A Pear-tree Story
Michael O’Brien
It was in the nature of things for the call to start off awkwardly. After all, here Lynn and I were, two people who had barely spoken to each other outside of the office. She asked a few generic questions about my family’s trip to Europe. I answered generically. I made a stab at getting to the point. She evaded it. I made another. She evaded it again. It was only then that I realized she had changed her mind. I went on volleying pleasantries back at her, trying to collect myself. Then I remembered her text. “Hey, what was that story you said you would tell me about the pear, what was it, torte?”
“Oh. No. Tart. It was a pear tart. It’s funny you should mention it though, because there’ve been some recent, well, developments, I guess you could call them, that are sort of . . . relevant.”
“Okay then. Let’s hear this pear- tart story.”
“Actually, I shouldn’t have said that. The developments don’t have anything to do with the pear tart. I mean, the story’s about the pear tree.”
“That sounds even better.”
“No, you don’t want – it’s just, the pear- tree story is kind of long.”
“Then it’s a good thing I’m supposedly out for a ten- mile run.
” Lynn was silent.
“Lynn, let’s stop dancing around the elephant in the whateverit- is. If this is my last time hearing your voice, I’m happy to listen for as long as you want to talk.”
True enough, but the words tasted sickly sweet. What I wanted was to hear about these quote- unquote developments. I’d been thinking of myself as the one who might back out. The one with the good marriage. The one with everything to lose. So I was surprised, and didn’t want to hang up without finding out what had happened. The fact that relief was already smothering my disappointment didn’t make me any less curious. And the curiosity wasn’t just self- involved: Lynn and I had become friends, and I wanted to hear my friend’s story. “Besides,” I added. “I don’t want to go the rest of my life knowing there’s a good pear- tree story out there I haven’t heard.”
Lynn broke her silence with a long sigh. Okay, she said. But for the story to make sense she would have to go back nine months, to December, when her family was getting ready to move to Chicago. It was their third relocation in six years. After living in two yardless tract houses, she’d been hoping this time to find a place she at least liked, and the little brick bungalow she was looking at didn’t qualify. Steve, though, was living out of a downtown hotel, Lynn’s start date was in January, and she wanted Owen and Abbie to begin school with the new year. It was winter, and there was nothing better on the market. “More pears than you can imagine,” the real estate agent promised when she showed Lynn the backyard. The tree was twenty feet high but its branches were short and wispy. It looked desolate. Lynn didn’t even know if she liked pears – the last time she’d eaten one she was ten years old, and it was canned in syrup. Nevertheless, the tree provided some consolation.
“More pears than you can imagine” turned out to be underselling it. In April, the tree lit up with dainty white flowers; by mid- June, the flowers had been replaced by green, fist- sized pears. Lynn couldn’t believe those skinny branches could hold so much weight. Then the squirrels showed up. More squirrels, Lynn said, than you can imagine. Right away, they targeted the lowest branches, as if clarifying what belonged to whom. If the squirrels had done nothing more than steal, Lynn might have laughed about it, but they were careless and wasteful and carpeted the yard with pears they’d barely touched. It felt like an insult. And the way they stared at her while they gnawed – that was insulting too. Steve wanted to solve the problem with BB guns, him and Owen blasting away, but had to leave on assignment before he got around to it.
Lynn’s neighbors, whose yard the branches extended into, told her that the pears didn’t ripen until late August, didn’t ripen well when picked early, and had only a four- or five- day window for picking. But they were a delicacy. And the squirrels? “Be serious. Look at that tree,” the neighbors said. Lynn looked. There had to be a thousand pears. Two thousand, maybe.
Sure enough, the pears stayed green and hard. Lynn picked a few and they sat on the counter for weeks before turning overnight into mush. August finally came, and Lynn started climbing onto a stepladder every day, hunting for the faint yellow blush that would indicate ripeness. The squirrels’ appetite this year, the neighbors acknowledged, was a bit extreme. But get ready, they told her. The blush was coming.
The beginning of August is when I left the company where Lynn and I had worked together since January. We had gelled from the start, racing through flirtation to a mutual crush that incapacitated me at times with distraction. At home, I slipped into trances replaying our conversations; when I closed my eyes at night, I saw Lynn’s face. Nominally, I was her superior, so we did not close doors behind ourselves or venture out of the office as a twosome, but we must have come across like giddy teenagers. People weren’t subtle about raising their eyebrows. C’mon, I told my friends, her husband’s an FBI agent, but the knowing looks kept coming my way.
Lynn vented to me frequently about Steve, but in a wry, worldweary way. I talked about my daughters a lot but left my wife out of it. On my last day, Lynn stated that if Steve got transferred again, she and the kids weren’t going with him. I asked if Steve’s posting, which she had described as permanent, had changed status, and she said no. Her tone was suggestive. I had sometimes fantasized about a life with Lynn, but it was like my periodic fantasies about how I would spend my fortune after winning the lottery – which is to say, I don’t get hung up on the fact that I don’t play the lottery and never would. I answered carefully, trying not to echo Lynn’s suggestiveness. “Are you saying that as long as he stays, you’ll stay?”
“Where would I go?”
I shrugged, acknowledging the lack of an easy answer.
When the office went out for drinks that night, our colleagues gave me and Lynn space and drifted away early. Neither of us knew what to do with the privacy. We turned shy and clumsy but didn’t want to say goodbye, until finally Lynn’s babysitter’s father called. We had made scripted promises to “grab lunch one of these days,” but then, just as Lynn’s Uber arrived, I stuttered that maybe we should get together sooner rather than later. “Yeah, we should,” Lynn said, trailing off. “Yes?” I asked, and she nodded. We agreed that I would call the day after I returned from my two weeks in Europe.
