Page 16 of Under the Orchard’s Spell

As we angle between branches, I find myself searching Logan for all the details I used to know by heart: the faintly metallic smell of graphite that clung to his shirts. The ink stains that never fully left his fingertips. His quick, easy smile. A million particularities I thought I’d left behind when I moved to Alaska.

After I piled into my mom’s station wagon, Logan and I planned never to talk again. By then, I’d already learned long-distance relationships always have a way of fading. Still, it took only a few eerie twilight evenings in that strange new home for me to slip up and call. Logan answered after a single ring.

At first, our conversations flowed as easily as the orchard’s south-side creek—we could sit on the phone for hours, usually talking, sometimes just listening to each other exist. But over the weeks that followed, something shifted. He started taking hours, sometimes days, to respond to my texts. When he answered my calls, he’d tell me he needed to go ten minutes later. When we managed to talk for more than a few minutes, Logan was quiet and withdrawn.

The distance was pulling him away, that much was clear. I was too familiar with how miles can erode just about everything, not to notice. So, I hastened the inevitable. I stopped texting so much and started letting some of his calls go unanswered. Within a few weeks, we lapsed into complete silence.

Now he’s here again, carefully setting his boots to avoid the sprinklers and the occasional fallen pear, sparing me a quick sidelong glance as I direct him up a new row. When I try to catalogue him, I find more differences than similarities to the boy I once knew. He’s much taller than me—I still have to tip up my chin to make eye contact with him, just the way I remember. But his posture is straighter, his hands clean of ink, his smile slower to come. Despite these tangibles, something indefinable makes Logan’s presence feel like a barometer change. Or like hearing a song I swore I’d stopped playing. One I haven’t listened to in years but with a baseline that yanks me back to moments long forgotten.

“So,” I say, sidestepping to avoid the circular spray from a sprinkler, which still manages to fleck my knees from afar. “I have to admit I lured you into this stroll under false pretenses.”

Logan glances at me. “Did you.”

A question without a question mark. I like that he still does that.

“We’re not wandering. We’re looking for unusual pears.”

“As in, a new variety?”

“As in, there’s this white stuff on some of them. Like a coating? I’d like to figure out what it is.”

Yesterday, after I got home from the farmer’s market, I noticed more of those affected pears. At the time, I shrugged it off with Val’s excuse—likely the sprayers. We use kaolin clay, a natural pest deterrent that leaves a white, powdery coating that bugs don’t like but washes off for consumers. Blake was in charge of running the sprayer this summer. He could have gotten distracted and ended up with too much on some of the pears.

I didn’t think more of it until late last night, when unsettled weather rolled through the orchard. Lying in bed, I found myself kicking my sweaty sheets and twisting through snippets of involuntary thoughts, the kind conjured only in the liminal wilderness between sleep and wake. Blake and Liv. Picking strategies. Val’s warnings about the farm’s financial situation. Somewhere along the way, my jostling thoughts landed on those unusual pears again.

And then my eyes flew open wide as it hit me: The pattern doesn’t make sense for spray. In addition to helping with the bugs, kaolin clay is used to protect the fruit from sun damage, so I specifically instructed Blake to run the sprayer on the southern slopes and in the corners. But Val and I were in the interior of a north-facing row when we saw that whitish film first. And Blake might have many flaws, but the man follows directions like a caboose clinging to a train car.

“I’m no arborist,” Logan says, as he lifts a branch away from his face and stoops out from under a canopy. “But ‘mysterious white pear disease’ sounds uncomfortably like the beginning of a movie that ends in widespread crop failure and space exploration to save humanity.”

I chuckle as I squint up into the nearby branches. “I suspect this is a lot more mundane. Irrigation water and pesticide sprays can leave a similar-looking residue.”

“But you don’t think that’s what it is.”

“No,” I admit. “I don’t think that’s what it is.”

“What, then?”

The truth is, I don’t know. What I do know is that if Uncle Martin were here, he’d tell me to try to listen. “The fruit will talk, you know,” he once said, a pear balanced on his knee as he rooted through his deep pockets, pulling out handfuls of seeds and twine until he landed on a paring knife he called flicker. He scowled at a branch above our heads, as though about to admonish it. “Sometimes they prattle so much you’d wish they’d clam up.”

“Like aloud?” I asked, back ramrod straight as I leaned forward, watching him carve off a shiny slice of fruit.

His head cocked, that wide-brimmed hat dusting over one eye, and I thought he looked a bit like he was considering whether or not to let me in on a secret. “Tell me, Ali. How do you know a high-quality fruit?”

“Size, color, sugar content,” I said straightaway.

“Good.” He handed the slice of pear to me. “And what can go wrong?”

The better question was what couldn’t go wrong, but my uncle wouldn’t have wanted to hear me being so pessimistic. “Disease. Fungus. Equipment failure. Late frost. Sunburn. Pests.”

A pleased nod. “And…?”

“Hail,” I said, leaving the worst for last.

Hail is a death sentence for fruit.

He tweaked my nose. “There you have it. That’s how the orchard talks. You just have to listen.”

“I’m worried about a disease,” I say to Logan now. “Or maybe a fungus.”