The lemons came off the tree with a small, dry snap, the way they always had, and Nora Hollis stood on the third rung of the stepladder with one hand braced on her belly and the other closing around fruit her grandfather had planted before she was born.
"You are not supposed to be on that ladder," Grant called from the patio.
"Then come hold it."
He didn't come. He was untangling a string of paper lanterns, frowning at it the way he frowned at spreadsheets, and after a second he said, "Two minutes," and went back to it. Nora picked three more lemons, dropped them into the canvas bag looped over her wrist, and climbed down on her own. Thirty-two weeks. Her center of gravity had moved somewhere south and forward, a stranger's center of gravity, and every step down felt like negotiating with it.
The Meyer lemon tree stood in the back corner of the yard, against the fence that divided Grandpa Leo's old lot from the Nakamuras' vegetable beds. It was not a pretty tree. It leaned. One whole side had died back in the freeze of 2019 and never recovered, and Leo had refused to let anyone cut it down. "It's still making lemons," he'd said, which for Leo was the entire argument for anything. He'd made the same argument about his truck, his hearing aids, and, near the end, himself.
He had been gone four years now. The house had been gone to Nora for four years, which was a different thing, and which she still had trouble saying out loud. My house. It sounded like something a person said who had earned it.
In the kitchen she dumped the lemons into the sink and ran water over them. The baby kicked, a single decisive push under her ribs, as if registering an objection to the ladder. "I know," Nora told her. "I know. Your father's busy."
It was eleven in the morning on the last Saturday in August, and the shower started at two. Sacramento had promised ninety-eight degrees. Nora had promised herself she would not cry if anything went wrong, because something always went wrong at a party and because she had been crying at commercials lately, at a dog food ad, at a man on the news who'd found his wedding ring in a lake.
She was rolling the first lemon under her palm when she heard her mother's car in the driveway.
Diane Castellano did not knock. She never had, not at this house. She'd grown up here; this had been her bedroom window that Nora could see from the sink, the small one over the side yard, now painted the soft green they'd chosen for the nursery. Diane came through the side door with a sheet cake balanced on one forearm and a bag of ice on her hip, and she was talking before the screen door had stopped swinging.
"The bakery spelled it wrong. I'm not even joking. 'Welcome Baby Holis.' One L. I made them fix it, but the frosting's a little lumpy where they scraped, so if anyone asks, that's texture." She set the cake on the counter. "Hi, sweetheart. Look at you. Are you drinking water?"
"I'm drinking water."
"You're flushed."