She had to work hard to keep up with the men. She was no match, that much was obvious. But Buddy praised her efforts now and then, telling her she was doing great for a new picker. Of course, Buddy clearly wanted a date, but she tried to ignore that since it was never going to happen.
After the first day, she didn’t walk to work in the pitch dark anymore, but she did set out in early dawn and all the same suspicious animal noises haunted her. She managed to get to the orchard just as full morning was upon them so she could make the coffee, which she had perfected. She brought a sandwich everyday—apples were on the house. And she was always the last one to leave—home by six.
By the time she got home everyday, Adie had joined forces with Martha to get the little girls home from day care, bathed and fed, a contribution so monumental it nearly moved Nora to tears, she was so grateful.
“Adie, you must be exhausted,” she said. “They wear me out!”
“I’m doing very well,” the woman replied. “I feel useful. Needed. But I’ll be the first to admit, they’re quite a lot to manage in the tub. They like the tub.”
“Thank God for Martha!” Nora said. She tried not to let it show that she had a little trouble lifting the baby into her little stroller, but Adie wasn’t paying attention to that, thank goodness.
“You know what’s wonderful? How excited they are when I come to school to pick them up,” Adie said while Nora readied her children to go home. “The teachers say the girls do very well—they eat well and nap well and seem to love being there.”
Almost more important than the added income, her girls needed to be around loving adults and other children in a safe environment. “Is Ellie Kincaid there sometimes?” Nora asked.
“I see her every morning. I think she’s some kind of official sponsor of the day care and preschool,” Adie said. “She welcomes the children and makes a big fuss over them every day. I’m volunteering to help with milk and cookie time and watching over nap time.”
“Oh, Adie, you’re priceless.”
“Why not? I have the time. And I love the children.”
Nora didn’t see Tom Cavanaugh much that first week and when she did, they didn’t speak or make eye contact, not even when she arrived early enough to be sure his coffee was made. This suited her fine. She wasn’t prepared to have him judge her weakness by her wounded hands or her slow movements and winces due to muscle pain. She saw him talking to other harvesters from time to time, saw him using the forklift to move full bins, saw him in the cider press area. But they didn’t work together nor chitchat. Why would they?
He never complained about the coffee again. And he had remembered the cream and sugar every morning.
By the end of the week she was so tired she believed she could fall down and sleep for a month. Mr. Cavanaugh told the harvesters it was their choice whether to work or take time off on the weekend; they weren’t in a critical harvesting situation like over-ripening or an impending freeze. He paid overtime, so even though Nora could hardly bend her fingers from the tightness or lift her right arm, her picking arm, she signed on and hoped she could get a little help from Adie and Martha with the kids, or maybe Ellie Kincaid or one of the local teenage babysitters. Overtime, that was juicy.
On her walk home, alone on that long uphill trek on a Friday night, she allowed herself to fall apart a little bit. She hurt all over and faced another long seven days of work. It was hard for her to hold her little girls; she ached when she lifted them and there were a couple of spots on her hands that bled if she didn’t wrap them in bandages. If Adie and Martha hadn’t managed the bathing before she got home, Nora didn’t know how she would. For her own daily shower, soap and water stung so badly tears rolled down her cheeks. And she was going to have to beg the use of someone’s washer and dryer during an evening soon—the laundry was piling up and they didn’t