Each cough was like a fraying of my final family thread. When I had pictured the faraway farm from my retreat in the Big Blue wilderness, I had assumed it carried on essentially unchanged below. But I had been so wrong. Everything except the peaches had waned, and I returned to an even more broken relic of who we used to be. I’d always believed it was the men in this house who held the place together. It never occurred to me that I was more than housekeeper and hand, that the heart of our family and home had somehow become me. As Daddy weakened, the orchard and I were all we had left.
