When Adelaida was thirty-two, her father died outside her door while choking on a peach pit. It was the seventh peach pit her father had swallowed, for he learned he could do so when he was a young boy, when he still was a third-rate prince in another country far across the sea, and he swallowed a peach pit whole to impress a servant girl who would have been impressed no matter what he showed her, since his father paid her father, and that was a good enough reason for her. 

From the pantry-room to his sixty-fifth year, Adelaida’s father would swallow a peach pit exactly five more times. Once before a famous playwright, who had put her father and his peach pit in a play, once before an oil tycoon with whom he’d shared a taxi car, once before the president, and twice before Marilyn Monroe. Adelaida never believed her father. Perhaps, had he stopped at the play, or the oil, she would have believed as a girl, and a fragment of that faith would have carried on with her into her later, cynical years. But it was difficult to believe Adelaida’s father, a man with hair growing in the absent space of a crescent moon, and a limp in his step ever since he’d been thrown as a boy off a horse to whom he’d spent the better part of an afternoon feeding peppered grain, had met Marilyn Monroe not once but twice, and both times she had asked him to swallow a peach pit the size of a ping pong ball. 

Yet Adelaida, along with everyone else on the street, and the two streets down in all directions, knew the peach pits were true, for they heard them when Adelaida’s father took his morning walk, afternoon walk, and luncheon walk, rumbling all six and content in the large expanse of his swollen stomach. 

When she was still a young girl, and her father still might have impressed her, she had asked him many times if he would swallow a peach pit for her, if she could watch it travel all the way past his jaw, down his throat, bumping down past his heart and into his stomach, where it could rest nestled and warm, like an overgrown quail’s egg. But with question, came each refusal, and her father would look another way and cough, guiltily, a quick, furtive, cough, that Adelaida, by the time she was eight years old, had come to learn meant,

 I’m sorry, but you are not Marilyn Monroe. 

Nonetheless, up until her father’s forty-eighth birthday, Adelaida was content. For his forty-third year, a year of significance to none, her father held the same festivities he always did, a week of writing invitations in beautiful gold script, another two weeks of waiting nervously to hear a reply, a day of cooking, alone in their kitchen, humming to himself with a soft smile hanging dumb atop his lips, and then an evening feast, where each year, a new group of guests would arrive, and Adelaida would sit at the top of the kitchen steps and watch her father roast with pleasure like a glowing peach in the sun.  

Her father never made new friends, had never performed his trick in this new country of theirs, where he was no longer a third-rate prince but an oil mechanic for a company of very angry men with blue shirts and beards. The company of guests he looked forward to entertaining each year came from his bygone glory as a rich man, when he would fly on small planes and eat caviar with a mother of pearl spoon. The odd rotation they formed, never more than eight, and never once the same, was chalked down to an arithmetic of chances. Some invitations, surely, would be lost along similarly important mail, others were poorly timed, and no guest would feel compelled to force his presence for more than a single year, so go the rules of polite society, so her father said. On this forty-eighth year, Adelaida was a month away from sixteen, and as many girls are, she was angry. Watching her father sing to himself in the kitchen, smelling of marzipan and lemon curd, picking up mint leaf with gentle tweezers and bending over the custards to blow the sugar neatly off, a wave of embarrassment ran through her, and she stayed in her room with the door shut and all the lights turned off, looking up at the splatters of paint on her ceiling and thinking her father, with his stories of princes and riches and fame, had lied. She heard the doorbell ringing below, and her father’s voice carrying up through the rafters, and all night she listened for the sound of her father’s guests, of the famous singer that played on the Tuesday radio all day long, of the good-natured politician who had fallen into a corruption scandal out of nothing more than bad luck, and all the other names and faces her father had given her, standing by the window and watching eagerly, though the invitations had not yet been sent, and only halfway written, there they would be, coming up the driveway, a basket of gifts in their hands. All night she listened, until at last the clock hit four in the morning, and she heard her father stand up and give a sigh, and the door shut in the latch, and then she began to weep, because all night, through she had strained her ear and pressed it right against the wall, she had not heard another person’s sound. 

For the first hour, Adelaida had shamed herself for being too angry to check her father’s preparations. She thought of him coming in covered in oil, serving pastries black with tar, or hors d'oeuvres with the taste of exhaust, and she cringed at every sound, at the squeaking of a floorboard, or the groan of an old couch frame. The next two hours, hearing only her father’s gentle humming, she had felt ashamed, her cheeks had turned red in the darkness, and she had placed her hands atop her eyes and prayed her father would stop singing that same song he always sang, the glaze of contentment heavy on his lids. After the fourth hour, Adelaida noticed the lack of chatter, of talking, of voices, or feet padding across the floor, and by the end of the night, when the sun was preparing to rise, her eyes had become puffy with tears, and she laid on top of her bed, sniffling and wiping uselessly at her face, knowing no one had come, and the hazy dream she had allowed of her childhood had passed.

