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For as long as Jess could remember, summer was defined by two things: baseball and stone fruits. Warm weather was a limited resource that far north and so there was always a sense of urgency and fullness to the days, like all the sunlight needed to be wrung out of them. Every mild breeze on the nape of her neck as she ran around the makeshift diamond in the abandoned schoolyard was a reminder of life’s fineries and how fleeting they could be. She ate plums and peaches and nectarines, let their juices run down her chin, worried the pits between her teeth and tongue until they were bare. She would eat anything that grew up out of the stubborn soil of their farm, whatever was on sale at the twice-weekly market in their meager downtown, but her favorite since she was a little girl was cherries.
They were economical and easy to carry around in a colander, still sparkling with water from the well, and entertaining, too: once eaten, she could compete with her brothers to see who could spit the stones the farthest, and they could terrorize the littler ones with stories of cherry trees taking root inside their tummies. She taught herself how to tie the stems into knots with her tongue while standing in the outfield, careful not to accidentally choke on them when she had to break into a sprint to catch a fly ball.
So when she spotted a display of cherries in the front window of the greengrocer as she and Esti were on their way home from the cinema, she saw no reason to resist their bright, sweet call. With a fresh paycheck in the bib of her coveralls, the only limitation was how many cartons she and Esti were able to carry between the two of them and the fact that she promised Esti a share of their bounty.
She’d been out of the habit of chewing tobacco because it fell under the apparently infinite list of activities banned by the League. So her long-distance spitting was rusty, to her own chagrin. She’d gotten the hang of it mostly back when she heard the screen door wheeze open, followed by the tread of Lupe’s loafers on the porch.
Lupe didn’t say hello or ask how she was, just sat down beside her and lit a cigarette. Not because she didn’t care, Jess hoped, but simply because she didn’t need to ask. She took one look at Jess cradling the colander in her lap, smile stained a pulpy red-purple, and could probably tell that she might as well have been in heaven here on the porch step. Besides, Jess’ mouth was occupied with activities more important than small talk.
She spat the stone the farthest she’s gotten one yet this afternoon and hissed a triumphant “ Yes! ” under her breath. Lupe snorted.
"How do you say cherry?" Jess asked, then mentally kicked herself. "Sorry. I know you're sick of translating."
Lupe lifted one shoulder and then let her arm go slack again, like she couldn’t even be bothered to shrug. "'S fine. It's 'cereza'. With a Z."
Jess repeated the word back to her. She liked the hiss of the consonants against her teeth but she couldn’t get the “R” to resemble what it was in Lupe’s mouth, that nimble flip of sound. "Not a lot of Z's in English," she commented.
“Not a lot of what ?” Lupe asked, laughing.
“Zed…Fine, ‘zee.’” Jess drew out the vowel into a little mocking melody. “It’s a pretty underutilized letter, if you ask me.”
Lupe huffed another laugh. “You just used one. Utilized one.”
“Oh, right. You Yanks spell it different.”
“I’m no Yank, hermano,” Lupe said flatly.
Jess hummed because she didn’t know what to say to that. “Do you think it gets lonely, back there at the end of the alphabet?” she asked instead. “Do you think Z ever wishes it could switch places with, say, K or M? Just for a change of pace, you know?”
“You are so goddamn weird, McCready,” Lupe said, though she was smiling again.
Jess shrugged and ate another cherry. The roof of her mouth was already raw from all the sugar and she felt a little sick to her stomach but she’d be damned if she let any of the girls in the house get their hands on the fruit before she’d well and truly had her fill.
They sat in comfortable silence for a while, Lupe smoking and Jess spitting cherry stones as far as she could into the victory garden that she’d helped Terri plant at the beginning of the season. It was a pretty pathetic excuse for a garden by McCready family standards but Terri seemed pleased with the two-and-a-half cucumbers it had yielded so far, and once Lupe stopped Jess in the hallway after she’d come in from weeding and reached up to draw her thumb over her cheekbone. “You’ve got a bit of…” Lupe had murmured, her fingers warm as she wiped a streak of dirt from Jess’ skin, then she’d stepped back and laughed outright, though not at all unkindly, at the expression on Jess’ face.
So the garden was not a complete failure in Jess’ eyes.
