He would need help bathing, dressing, transferring from bed to chair. He would need supervision.

"He lives alone?" the doctor asked.

"There's a housekeeper. Four days a week."

"That's not going to be enough, Ms. Grieve."

"Shackley," she said, and then, "Grieve. Grieve is fine. Grieve is right." The divorce had been final for fourteen months and she still tripped on it.

She stood in the corridor afterward with her back against the wall, doing the arithmetic that had been her whole adult life. Twenty-four-hour care was four thousand a month if she was lucky and if she found somebody honest. She did not have four thousand a month. She did not have four hundred a month. What she had was eighty-one acres outside Charlottesville, twenty-two hundred apple trees, an eleven-year-old cider press, and a rental apartment in Crozet with a leaking dishwasher.

Cecily came around the corner with a vending machine coffee and handed it to her without being asked, which nearly broke Teddy in half.

"He said my name," Cecily said. "He said it wrong, but he said it."

"He'd know your face in the dark."

Her daughter looked at the floor. "We're moving out there, aren't we."

Teddy drank the coffee. It was terrible. "Yes."

"For how long?"

"I don't know."

"God, Mom." Cecily's voice cracked upward. "You don't know anything, apparently."

"Cecily."

"There's no bus out there. There's no anything out there. Rylan lives in town, my school is in town, my life is—" She stopped, because a nurse was passing, and Cecily was the kind of girl who would not make a scene in front of a stranger. She waited until the nurse turned the corner. Then, quieter, worse: "You've been wanting an excuse."

Teddy did not answer, because there was a grain of truth in it and the grain was sharp.

They moved on Saturday. It took one trip with the truck and one with the car. Teddy had learned in the divorce how little she actually owned.

The house at 514 Lynden Road sat at the end of a gravel drive lined with black walnut trees, a white frame farmhouse from 1911 with a metal roof and a porch that ran the whole front. Beyond it the land dropped away west in long combed rows—Staymans and Winesaps on the near slope, Golden Delicious and Grimes on the flat, and up on the high ground where the frost drained away, the old block: Albemarle Pippins, some of them planted by her grandfather Alvin in 1937, gnarled and mossy and still, every fall, producing fruit so tart it made the back of your jaw ache.

Noreen was on the porch when they pulled in, wearing her canvas coat, a woman of seventy-four with hair the color of a nickel and a wooden spoon in her hand as though she'd forgotten she was holding it.

"There's my girl," she said to Cecily, and Cecily, who was determined to hate everything, allowed herself to be hugged. "You've gotten tall. You've gotten tall and you've gotten skinny, and I don't approve of either one."

"Hi, Noreen."

"I made a chicken. Go put your things in the yellow room, the bed's aired."

When the girl was inside, Noreen turned to Teddy and the brightness went out of her like a lamp switched off.

"I got the downstairs bedroom set up," she said. "Moved your mother's sewing table out to the shed. I didn't think you'd want it in there where he could look at it."

"Thank you."

"Rehab called. They can take him Thursday, three weeks inpatient, then home."

"Thursday's good."

Noreen looked out at the rows. The light was going long and gold, and the trees stood in their thousands, heavy, indifferent.

"There's a stack of mail on the sideboard," she said. "I didn't open it. Some of it's the kind you can feel through the envelope."

That night, after Cecily had gone up and the house had settled into its noises—the tick of the water heater, the scrape of the walnut branch on the north gutter—Teddy sat at the kitchen table with the mail and a glass of her father's bourbon and began to open envelopes.

County of Albemarle, Office of the Treasurer. Delinquent real estate taxes, tax years 2021, 2022, 2023. Balance due with penalties and interest: thirty-four thousand, one hundred and eighty-two dollars.

Farmers & Merchants Bank of Albemarle. Notice regarding loan number 4417-B, secured by deed of trust. Two payments past due.

A letter from an insurance adjuster about hail damage to a structure identified as "barn, secondary" which had been inspected in April and denied.

And, at the bottom, a thick cream envelope, hand-addressed, with a return address in raised gray letters: Tyndall Land & Development, LLC, 200 East Water Street, Charlottesville.

Teddy held that one for a long time without opening it.

She thought about the September morning when she was twenty-two, coming down these same stairs to find her mother's reading glasses folded on this same table, on top of a note written on the back of a feed receipt.

Eight words. Teddy could have recited them in her sleep, and often did.

I have used up every good thing I had.

She put the cream envelope down unopened, turned off the kitchen light, and went out onto the porch. The mountains were a darker dark against the sky. Somewhere in the high block, a deer moved through the Pippins, and the sound it made was the sound of an apple dropping in the grass.