When I disembarked in Prague, a text from Lynn was waiting. Steve’s assignment was wrapping up, it read, and he expected to be home at the end of the month – a week after my return. Later that day she texted: Steve called while I was mopping the floor. He asked what I was doing and I said vacuuming. Not too many people can get away with lying to an FBI agent like that. Subtext has never been so sweet. The next day it was Steve asked where Owen was. I said Joey’s house but actually it was Ascher’s. One lie a day, including I told Steve I made a pear tart. I couldn’t make a pear tart if my children’s life depended on it. I replied with Why a pear tart?, she with Long story, me with Can’t wait to hear it.
In Europe, I was preoccupied to an unconscionable degree. I didn’t see what my wife and daughters saw, or hear what they said. Instead I was thinking about Lynn’s texts, or remembering that moment in the bar, or working out logistics, or imagining our first illicit hour together. During the day I took note of bridges, a lifelong source of fascination and fear. The medieval bridge in Prague whose stone arches span the Vltava River; the spectacular chain bridge over the Danube joining Buda and Pest; and, in Bratislava, the long, elegantly curved Apollo Bridge, whose arches are strung like a harp. At night I jogged back to them, the low city skylines radiating gold, the water shimmering with reflected light, and composed my replies to Lynn.
Lynn’s story continued with her on the backyard deck one evening, dousing herself with bug spray. That’s when she looked up and saw a color that wasn’t green. The mystical yellow blush. When she mounted the stepladder, though, it turned out that the squirrels had polished off the section of pears that would have been within reach. Lynn clutched at the twiggy branches to balance herself while she stared up at the remaining fruit. Afterward, she kept an eye out for the neighbors, and shortly after dark rushed from the house to hail the wife, who was taking her recycling to the alley. “It’s happening,” Lynn said. “They’re changing colors.” “We had cinnamon- baked pears for dessert tonight,” the neighbor said. “We borrowed your stepladder – I hope you don’t mind.” Instead of asking whose yard, exactly, they had taken the pears from, Lynn exclaimed, “I can’t reach the ones that are left. How am I supposed to pick them if I can’t reach them?” The neighbor looked at her funny. “Um, a fruit picker?”
“Is a fruit picker really necessary?” Steve asked over the phone that night, having seen the confirmation email from Amazon. Lynn felt like the neighbor: Well, if you want to, you know, pick fruit? “You’ve never bought a pear in your life,” Steve said. “Tell me how you’re gonna get thirty- six bucks worth of value from that thing.” She invented the pear tart to annoy him – he had no use for “fancy” desserts. “If I’d known I could save myself thirty- six dollars,” he said, “I would’ve chopped that thing down the day we moved in.”
Two days later, Lynn hurried home to an empty front porch. According to Amazon, the package had been delivered. There was a house on the other side of town, she knew, with the same street address as hers except West instead of East, so she put Owen and Abbie in the car. After ringing the doorbell three times, she pressed her face to a window, and there the package was, propped against a recliner. She put a note through the mail slot, then spent two hours digitally chatting with someone or something at Amazon customer service. Eventually the entity agreed to deliver a replacement overnight.
The next day, Lynn left work early and found the package waiting. She attached the red metal basket, extended the aluminum pole to its maximum thirteen feet, and marched around the side of the house. She climbed the stepladder, looked up and . . . didn’t see any pears. No way, she thought. She circled the tree with the ladder then, poking with the basket from every angle, and couldn’t find a single pear. She collapsed the picker and examined the promising ones on the ground, but all of their undersides had been gnawed at. Just when she thought she’d struck out, she looked up from a crouch and glimpsed a pear, shrouded by leaves, hanging ten feet over her head.
“Let me guess,” I said. “It was no good.”
“I didn’t see how brown and squishy it was until I was touching it.”
“At least you’ve got your fruit picker ready to go for next year.”
“I’m thinking I’ll spend the winter inventing a squirrel repellent.”
“I have an image of you in your basement with a Bunsen burner and test tubes and a big cage of squirrels.”
“I’m picturing the tree full of blushing pears, and me standing there with the fruit picker, and the surrounding trees are full of squirrels. It’s like an amphitheater.”
“Lynn, here’s the thing. That’s a good story, but I got Cs in my high school English classes – I’m afraid you might have to spell out what was relevant in it.”
“I didn’t get to the end yet.”
When Steve asked that night about the fruit picker, Lynn told him about the misdelivery, and hunting for pears, and finally finding that one, and she was planning to tell him it was perfect: the most delicious piece of fruit she’d ever tasted. Instead, she told him the truth.
“I had this nauseating feeling. It was like I knew, right then and there. I knew that I don’t want a life where every other time I open my mouth it’s to tell a lie.”
“Well. That I can follow.”
Lynn was quiet.
“Did Steve rub it in about the fruit picker?”
“Not really. He’s gracious in victory, usually.”
Saying I don’t want to lie rather than I don’t want to end my marriage was leaving a door conspicuously open. At that moment, the possibility felt real; I had to swallow the urge to say What if we didn’t have to lie? Instead, I started to tell Lynn that she deserved great things, don’t settle for an absence of bad things, but stopped, afraid it would sound condescending.
“Do me a favor. Text me a picture of the first bushel of pears you pick next summer.”
“I think a bushel would be something like a hundred pounds.”
“Your point being?”
Lynn’s laugh, for months a perfect drug, tightened my stomach. Run away with me, I thought.
“One bushel wouldn’t be that impressive. How about I send you a picture of the first two?”
“Perfect,” I said. And then, mercifully, Lynn said goodbye.
Michael O’Brien’s work has appeared in Salamander, Sou’wester, Southern Indiana Review, and Washington Square Review.