Page 129 of Cherry Picking

“I followed directions. You should be proud.”

“Mmm.” She’s fighting a smile, her eyes softening at the edges. “Come on. Let’s get to it.”

Ray runs the excavator for the first part. I stay clear of the swing, watching the machine bite into the dry earth until there’s a rough, rectangular gap in the lawn. It takes twenty minutes to clear the bulk of it out—a raw wound in the grass with loose dirt piling up at the edges.

Then the engine dies, the silence of the cemetery rushing back in, and Evie hands me a spade. “Machine gets you eighty percent of the way there,” she says, testing the edge of her own shovel. “But it doesn’t get you square.”

“Square.”

“The vault has to sit perfectly level. If the sides aren’t clean, the whole thing settles wrong. Two years from now, there’s a dip in the turf, and someone’s daughter notices it while she’s standing here.” She drops down into the hole. “Come on. You’re built for moving dirt, Maxwell. Use it.”

I join her at the bottom. The walls are close enough that our shoulders brush as we work, and she’s twice as fast as I am because she has the technique, and I only have the strength.

“Too much,” she says, stopping my arm after ten minutes.

“I’m just digging, Evie.”

“You’re taking it out of the wall. The wall is the boundary.” She taps the blade of my spade. “Shave it. Don’t dig. You aren’t trying to make it bigger; you’re trying to make it right.”

By six thirty, the temperature has hit ninety, and my shirt is a lost cause. Ray hands down bottles of water at regular intervals, watching the progress without comment. I drink mine in three gulps and get back to the north wall.

Around seven, Evie stops to wipe her brow. She just ends up smearing a trail of caliche across her forehead.

“You’re doing okay,” she admits.

“I’m being defeated by a hole in the ground.”

“Happens to everyone the first time.” She goes back to the corner. “You should’ve seen Tomás. He actually puked.”

“I’m not going to puke.”

“You’ve got fifteen minutes of shaving left to prove it.”

I stop for a second to look at her. She’s covered in dirt to the elbows, hair falling out of its knot, working a wall in a seven-foot rectangle at sunrise. Still, she looks entirely, perfectly at home.

“The morning before I met you,” I say, “you were doing this.”

“That’s right.”

“For Ziggy.”

“For your brother.” She squares the final corner, checking it against the string line. “It was fifty-four degrees that morning. Much better conditions. You’re getting the advanced players’ edition.”

We finish just before eight. Ray inspects the corners in silence, which Evie whispers is the highest form of praise her father offers. The three of us stand in the gravel lot drinking water from the cooler while the desert sun turns the horizon white.

“You’re going to be sore tomorrow, son,” Ray says, capping his bottle.

“I’m sore now, Ray.”

I kiss Evie goodbye—a minor workplace offense that earns me a wink from her father—survive a scalding shower, and scarf down a massive breakfast.

By nine thirty, I’m idling at the curb for my father with four bunches of berry-pink dahlias in the truck bed, picked up from the florist on Eastern, where they knew the order before I said his name.

He does the flower run the first Saturday of every month. For over a year, Danny or Evie has been the one to navigate the traffic. Today, I agreed to do it, a fact he’s been remarkably smug about since Wednesday morning.

“You smell like a landfill,” he notes as he hauls himself into the seat.

“I dug a grave this morning, Dad.”