ALSO BY SARAH ADDISON ALLEN
The Girl Who Chased the Moon
The Sugar Queen
Garden Spells
The Peach Keeper is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Sarah Addison Allen
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Allen, Sarah Addison.
The peach keeper: a novel / Sarah Addison Allen.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-553-90813-8
1. Family secrets—Fiction. 2. Self-actualization (Psychology)
in women—Fiction. 3. North Carolina—Fiction.
4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3601.L4356P43 2011
813′.6—dc22 2010047828
www.bantamdell.com
Jacket design: Kathleen DiGrado
Jacket images: © Irene Lamprakou/Trevillion Images (woman),
© Lee Avison/Trevillion Images (tree),
© Joan Kocak/Trevillion Images (field)
v3.1
To Michelle Pittman and Heidi Gibbs.
Everything I know of friendship
is thanks to you.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One - Hiding Places
Chapter Two - Whispers
Chapter Three - Code of Outcasts
Chapter Four - Wish Lists
Chapter Five - Unearthed
Chapter Six - The Fairy Tale
Chapter Seven - Relativity
Chapter Eight - Party Girls
Chapter Nine - Root Systems
Chapter Ten - The Magic Man
Chapter Eleven - Love Potion
Chapter Twelve - Strange Seductions
Chapter Thirteen - The Joker, the Stick Man, the Princess, and the Freak
Chapter Fourteen - Lost and Found
Chapter Fifteen - The Risk
Chapter Sixteen - Shedding the Armor
Chapter Seventeen - Fly Away
Chapter Eighteen - The Peach Keepers
Chapter Nineteen - The Dream
Acknowledgments
About the Author
ONE
Hiding Places
The day Paxton Osgood took the box of heavy-stock, foil-lined envelopes to the post office, the ones she’d had a professional calligrapher address, it began to rain so hard the air turned as white as bleached cotton. By nightfall, rivers had crested at flood stage and, for the first time since 1936, the mail couldn’t be delivered. When things began to dry out, when basements were pumped free of water and branches were cleared from yards and streets, the invitations were finally delivered, but to all the wrong houses. Neighbors laughed over fences, handing the misdelivered pieces of mail to their rightful owners with comments about the crazy weather and their careless postman. The next day, an unusual number of people showed up at the doctor’s office with infected paper cuts, because the envelopes had sealed, cementlike, from the moisture. Later, the single-card invitations themselves seemed to hide and pop back up at random. Mrs. Jameson’s invitation disappeared for two days, then reappeared in a bird’s nest outside. Harper Rowley’s invitation was found in the church bell tower, Mr. Kingsley’s in his elderly mother’s garden shed.
If anyone had been paying attention to the signs, they would have realized that air turns white when things are about to change, that paper cuts mean there’s more to what’s written on the page than meets the eye, and that birds are always out to protect you from things you don’t see.
But no one was paying attention. Least of all Willa Jackson.
The envelope sat untouched on the back counter of Willa’s store for over a week. She picked it up curiously when it had been delivered with the other mail, but then she’d dropped it like it had burned her as soon as she’d recognized what it was. Even now, when she walked by it, she would throw a suspicious glance its way.
“Open it already,” Rachel finally said with exasperation that morning. Willa turned to Rachel Edney, who was standing behind the coffee bar across the store. She had short dark hair and, in her capris and sport tank, looked like she was ready to go climb a large rock. No matter how many times Willa told her she didn’t actually have to dress in the clothes the store sold—Willa herself rarely deviated from jeans and boots—Rachel was convinced she had to represent.
“I’m not going. No need to open it,” Willa said, deciding to take on the mundane task of folding the new stock of organic T-shirts, hoping it would help her ignore the strange feeling that came over her every time she thought of that invitation, like a balloon of expectation expanding in the center of her body. She used to feel this way a lot when she was younger, right before she did something really stupid. But she thought she was past all of that. She’d padded her life with so much calm that she didn’t think anything could penetrate it. Some things, apparently, still could.
Rachel made a tsking sound. “You’re such an elitist.”
That made Willa laugh. “Explain to me why not opening an invitation to a gala thrown by the richest women in town makes me elitist.”
“You look at everything they do with disdain, like they’re just too silly to be believed.”
“I do not.”
“Well, it’s either that or you’re repressing a secret desire to be one of them,” Rachel said as she put on a green apron with Au Naturel Sporting Goods and Café embroidered on it in yellow script.
Rachel was eight years younger than Willa, but Willa had never written off Rachel’s opinions as those of just another twenty-two-year-old who thought she knew everything. Rachel had lived a vagabond and bohemian life, and she knew a lot about human nature. The only reason she had settled in Walls of Water, for now, was because she’d fallen in love with a man here. Love, she always said, changes the game.
But Willa didn’t want to get into what she did or didn’t feel about the rich families in town. Rachel had never spent more than a few months in any one place growing up. Willa had lived here almost her whole life. She inherently understood the mysterious social dynamics of Walls of Water; she just didn’t know how to explain them to people who didn’t. So Willa asked the one question she knew would distract Rachel. “What’s on the menu today? It smells fantastic.”