By Alyssa Cami

Leta craves peaches. It’s too early in the season, though. The small display at the grocery store contains hard, pitiful things that bear only a passing resemblance to the fruit she has in mind. The baby kicks the inside of her ribs, displeased. Leta rubs her overripe belly, but the motion does little to soothe the mini tyrant inside.

That night, Tim comes home with dried peach slices. They were all he could find. He promises to continue the search tomorrow. The slices are shriveled in her hand, tacky to the touch. When Leta tries one, it’s artificially sweet and sticks to her molars. The baby squirms between her hipbones, unsatisfied. She places a hand over where she thinks his head is. 

“My grandfather grew a peach tree,” she tells Tim. “In the backyard.”

“Did he?”

Leta can tell Tim is only half-listening. His phone is out, and he taps around on a food delivery app looking for peach substitutes, a modern-day hunter-gatherer trying to feed his pregnant wife. She lets him scroll and thinks of that peach tree—the thin yet solid trunk, the wide canopy. Her baba planted it with two apples and a fig tree. The fig didn’t last long. No one thought the peach would last either, but every summer its branches were dotted with red-orange-yellow fruit. 

Under its shade, Baba would flick open his knife and tell her about the old country while he cut into a peach with quick, expert motions. The orchards, the farmland, the sun. Everything fresh from the tree, the vine, the ground. Then he would offer her fat slices on the knife. 

We ate everything like this, before I had to leave, he’d tell Leta. His thick accent bent the words in funny ways, gave it a foreign melody she loved. 

The metal was cold on her bottom lip, the fruit sun-warm and sweet on her tongue. Baba would lean forward, try to snatch her up for a rib-cracking hug, and Leta would run off barefoot through the grass, her chin sticky with juice. Nana said Baba was still learning to be gentle. One of so many sons and no mother to raise them. Sent away when he was still a boy to make money for the family. It made him tough and strong, but he didn’t know his own strength. Didn’t know how to temper it for small bodies, when nothing had been tempered for him when he was that young.

When Leta would rush back for more peach, she’d stand just out of reach, and Baba would offer up the slick yellow-orange fruit balanced on the flat side of the blade. They’d continue this dance until only the wrinkled pit rested in his palm.

Leta pictures the swell of a peach in his calloused hand. What would his thick fingers have felt like on the slope of her ever-expanding belly? Would he have felt the baby kick? Would he have muttered a string of blessings in the lilting and falling sounds of his first language, the one her father never taught her? To Leta, it always sounded like rolling waves. She can’t comprehend how she can ache for words she never understood.

Her father and uncles sold the house after Baba died. A few years later she made the mistake of driving through the old neighborhood. She thought it would be fun.

But the new owners had ripped out the fruit trees. No apples. No peaches. She stared at the stretch of grass as new cracks formed in her grief. 

Tim finally tracks down peaches as summer is beginning to fade. Her stomach is a shriveled pit of a thing, their son asleep between her breasts when he presents the fruit to her. As she cups it in her hands, the healed-over cracks reopen.

“Can you cut it?” she asks.

He returns from the kitchen with the slices arranged on a plate in a neat circle. The ceramic is smooth against her hands, neither hot nor cold. She thanks him, though this isn’t what she wanted. What she wanted he could never give her. 

Their son rouses and Tim scoops him up, tells Leta not to worry, to rest, enjoy her long-deferred craving. 

Leta listens to their soft sounds in the other room. An ache builds at the base of her throat. What she wouldn’t give for one more rib-cracking hug. Her son will never know them. He’ll never eat a fresh-plucked peach from a glinting blade, or have a rough thumb brush his lip after.