The Divide (44 page)

But what did one more lie matter? They were all liars now. Abbie had seen to that. And the biggest lie of all was the one he played out every single day with his mom and dad. Because holding something back, keeping such a powerful secret from them, was every bit as bad, if not worse, than actually telling them something untrue. Abbie
had
been in touch again. He had spoken with her twice. And hadn’t told a soul.

He still had the prepaid phone she’d made him buy and he checked it every morning, just as she’d told him. The very next day after his dad came home looking like he’d fallen foul of Mike Tyson, there was a message, two words which when decoded gave him a number to call. And he’d gone to a pay phone and called it, at precisely the right time, and listened for ten minutes while Abbie cursed and ranted and called their dad every obscene word Josh had ever heard. She’d gone on and on about there being only fifteen thousand dollars in the bag,
only fifteen fucking thousand, the cheap fucks!
He nearly hung up but didn’t, just stood there with his head bowed, listening and taking it, until eventually she seemed to run out of steam and said,
Okay, well, that’s it. Tell them from me they won’t get a second fucking chance, okay?
And he nearly replied,
What, you mean not until you want some more money?
But, again, he didn’t.

And he kept on, every day, religiously checking his secret phone—the one which still, amazingly, nobody except Abbie knew he had—and for eight months there was nothing. Until last Christmas Day at his grandparents’ when he dutifully snuck down to the tennis court to check his voice mail and heard her voice, not angry this time, just frail, giving the coded two-word message. He called the next day and, again, listened for ten minutes. Only this time she didn’t curse or call anybody names. She just cried. Sobbed for ten long minutes, saying how lonely and sad she was and how she wanted to kill herself. And Josh did his best to comfort her, but what could he say? Except a lot of
Oh, Abbie
and
Don’t, please don’t, it’ll be okay, it’s just because it’s Christmas . . .
What a dumb thing to say, really.

He didn’t even tell her to come home or suggest that she should turn herself in, because he didn’t want her to yell at him. At least this time she sounded human. But he did ask her where she was and she told him not to be stupid. This time the number wasn’t a pay phone but a 704-area-code cell phone. It meant nothing. She could have been calling from anywhere. And when he later tried the number again, bracing himself each time in case she answered and bawled him out, all he ever got was an unavailable tone.

It was after three in the morning when Josh drove carefully home from Freddie’s. Nikki had given him her number but he figured that was about all he was ever going to get. Maybe he’d call her sometime. Or not. He’d already done the long-distance heartbreak thing and didn’t feel inclined to try it again.

His mom’s light was still on and as he tiptoed up the stairs and past her door she called his name and told him to come in. She was propped up in bed, reading, a half-empty glass of milk beside her on the night table. As he came in she smiled and took off her glasses and patted the bed for him to sit and he did so, trying not to look her too directly in the eye. He didn’t feel that stoned, but he probably looked it.

“Good party?”

“Yeah. Wasn’t really a party. We just hung out, you know.”

“How’s Freddie?”

“Good.”

“How’s he getting on at college?”

“Fine.”

“Well, that’s great. Are you okay?”

“Sure. Just tired, you know.”

“Give me a hug.”

He leaned forward and put his arms around her and they held on to each other for a long time. She felt bony and fragile. He was always telling her she needed to eat more, but it never made any difference. She didn’t seem to want to let go of him. And when she did, he saw there were tears in her eyes.

“I love you, Joshie.”

“I love you too.”

A
bbie leaned her aching back against the whitewashed wall of the weigh station and stared out through narrowed eyes over the vast flat fields where a hundred hunched figures were still picking the rows, their shadows long and black in the mellowing sunlight. A truck was heading in from the highway, trailing a cloud of luminous gold behind it. Abbie looked at her watch and saw it was coming up to six o’clock. She was going to be late.

There were still about a dozen pickers ahead of her in the line waiting to have their last trays weighed and get their money. Her tray was at her feet and as the line moved forward she shunted it with her boot across the baked earth and one of the supervisors yelled at her and told her to pick it up and she cursed him under her breath but did so. No matter how tired you were or that it was twelve long, hot, backbreaking hours since you’d started work, you weren’t supposed to put your tray down in case the strawberries got dirty. As if they weren’t contaminated enough by all the toxic chemicals they sprayed them with. She would never eat another strawberry in her life.

It was early September and three whole weeks since she had seen Rolf. But she was going to see him tonight and her heart beat faster at the thought of it and at what she had to tell him. She hadn’t taken a test, but she didn’t need to. She was already sure. She was two weeks late and she was normally never late. And this morning, for the first time, she had gotten sick. How he was going to take it, she didn’t know. She was hoping it might make things better between them. Of one thing she was sure, however. Come what may, whatever he said, whatever pressure he put on her, she was determined to have the child.

She would have to find the right moment to tell him, of course. Maybe they could go down the coast, to Big Sur or somewhere, and find some nice place to stay, spend a little of the money they’d earned.

It had been Rolf’s idea that they should spend some time apart. He said he needed space and when she asked him what he meant, he’d just gotten mad at her. He was working on a construction site in Fresno, earning two or three times as much as she was for many fewer hours. At least, that’s what he’d told her he was doing the last time they saw each other. Nowadays she never really knew. She no longer had a cell phone and on the three occasions she’d been able to call his he hadn’t answered. Abbie only hoped he was going to be in a better mood this time, that he would be nicer to her, not fly into a rage with her so easily.

She’d had time to reflect on why things weren’t so good between them anymore. It was more her fault than his, she knew. She was too possessive, too needy and jealous. After that first time she’d found he was cheating on her, when they were living in Chicago, she’d tried so hard to change, not to see it as such a big deal. It wasn’t important for him, so why should it be for her? But in Miami, when she’d actually caught him at it, walked in on him and found him in bed with that little Cuban bitch, all her noble reasoning had collapsed.

