“I can’t imagine why. It’s a perfect good peach.”
He opened the seed and placed the two sides not far from Gaston. The girl studied the open halves.
“Is that where he lives?”
“It’s where he used to live. Gaston is out in the world and on his own now. You can see for yourself how comfortable he was in there. He had everything.”
“Now what has he got?”
“Not very much, I’m afraid.”
“What’s he going to do?”
“What are we going to do?”
“Well, we’re not going to squash him, that’s one thing we’re not going to do,” the girl said.
“What are we going to do, then?”
“Put him back?”
“Oh, that house is finished.”
“Well, he can’t live in our house, can he?”
“Not happily.”
“Can he live in our house at all?”
“Well, he could try, I suppose. Don’t you want to eat a peach?”
“Only if it’s a peach with somebody in the seed. ”
“Well, see if you can find a peach that has an opening at the top, because if you can, that’ll be a peach in which you’re likeliest to find somebody.”
The girl examined each of the peaches on the big plate.
“They’re all shut,” she said.
“Well, eat one, then.”
“No. I want the same kind that you ate, with somebody in the seed.”
“Well, to tell you the truth, the peach I ate would be considered a bad peach, so of course stores don’t like to sell them. I was sold that one by mistake, most likely. And so now Gaston is without a home, and we’ve got six perfect peaches to eat.”
“I don’t want a perfect peach. I want a peach with people.”
“Well, I’ll go out and see if I can find one.”
“Where will I go?”
“You’ll go with me, unless you’d rather stay. I’ll only be five minutes .”
“If the phone rings, what shall I say?”
“I don’t think it’ll ring, but if it does, say hello and see who it is.”
“If it is my mother, what shall I say?”
“Tell her I’ve gone to get you a bad peach, and anything else you want to tell her.”
“If she wants me to go back, what shall I say?”
“Say yes if you want to go back.”
“Do you want me to?”
“Of course not, but the important thing is what you want, not what I want.”
“Why is that the important thing?”
“Because I want you to be where you want to be.”
“I want to be here.”
“I’ll be right back.”
He put on socks and shoes, and a jacket, and went out. She watched Gaston trying to find out what to do next. Gaston wandered around the plate, but everything seemed wrong and he didn’t know what to do or where to go.
The telephone rang and her mother said she was sending the chauffeur to pick her up because there was a little party for somebody’s daughter who was also six, and then tomorrow they would fly back to New York.
“Let me speak to your father,” she said.
“He’s gone to get a peach.”
“One peach?”
“One with people.”
“You haven’t been with your father two days and already you sound like him.”
“There are peaches with people in them. I know. I saw one of them come out.”
“A bug?”
“Not a bug. Gaston.”
“Who?”
“Gaston the grand something.”
“Somebody get a peach with a bug in it, and throws it away, but not him. He makes up a lot of foolishness about it.”
“It’s not foolishness.”
“All right, all right, don’t get angry at me about a horrible peach bug of some kind.”
“Gaston is right here, just outside his broken house, and I’m not angry at you.”
“You’ll have a lot of fun at the party.”
“OK.”
“We’ll have fun flying back to New York, too.”
“OK.”
“Are you glad you saw your father?”
“Of course I am.”
“Is he funny?”
“Yes.”
“Is he crazy?”
“Yes. I mean, no. He just doesn’t holler when he sees a bug crawling out of a peach seed or anything. He just looks at it carefully. But it is just a bug, isn’t it, really?”
“That’s all it is.”
“And we have to squash it?”
“That’s right. I can’t wait to see you, darling. These two days have been like two years to me. Good-bye.”
The girl watched Gaston on the plate, and she actually didn’t like him. He was all ugh, as he had been in the first place. He didn’t have a home anymore and he was wandering around on the white plate and he was silly and wrong and ridiculous and useless and all sorts of other things. She cried a little, but only inside, because long ago she had decided she didn’t like crying because if you ever started to cry it seemed as if there was so much to cry about you almost couldn’t stop, and she didn’t like that at all. The open halves of the peach seed were wrong, too. They were ugly or something. They weren’t clean.
