The Year Money Grew on Trees - Aaron Hawkins [67]
After a few hours, she began to fade. Everything went dark all at once. I looked down, and she had dropped to the ground asleep, letting the lamp fall next to her. I didn't know whether to try and wake her up and take her home or not. In the end, I just turned the lamp back over and kept picking, leaving her on the ground. I would take her home after finishing up just a couple more boxes.
A little later I heard footsteps coming through the darkness. I turned and saw my dad walking up. He looked down at Jennifer and frowned.
"You just going to leave your sister lying here on the ground?" he asked angrily.
"I was about to finish up and bring her in."
"Maybe your mother's right. Why don't you come back home before you make yourself really sick."
"Let me just finish this up."
"Come on, I'm not sure what you're trying to prove here. You're going to hurt yourself and your sisters."
A feeling of resentment swept over me. If he was so worried, why didn't he try and help me finish? He hardly seemed to care if I succeeded. "I'm not trying to prove anything, Dad!" I yelled. "You're the one who's always talking about working so hard! I only started out here because I didn't want to work at that stupid scrap yard! But I can't stop now or you'll call me a quitter! I just wish for once you'd say I was doing something right!" What I said didn't make much sense, but I was so full of anger and frustration that I wanted to scream anything at someone.
My dad just looked at me. I thought he would shout something back, but he didn't. Something close to sympathy came over his face. "Do what you want, then. It's your health," he said. He picked up my sister and carried her home.
I waited until I knew he had reached the house, and then I switched off the lamp and carried it home.
I was exhausted but couldn't sleep peacefully. I kept thinking of yelling at my dad and my little sister lying there on the ground. Deep down I craved for him to say he was proud of me and I was doing something he never could have done when he was my age. That kind of thing would probably never leave his mouth. Maybe the best I could hope for was the fact that he didn't yank me off that ladder when I had yelled at him.
I also thought of Sam's and Michael's faces when I would have to tell them there would be no money for them after all. Mrs. Nelson was going to take everything just like I'd agreed to in the contract. When I did fall asleep, I dreamed that I was picking apples that wouldn't come off their branches. No matter how hard I pulled, they clung to the trees. I woke up in the middle of the night to find myself standing on my bed grasping at the walls of my room as if I were reaching for an apple tree.
***
Since the picking had begun, the one thing I had come to rely on was Amy's presence. Unexpectedly, during the second week of picking, she had stopped complaining or asking when it was all going to be over. She was out beside me every day until it got dark and all day on Saturdays. Compared to the nights when I was alone, those times hardly felt like work.
She never mentioned me staying up late at night. Maybe she thought that as long as she didn't acknowledge what I was doing, she wouldn't have to feel guilty about not joining me. When we would go out to pick, she would try not to look at the boxes I had finished the night and morning before.
She constantly encouraged me, though, whenever we were together. She would say things like "You know you're going to make more money than anyone else at high school did in their summer job" or "You know that my friend Paige Manning likes you. When this is over, you should call her because the two of you would hit it off." I didn't really believe what she was saying, but it was nice to hear it, anyway. When Sam would come tell us about a problem up at the road, Amy would