The next morning, she stood in the kitchen doorway and watched her father making coffee by himself. That’s a lot of leftover food, she said, and he smiled, and that was it. 

Adelaida left for school around the time her father began to keep the doors unlocked, when he had been retired for a year and a few months, and met an old woman down the corner on an afternoon walk, who slowly moved in. 

She was a thin, skeletal woman, with bleached blond hair that had fallen out in a clump at the back of her head, who wore fake eyelashes and always smelled of cigarettes. Adelaida’s father said she had character. The woman kept a rabbit in an old suitcase, that she dragged after her atop the cracks in the pavement side, and every two months she would cut the hair and make it into a hat. When she gave one to Adelaida for school, Adelaida threw it away. 

By the time she returned, bags on the doorstep, having not seen her father for four years, having dyed her hair, and lost a lot of money, and having retaken her courses at night and in the summer so that her father would not know she had failed her examinations twice, there were fifteen people living in the house, surrounding her father, who sat blithely on the couch and told them of his younger days. 

When she sent them all packing, and told her father they could only come for holidays and his birthday, it was the first time in all of Adelaida’s thirty-two years that her father had grown angry with her, and he would not speak to her for six days. After the fifth evening, Adelaida woke up to find a saucer and coffee cup steaming gently outside her door, and she knew her father had forgiven her. Later that day, she bought a clutch of tulips to plant in a vase on the kitchen table, and he began to hum again. They spoke no more of it. 

On holidays that Adelaida had never heard of, and she was certain her father had never known, she would come in the evenings and he would look up, guilty, from his chair, and all fifteen pairs of eyes would turn in her direction. The old woman would lift her hand from her rabbit, the two grocers and the butcher from the chain down the street would cough and fix their aprons, the tall thin man that she saw sometimes walking down the street who only ever ate two kinds of premade meals, and all the others her father had collected off the road would turn round through the glaze of her father’s story, and look at the strange, angry woman, standing with shopping bags in her hands and a crumpled uniform from the dollar and under store around the corner, an expression of mute anger stiffened on her face. 

Oftentimes, at night, when she lay in the same bed she had come back to as a little girl, thinking of all the ways her life had done her wrong, an intense grip of loneliness would come about her, and she would ask herself when the last time her father had spoken directly to her had been. She would search her mind through the week, through the whispers of his speech she heard before she pushed open the door and he fell quiet among the rest, through the cracking hum of the songs he sang in the morning, or the notes he would leave for her at night, if he went to bed early complaining of pain, and she would be left with a blank, empty space of far too many years. She knew something had happened, had changed her and had changed him, between those years as a girl, of the presidents and poets that had visited her father up until his forty-third year, and yet she knew everything had not, for she’d gone to school and come back, cut her hair and changed her name, and she was still angry, and her father still told stories and smiled, and looked at her like he still loved her, which made her all the more mad. 

When Adelaida was rejected from the sixty-two companies she had searched for after the final year of her schooling, she took a sick pleasure in it, coming home empty handed, with nothing to show except an absence of money and a paper with her name on it. She thought she might like to see her father shout, throw a glass or dish, and tell her how good his life had been, as a third-rate prince in a third-rate country far away, where he had servants and maids to clean his shoes, before he’d had her and she’d gone and ruined everything anyway.  She thought maybe, as he shouted and flailed, the peach pits would rumble around inside him, and maybe one by one they’d roll up his throat and fall out, and she could stand before him and count the six polished stones and say, there, now you have nothing anymore. 

When her father did none of this as he opened the door, she thought, maybe, it would be nice if he would hug her, put his arms around her back and let her wet his shoulder with her tears. 

But he only looked bashfully back at the fifteen pairs of eyes, standing hunched over, and clearing his throat as though he’d been interrupted and knew not what to say that he may resume as quickly as possible, and so Adelaida pushed past him and pulled her bags up the stairs herself, and locked the door and washed her face with cold water so that none of the fifteen pairs of ears roaming around below might hear her cry. 