In the late afternoon light time grew syrupy between them. It was so hot that week that all the girls were in the habit of hanging around the house in as little clothing as propriety and Beverly would allow. For Lupe this meant pale canvas trousers that hugged her thighs and a white T-shirt, worn thin enough that Jess could see the raised edges of her undershirt beneath it, the muscles in her shoulders as she leaned forward and braced her elbows on her knees, the dark hair under her arms. There was a faint sheen of moisture at her temples, from an earlier shower or perspiration or both. Either way Jess wanted to put her fingertips, her nose, her tongue, to the skin there.
“Pues, dámela,” Lupe said after the fifth or sixth cherry pit sank down somewhere in the grass beyond them, putting out her hand, and Jess didn't need to guess the meaning. Lupe had good table manners despite her consistently unladylike grumbling so she chewed with her mouth closed, but Jess could imagine the meat of the cherry cleaving from its stone when Lupe carefully bit into it, the slight resistance of its cool flesh before she was able give herself over to the pleasure of its flavor without the risk of cracking her molars on the pit. Jess ran her tongue over her own teeth, watched as Lupe parted her lips and spat the stone with a soft, wet sound, so far that it ricocheted off the trunk of a tree on the edge of the garden. It was at least a foot past where Jess had managed to land any of her own.
Jess frowned and grabbed the colander back. "Hey, look at this," she said a moment later, and Lupe’s attention swiveled to her, shoulders slanted with intrigue. Jess held up a spindly green cherry stem and then stuck it in her mouth.
The thing she yelled most often as a kid was Look what I can do! Hollering to her brothers from high up in a tree as the branches trembled but ultimately held her fast. (Later, howling as her mother tried to scrub the pitch from the soles of her feet to no avail, her skin a vivid, angry red against the white ceramic of the bathtub.) Riding a bicycle with no hands, ice-skating backwards across the pond, gutting a fish so swiftly that it didn't even twitch, pissing standing up, whistling through a blade of grass between her thumbs, diving for a ball and turning a double play, opening a bottle of beer with her teeth, recreating a song from the radio with her guitar, laying a royal flush down on the table, making a woman gasp and curl in on herself as she came.
She realized early on that people were always going to look at her. Just as early, she knew she needed to give them a reason to stare that was within her control.
She maneuvered the cherry stem until it lay flat on her tongue, then pinned it to the roof of her mouth. It was a somewhat involved process, and Lupe watched her through it, mildly curious expression unchanging as the cigarette dwindled between her fingers.
Lupe made her feel young the same way baseball made her feel young—a heady, fully-embodied sense of now and fast and go , always let’s go . She found herself grasping for those coltish displays of bravado from the age when she was desperate for the neighbor girls to keep their gazes on her, when she assumed all the small feats of her physical person were as universally impressive to others as they were to herself. They weren’t always, she had discovered, and what’s more they frequently backfired. But when they worked—when Marie Martin’s dark eyes went wide with amazement, when the Anderson sisters raised their polite little hands to cover their mouths the way they’d been taught but not quickly enough to smother their laughter—the immediate satisfaction that zinged through her whole body could only be described as electric.
She consistently felt a shadow of that same nearly wild need for Lupe to look at her and be impressed by whatever she saw there. The thrill now was in the knowledge that Lupe would inevitably delight in each of Jess’ weird little skills, even if she scoffed and rolled her eyes at first, and that she would join in, demand to be taught, prove herself the more talented.
Jess realized she was pulling all kinds of unflattering faces as she guided the end of the stem through the little eye she’d bent it into, then bit it carefully, using the very tip of her tongue to secure the loop into something more closely resembling a real knot. Probably wouldn’t have passed muster for a Boy Scouts badge, but it was good enough for a party trick, even when there wasn’t much of a party. She drew back her lips and stuck out her tongue in Lupe’s direction.
“Jesus Christ.” Lupe sounded a little grossed out and a little impressed at the same time, which was precisely what Jess was going for.
She delicately spat the stem into her hand and, after tightening it further with her fingers, reached over and presented it to Lupe as if it were a precious gift. “A token of my love.”
“Real thoughtful of you, thanks,” Lupe said.
“That’s fine craftsmanship right there, you know,” Jess told her. She set the knot on the step next to where Lupe was sitting. “Mine is a talented tongue,” she added, like the innuendo wasn’t clear enough already.
“Yeah, I’ve seen the girls at Vi’s after they’re back from the bathroom with you.”
