Valley Fever by Katherine Taylor Page A

don’t.”
    â€œYou’d care if you had to, but you don’t know what it’s like to be poor.”
    â€œI’m poor now.”
    He looked at me, disgusted. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
    Part of what we all loved about Uncle Felix was his opinions, but it stung when he turned them against you. Somehow we wanted Felix’s approval above all others.
    He knew I was angry, or that he’d hurt my feelings. Sometimes I can’t tell the difference myself. “Forget the money,” he said. “Why don’t you just come back here to be close to your family?”
    â€œI am close to my family.”
    â€œYou’re stubborn. You’re set on the idea that anyplace is better than here. Your mother did that to you.” He stopped walking. “Look,” he said, gesturing to the trees on one side of us, abundant with nuts, and the canal just beginning to reflect the orange light. “No place is better than right here.”
    I continued walking. It was too distressing to admit that certain patches of that mean little town were, in fact, more beautiful than anyplace else in the world. And I’d looked, believe me, hoping to find someplace. I’d seen all sorts of rural agricultural valleys and hills I wouldn’t go back to. I’d looked and looked for someplace that felt more like home than right there. Leave it to Uncle Felix to find the exact spot that was most beautiful of all, at exactly the moment he needed it.
    â€œWhat would I do here for fun? Who would my friends be?”
    â€œI’m not talking about fun,” he said. We walked on a little. The trees were dense with fuzzy green almonds. “You have Wilson. And that Bootsie. You need more than two friends in this world? You think you’ve got more than two friends, you’re fooling yourself.”
    â€œWhat would I do on Saturday afternoons, for example?” I asked myself this question as much as I asked Uncle Felix. “My mother has spent her whole life playing cards by herself.”
    â€œThat’s your mother. You want to be your mother?”
    â€œNo, I don’t.”
    â€œI’ve asked you to play golf, but you won’t play golf.”
    â€œThe club reminds me of how people were mean to me when I was little,” I said.
    â€œYou think too much about other people.”
    â€œThe older kids used to play ditch ’em and I was always the one they were trying to ditch.”
    He laughed. He liked that. “Me, too,” he said. He patted the taut drum of his stomach. “They still try to ditch me.”
    â€œThat is just not true.”
    â€œYou see anyone else walking with us?”
    â€œYou’re not understanding what I’m telling you.”
    â€œI understand exactly.” It was true, Uncle Felix had friends at fund-raisers and wine events and at the Vineyard for lunch, but tonight, and every night, he was alone. Even Mother didn’t much care to see him anymore.
    I said, “No one tries to ditch me in New York, or LA. Or London. Or Paris or Berlin or anywhere else but right here in this sad little town. If I stay here I’ll be alone all the time.”
    â€œYou have no idea, Inks.”
    â€œOf what.”
    He stopped and plucked an almond off Mr. Ellison’s tree, as if the almonds were his. We grew up understanding that you never, ever, ever took anyone else’s crop. My whole childhood I never took an almond or apricot from Mr. Ellison’s trees. That evening, Uncle Felix plucked the green almond and then threw it down the middle of the row, to see how far he could throw. “Of what people are like,” he said.
    I had read in The Fresno Bee that day about two neighbors, Bill and Emory, with a long-standing dispute about Bill’s dog—it kept getting into Emory’s yard and digging up the bulbs. It turns out Emory was a florist, and yesterday, having