If she was honest with herself, she’d known all along that there were other women. Rolf said she should grow up, that she was the victim of her own pathetic bourgeois background. They didn’t own each other, he said, and if she wanted to have other lovers herself it was absolutely fine by him. That hurt her too, though she didn’t really know why. She didn’t want anyone else. Especially not now. Well, tonight and tomorrow and all weekend she would make a special effort and they would find each other again and things would again be good. And when he knew about the baby it would all be different.

“Next!”

In front of her now, her new friend Inez was swinging her tray onto the scales and the sour-faced bastard on the other side was checking its contents and throwing out any berries that in his indisputable opinion had been damaged. Inez challenged him on a couple that looked perfect but he just gave her a blank look and didn’t even bother to justify himself, just yelled out the weight to the guys sitting beyond him at the trestle table, one with the clipboard and the other with the money, then swung the tray off the scales and stacked it.

“Next!”

Abbie always got a little anxious at the weigh station, just as she still did at post offices and banks or anyplace where she felt her identity was being scrutinized. Apart from a handful of students (which was what, if anyone ever asked, she pretended to be), she was the only non-Hispanic and the men at the pay table always seemed to look at her more closely than they did at the other women. Sometimes they tried to flirt with her but she just kept her eyes down and never engaged. She knew she didn’t really need to worry too much. Every single picker here was working illegally. Nobody was going to ask any awkward questions. In any case, today the guy seemed interested only in her strawberries.

“These are all dusty.”

“The hell they are.”

“What did you say?”

“I said they’re not. And if they are it’s because of that truck that went by just now. You ought to tell them to slow down.”

The guy threw most of the top layer of berries out, ignoring her complaints, then gave her a baleful look and yelled out the weight.

“Next!”

The man with the clipboard asked for her name.

“Shepherd.”

He logged the last tray and hit a few buttons on his calculator and the man beside him then counted out her day’s pay: forty-eight dollars and twenty cents. He pushed it across the table and Ann-Marie Shepherd of Fort Myers, Florida, gathered it up and stuffed it into the pocket of her skirt and followed Inez into the shower block.

Inez’s English was only a little less primitive than Abbie’s Spanish but the two of them had become close. They had met on Abbie’s first day of picking when she still hadn’t found anywhere to stay. In the evening Inez had hauled her into the back of a crowded truck that drove them up into the hills above the Salinas Valley. Abbie could hardly believe her eyes when they got there. She knew this was Steinbeck country but not that so little had changed.

There was a whole camp of Mexican fruit pickers, all illegals, living in the woods. The lucky ones had found caves for shelter but most just slept out in the open, with plastic garbage sacks over them to keep off the dew. She couldn’t get over how kind and generous they were. They found her a blanket and a mat to lie on and a plastic sack and gave her food and water. It was strange how those who had the least always seemed to give the most. She spent the night listening to the yip of coyotes and it made her think about Ty.

After a few days, Inez managed to find them somewhere nearer to the fields, a garage with its own sink and toilet, which they shared with ten others, each paying four dollars a night for the privilege. Inez was only a year older than Abbie but already had two kids who lived with her mother back home in Santa Ana. She missed them badly. Their father had run off when she was eight months pregnant with the second but she didn’t seem to hold it against him.

“Men,” she said one night when they were sitting outside under the stars, sharing a cigarette. “They cannot help themselves. They don’t know who they are or why God made them. You cannot hate them for what they don’t know, only pity them.”

Abbie hadn’t told her she was pregnant, though the morning sickness was going to make the secret a tricky one to keep.

Because it was Friday night and everyone felt flush, there was a truck going into Salinas and when the two of them had showered and dressed they climbed up into the back and sat squeezed among a dozen others, all but a few of them men. Abbie wanted to look her best for Rolf and was wearing the pretty black-and-red cotton print dress she’d bought in a street market in Miami. She rarely looked in a mirror nowadays but this evening Inez had forced her to and Abbie was pleasantly surprised. It was like looking at someone she hadn’t seen for years. She didn’t dye her hair anymore and it was longer and going blond from all the sun she’d been getting. She’d never had such a tan in all her life. The only thing that dented the image was the state of her hands. They were calloused and ingrained with dirt, the fingernails bitten short.

Inez was all dressed up too and so were the three young men sitting opposite. They were flirting with her. Abbie couldn’t understand what they said but she got the drift. One of them seemed more interested in her than in Inez and kept staring. He said something to the others who looked at her with a sort of shy assessment then nodded.

“What did he say?” she whispered to Inez.

“He said you look like a movie star.”

She was supposed to be meeting Rolf at seven-thirty at a bar in the Oldtown district, near the Fox movie theater, but it was half an hour’s walk from where the truck dropped her and by the time she got there it was after eight and he wasn’t there. She found a table near the window so she could see out into the street and ordered a soda and took her book from the old duffel bag that held all her few worldly possessions. But an hour passed and darkness fell and still there was no sign of him. By then the glances of the men in the bar were making her uneasy so she got up and went for a walk, telling the woman behind the bar that if anyone came looking for her she would be back.

Just before ten, when she was half-sick with worry and wondering where she was going to sleep, she saw his car pull up across the street, the little Ford they had bought in Florida with the last of her grandpa’s money. As he sauntered across the street, talking on a cell phone, he saw her in the window and gave a little nod but not a smile. Abbie got up and went out to meet him but had to stand there stupidly on the sidewalk beside him, waiting while he ignored her and finished his call.

“Yeah. Okay. You too. Bye.”

He snapped the phone shut and slipped it into his jacket pocket and she put her arms around his neck and kissed him on the lips.

“I thought you were never coming.”

“I had some things to see to.”