“So you’ve thought about it.” Jess allowed her tone to slide into something suggestive but still light enough to blow away on the breeze of a friendly fuck off. She expected Lupe to roll her eyes or to just laugh, that lovely low sound from the back of her throat which Jess coveted.
But instead Lupe shrugged, a real one this time, with a sigh tucked into it. Still staring into the yard, she said, “Yeah. I have.” The thin skin beneath her eyes was smudged violet. She glanced at Jess for a fraction of a second then blinked away again. The smoke from her cigarette caught in her eyelashes, turned them silvery.
Jess was used to summers dwindling into autumn. Her favorite fruits vanished from the market stands as the cold set in. Baseball games were replaced by hockey on the airwaves. Women always seemed to find reasons to skip town, or, worse, stick around and get married. And yet the cyclical nature of all these things managed to stave off any real sense of heartbreak: there would always be more fruit, more baseball, more women. Even the most vicious of winters eventually yielded to warmer days if she waited long enough.
Whatever this thing was with Lupe—this affection, astonishing in its enormity, this mutual understanding the likes of which she'd never known before—she wanted it to last. There was part of her that worried that by making a move she would render it real, and in making it real it would become something to lose, and she couldn’t fathom how she might hope to get it back.
That was the part that was unfamiliar. Not the need to impress and certainly not the attraction, an insistent hum just beneath the surface of her skin whenever Lupe was near, but the hesitation.
So she paused for too long in the wake of Lupe’s statement before she fumbled a reply: “You have?”
Finally Lupe turned toward her. Anyone else might have taken the silence as a tacit rejection but Lupe seemed unshaken as she let her gaze linger on Jess’ face, dipping from her eyes to her mouth, drifting along the line of her neck and then down to her hands which were now gripping the colander as though it might leap from her lap at any moment. It was so obvious and without any self-consciousness that it made Jess feel absolutely indecent even though she was no stranger to that kind of look in a woman’s eyes. Never mind they were sitting more than a foot apart from each other in broad daylight behind a house full of their teammates, awake and probably bored enough to be attuned to any particularly loud silences just outside.
“Yeah,” Lupe said again. She was smirking in a way that Jess suspected was an attempt to suppress a real grin. “Once or twice. You make it pretty hard not to. But I’ve also been told I have an active imagination, so.”
“Shit, García. Why the hell didn’t you say anything?” Jess demanded, almost annoyed.
“I thought you’d figure it out eventually.” Lupe chewed her lower lip. “Hoped so, anyway.”
Jess was trying to formulate a clever response that didn’t convey the true depths of her want when there was another metallic groan behind them as the door swung open and Esti came barrelling out of the house. In her hand was her carton of cherries from earlier, already significantly reduced in volume. Jess glanced at Lupe, half-anticipating a stormy expression on her face now that the kid had interrupted their moment—although what exactly the moment even was continued to elude Jess as it dissolved around them—but Lupe just smiled and leaned back against the porch railing.
Esti addressed Jess in Spanish. Her accent was softer than Lupe’s, rounder somehow, the language all tumbling together so Jess had to really concentrate to recognize individual words. Something about the heat, about New York, where the movie they saw earlier had taken place.
“I’ll take you someday, kid,” Jess promised her. She meant it as much as she could.
Esti sat down between them on the step, sweeping her skirt underneath herself in one fluid motion while holding the cherries aloft in her other hand. She offered the carton to Lupe, who took a cherry. Looking past Esti to catch Jess’ eye, she chewed for a moment, then spat the stone into the yard. Jess did the same a moment later.
Esti said something—Jess caught cereza —and Lupe laughed.
“She says we shouldn’t eat any more cherries, because Carson wants to make a pie with them.”
“No way!” Jess snapped. “I’m not letting them go to waste in some pie. These cherries should be enjoyed in their purest form. Anything else is sacrilege.”
Lupe translated and Esti rolled her eyes even as she grabbed a cherry for herself. “Fine,” she said in English. “But now you watch me.”
The pit flew from her mouth and landed somewhere among Terri’s remaining half cucumber, past where Jess and Lupe’s respective records had been set. Esti’s face dropped open in that little look of delight Jess recognized from the field, and Jess threw an arm around her shoulders, tugging her close. “Eres la champ,” she said. “I should’ve known you’d be a killer at this, too.”
“La campeona,” Esti corrected her, smiling.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Lupe pick up the knotted cherry stem, pale and brittle from the sunlight that had just begun to melt toward the treetops, and slip it into her pocket.