One

Chapter One (Excerpt)
"Apple Hill Road" from
In the Cherry Tree: A Novel

Summer days began without a plan. You got up. You had a bowl of cereal. You went outside. A lawn mower hummed. Ducks passed overhead in perfect V formation like World War Two bombers. A dog barked, and another dog barked back. Somebody was hammering nails into a roof. Somebody was bouncing a basketball three streets away. You heard the echo, not the sound itself. A cat crept across the grass an disappeared beneath a hedge. It was hot. The sun was strong. The crickets made a seething noise. A sprinkler came on and made a quiet rain sound when the water hit the grass and then a louder rain sound when the water hit the street.

"Let's do something."

"Like what?"

"I don't know."

"Crab apple fight?"

"Nah."

We thought it over. After a while someone got an idea, and we did something.

***

Our street before it was a street used to be an apple orchard. The apple trees were planted in neat rows that went up the hill as far as you could see. The Dad told us about the apple trees. He remembered them from when he was a boy. He used to come out to the country for picnics with his family in his father's car, which was called a Graham Paige, and they would get a drink of apple cider at the farmhouse and walk around the apple orchards.

That was a long time ago.

When they built our street the builders cut down most of the apple trees and sawed up the logs and dragged the branches away. The builders left some of the apple trees for looks. Every house had one in the front yard, giving off shade and dropping crab apples into the grass. Everyone kicked or swept the crab apples into the street, where they got smashed and worm- eaten and smelled like rot. The crab apples were not good to eat. They were sour. Mik Cosgrove ate them but no one else did. We threw the crab apples at cars and squirrels, at telephone poles and each other. Once I nailed Albert in the middle of his forehead with a rotten crab apple, which exploded. The Dad saw it from the kitchen window and came outside and said,

"That's a good way to take someone's eye out."

All the houses on our street looked the same except for the farmhouse. The houses were white, split-level houses with flat roofs. Some of the front doors were painted different colors. On every stoop was a gray milk box. Each house had a sign above the front door that said something like "Welcome," or "Home Sweet Home," or "Bless This House." The sign above our door said, "35." We lived at number thirty-five. Stev lived directly across the street from us. Tiger lived next to Stev. Mik Cosgrove lived next to Tiger. Franky DiLorenzo lived across the street from Mik Cosgrove. The Estabrooks lived next to us. At night Diana Estabrook kissed boys on her porch swing while Albertand I watched from our bedroom window. All the boys liked to kiss Diana Estabrook.

The farmhouse was located at the bottom of the street. The farmhouse was built in 1805, according to the little sign on the front door. A brook ran through the back yard of the farmhouse. There was a well in the yard with a pump and a bucket which no one used anymore. The well was for looks. It had no water. The sign on the farmhouse mailbox said, "Geo. W. Sage" but nobody by that name lived in the farmhouse. An old lady lived there, but the lights were always off. The old lady had never been seen. She lived her whole life in the farmhouse and never came out. She was like a rare butterfly. If you could just catch a glimpse of her with your binoculars, your life would be special. But it never happened, not once.

End of Chapter One