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most of his life.
    As a young child he had waited for his parents to realize the world didn’t revolve around his older sister. His mother was forever talking on the phone with her friend Glenna about Kathleen’s track and field ribbons, and straight-A report cards, and later her oh-so-polite boyfriends.
    In high school Tim waited to work up the nerve when he wanted to ask a girl for a date. He even managed to blurt out the words a time or two, not that it did much good. He usually received a rude “No, I’m busy that night.” Or even worse, the time Karen Cunningham stared at him in silent horror and then walked away shaking her head. She spent the next week reliving the event with anyone who would listen, using “can you imagine?” as her punctuation of choice.
    Becky Farmer accepted his invitation to the Christmas dance once. The two of them stood to one side of the school gym and hardly spoke to each other the entire evening. Tim remembered feeling relieved during the times one of Becky’s friends wandered by and talked with her for a few minutes before rejoining the milling groups of Popular People. At the end of their walk home, she muttered a quick “Good night” and escaped up her front walk.
    So he waited for someone comfortable, for the chance to be himself. He waited until his junior year when the McGrath family fled the New York City rat race by moving to Worcester, Massachusetts and bringing Lesley into his life.
    Not that Tim was in her life, at least not at first. She was self-assured and pretty—gorgeous, actually—and was immediately swallowed up by the popular people. But he watched her and he could tell. She wasn’t snotty like the others. The barbs and cruel shots still jabbed out to sting him when he passed the knots of girls chatting in the corners, their school books clutched against perfect breasts he would never know. But Lesley just frowned when this happened, never joined in. And she always smiled at him when they passed in the hallway.
    Before long he was waiting for Lesley, waiting to talk to her when none of the others were around to make him all tongue-tied.
    He finally got his chance on a Saturday afternoon in his senior year. It was one of those late September days when the air had just enough bite to feel really good as you drew it in. The sun was so strong your shadow was practically etched on the ground, dark and sharp-edged so it seemed the shadow would stay there after you moved on.
    Tim’s mother drafted him into her service that afternoon at the Johnny Appleseed U-Pick. He did his best to beg off going but to no avail. She needed his long arms to pluck those hard-to-reach gems from the topmost branches, where the apples would be red all around and not half yellow like the ones further down that she felt just anyone could pick.
    She stood at the foot of the ladder and supervised the entire operation with the tenacity of a drill sergeant, pointing out this one and that, rejecting many perfectly delectable specimens after he pulled them off and showed them to her.
    Tim’s father didn’t have the patience for this foolishness. He preferred to wait by the car, Marlboro in hand, until all the agonizing decisions had been made. Then it was his job to pony up the required six dollars and fifty cents—not, of course, without grumbling that the people who owned the U-pick were probably making an outrageous profit on the transaction.
    At one point his mother had to walk back to the shed to get a different basket from the folks who owned the orchard. One of the baskets they had given her had a sharp point sticking up from inside, of all things, which was likely to poke her when she reached in for an apple and she wasn’t going to stand for it thank you very much. This left Tim at the top of the ladder with nothing to do except close his eyes and enjoy the sunshine on his face. He hadn’t noticed while his mother was harping at him but it was actually kind of pleasant. Tim shined