The radio stayed on twelve hours a day. It was an old wooden-cased Panasonic with a frayed cord, and I kept it tuned to a station out of Dothan that played scratchy old country numbers and market reports I didn’t care about. I didn’t listen to the words. I just needed the noise to push back against the corners of the room.
When you live with the same man for fifty-two years, the silence doesn’t just feel empty. It has weight. It presses against your eardrums until you start talking to the kettle just to hear a human voice in the house.
Arthur had been gone four months. The azebals out by the front porch had gone wild and leggy because I hadn’t had the heart to prune them back in June. He always did the pruning with those long-handled yellow shears he kept hanging on a rusted nail in the shed. I left the shears right where they were. I left a lot of things right where they were.
Every morning at 7:15, I would pour my coffee and stare at the white bowl on the counter. Arthur always bought a bag of navel oranges down at the Piggly Wiggly on Tuesdays. He liked the ones with the little belly buttons on the bottom because he said they were sweeter.
For fifty-two years, he stood by the counter with his little pocketknife, stripped the peel away in one long, curling ribbon, and handed the pieces to me across the yellow table. Sometimes he dropped a little spray of citrus oil on my cheek just to make me jump.
I kept buying the oranges. I don’t know why. I suppose my hands just reached for them out of some stupid muscle memory when the produce clerk weighed my butter beans. But I couldn’t peel them myself. My joints were too stiff in the mornings, and every time I tried to dig my thumbnail into the rind, the skin would just dig back into my quick and tear into a bitter, wet mess. So the oranges sat there. By Friday, the skins would go dull and soft. By Sunday, there’d be a faint, sweet smell of rot coming off the bottom of the bowl, and I’d have to scrape them into the grease pail while I looked the other way.
Then Tuesday rolled around, and Sarah brought little Lily by because she had a dental appointment over near the county seat and needed someone to watch the girl for an hour or two. Lily was four going on forty, with a mop of curly brown hair she inherited from her daddy’s side and shoes that always looked like she had been kicking gravel on the shoulder of Route 23.
She didn’t even take her little pink windbreaker off before she climbed right up into Arthur’s chair. Not the chair next to it. His chair. The one with the slightly wobbly left leg he had shimmed up with a folded matchbook back in ninety-four.
“It’s messy,” she announced, pointing a small finger straight at the white ceramic bowl.
I was standing by the stove trying to fish a piece of toasted light-bread out of the slot with a butter knife, which I knew better than to do, but my head wasn’t screwed on right. I dropped the knife. It clattered against the linoleum.
“What’s messy, honey?” I asked, bending down to pick it up. My back gave a dull little pop that felt like dry kindling.
Lily didn’t answer my question. She reached her small hand into the bowl, grabbed a large orange that felt a little heavy on the bottom, and hauled it into her lap. She didn’t have a knife. She didn’t even have decent leverage. She just dug her little fingernails, the ones Sarah was always fussing at her about biting, right into the dimple of the skin and hauled back with all her might.
“Hold on now, Lily-bug,” I said, stepping toward her with the rag. “You’re going to get juice all down the front of that shirt, and your mama just washed it.”
She ignored me completely. Her tongue came out the corner of her mouth in that fierce, concentrated way Arthur always used when he was trying to fix the float valve in the toilet tank. She worked her thumb under the torn skin, grunting a little, and peeled off a ragged chunk of white pith that fell straight into her lap like a dry leaf.
“He said I had to do it,” she muttered, her face red from the effort.
“Who said that?” I asked, my heart doing a strange, heavy flutter against my ribs. “Who told you that, sweetheart?”
“Grandpa,” she said simply. She finally got a thumb under the meat of the fruit and ripped away half the rind in one clumsy, spraying motion that sent a sharp, clean mist of citrus oil right into the warm morning air.
She didn’t look up. She pinched off a thick, misshapen wedge of orange, smeared with white stringy pulp, and held it out across the table toward my coffee cup. Her little palm was wet and sticky, shining under the kitchen window light.
“Grandpa said it’s my job now,” she repeated, and her voice sounded so certain, so matter-of-fact, that the radio announcer talking about hog prices in Montgomery just faded into a blur of meaningless static.
I stood there with the butter knife in my hand, staring at that wet piece of fruit. “When,” I whispered, and my throat felt suddenly dry as sand. “When did he ever tell you that, Lily?”
She poked the orange a little closer to my fingers, her little brow furrowed because I wasn’t taking it. “In the truck,” she said, as if I were being slow on the uptake. “When we went to get the seeds. He told me Grandma doesn’t know how to do it right without him.”
The kitchen grew so quiet I could hear the refrigerator compressor clicking on down in the corner. I hadn’t been in the truck with Arthur since the first frost in November, back before his breathing got shallow and he stopped going out to the shed altogether. But Sarah had dropped Lily off here three or four times a week all through that winter while she worked the double shifts down at the county tax office. Arthur would take the girl out to the back porch with a bag of navel oranges while I was inside folding laundry or baking a pan of cornbread. I always thought they were just sitting out there looking at the crows in the pecan tree.
“He told you that on the porch?” I asked, my voice shaking in a way I couldn’t stop.
“No,” Lily said, shaking her head so hard her curls bounced. “In the truck. With the red seats. He gave me the little knife with the yellow handle.”
I set the butter knife down on the counter very carefully, as if it might break. I walked past the table, past the humming radio, and pulled open the shallow utility drawer beside the stove where we kept the rubber bands, the twist ties, and the old coupons from the hardware store.
Way back in the dark corner, underneath a pile of faded Sears receipts from 2004, lay a small, dull-bladed paring knife with a bright yellow plastic handle I hadn’t seen in ten years. Arthur must have bought it at the dollar store down by the bait shop. Taped to the flat of the blade with a strip of yellowed masking tape was a square of lined notebook paper folded in quarters.
My hands were trembling so badly I dropped the knife twice before I finally got the tape peeled back. The handwriting was shaky, the way Arthur’s letters had looked ever since his hands started shaking in the fall, but every word was stubborn and clear.
*Martha, stop buying them if you aren’t going to eat them. I showed the little one how to dig her thumb in near the stem so she don’t cut herself. She’s better at it than she looks. Don’t sit in that kitchen alone with the radio turned up high. Let her earn her keep.*
I stared at the paper for a long time. The ink had little feather edges where his pen had paused against the grain of the cheap paper.
When I turned back around, Lily was still sitting right there in his chair, her legs swinging back and forth against the wooden rungs, holding out that broken, messy piece of orange like she was offering me the crown jewels of Alabama.
“Well,” I said, and my voice cracked right down the middle, sounding like an old gate hinge that needed oiling. “I suppose if it’s your job, you better do it right.”
She grinned, showing a little gap where her bottom tooth had come out last month, and shoved the orange a fraction of an inch closer until my thumb finally brushed against the cold, wet fruit.
I took the piece from her. It wasn’t neat the way Arthur used to do it. There was too much pith left on the side, and a little white string stuck to my knuckle. But as I put it in my mouth and tasted the sharp, sweet juice, I reached over and hit the switch on the side of the Panasonic until the room went entirely, beautifully quiet.