Had he lived longer, she might have grown to resent him, the way flowers in a vase still reach out to the sun only for their petals to furl over and fall, knowing from the very first day he had lied. She did not have time. She only learned to see her father as a dead man, and all those strange, forgotten, abandoned people her father took under his roost and kept warm with his fantastical tales, were merely shadows of his extended limbs, of his placid smile, his dull eyes. Adelaida never left her father’s house, living in the room she had held and scratched at and chipped at the walls for the whole duration of her life, and she never took over the home the way many angry people do, seeing their discontent in the weakened limbs of the whitened faces of themselves. She let her father keep his pride, this small, crowded home three doors down from the corner of the great pothole where she’d split open her knee as a younger, happier girl. Thus it came to be that during Adelaida’s thirty-second year, as she was sitting by her desk and carving little flowers into the wood, waiting for the clock to shift that she may put on her uniform for the dollar and under store and find another way to bring about faster the end of the day, her father swallowed a peach pit alone in their wooden, squeaking house, standing outside her door, and died without a sound. 

When she opened the door at last, adjusting the collar of her crumpled shirt and pulling the hair back from her eyes, she found her father standing before her, eyes slightly wide, hand reaching up towards his throat, and were it not for the sound of the peach pit dislodging itself at last from his throat and falling with a hollow thud down to join the other six, she would have walked right past him, frowning her brows and muttering goodbye only after she had closed the door and left him safely far behind. 

All throughout the funeral Adelaida wondered why her father had not knocked upon her door, had not beat but once against the wooden frame as he felt the peach pit slot itself cleanly into the folds of his throat, as the breath had left him and he’d turned a slight purple, and all the while he’d stood in front of his daughter’s door, swaying a little with breathlessness and waiting for the peach pit to fall. She imagined it one hundred times, and then one hundred more, and with each vivid image, more clean and clear than the one before, as though her father himself from the icebox below the funeral home was sending it to her now, in death, the way he’d make her tarts ten days after she caught him slipping the old blonde woman a fine bone dish of china, or giving away her hairbrush to the rabbit, which chewed on the wooden end and looked up at Adelaida with red, rheumy eyes. By the time they buried her father, Adelaida saw the image, his pale, questioning face, his hand coming up to feel the boulder lodged in a place where it had never been before, and from her eyelids burst such a torrent of hot, angry tears, that all those who saw and came to the wake, who loved her father more dearly than she felt she ever had, felt moved by the plight of this sad, small angry woman, who had loved her father so deeply she had come back, from so far away, to share what life she could with him before he died. When Adelaida saw their faces, she only grew angrier, and her tears only grew heavier, and by the time the wake had ended, and she had gone outside to cry, it was only her and a few stragglers still lingering, she looked down at her feet and saw a little puddle form, where her tears had mixed with the mud, and glued her black shoes neatly to the ground. 

As one of the figures came up to Adelaida from inside the warm room and offered her his handkerchief, for her shoes and socks had now sunken deeper in the mud, she moved to thank him, then promptly swallowed her words, for she saw him standing with the blonde woman, and she felt if she said anything at this very moment, she would once again burst into tears, and drown right before her father even entered his grave in her very own pit of black mud. The stranger, a stethoscope wound round his neck and two great rubber gloves puffed up on each arm, looked at her through thick glass lenses, which obscured his eyes and made them large and curious, so that she saw herself magnified in his black pupils threefold, and he smiled as he told her that she looked just like her father, to which Adelaida held her tongue. Had she not been so tired, she would have left the two standing there, the doctor covered in mud with a mask across his chin, and the woman in a black dress too short for a funeral, so that her thin legs poked through and the knees hit each other then splayed out again as they leapt towards the ground. But they stood there, the three of them, looking into the open doorway, where her father nestled yellow and embalmed in the casket, and together they shook their heads and sighed, and the rabbit in the suitcase looked out through the open cracks and ate the freshly cut grass. “A shame,” the doctor said, to neither Adelaida nor the woman, and adjusted his heavy glasses. “A damn shame.” From his breastpocket he pulled a blue envelope initialed in gold script, and she knew it was for her father’s sixty-fifth birthday, for she had worked all day and night that week, just months ago, unable to bear it anymore, and that very night at the dollar and under store, she had felt a flush come to her cheeks when a woman had come in to look for gold ink and there was none left on the shelves. 

“I’d have liked to do it while he still lived,” the doctor said, and handed her a card, which she could not read, for she had never seen that language before. She looked up at the man, shining in his suit of rubber, and he smiled with yellow teeth and pushed the heavy glasses up his tired nose, so that his eyes danced above his brow. “It’s a non-invasive incision,” he said, and drew a line up the side of his abdomen with a heavy glove. The blonde woman pressed her lips together and bobbed her head up and down. Adelaida did not take his card, and told the man she did not want to cut her father open for seven peach pits. “Did you come for my father’s sixty-fifth birthday?” She asked the plastic man, and he shook his head. “It was lost in the mail,” he said, then sighed once more, and she almost believed him.

The doctor left that very afternoon, shaking his head all the way to his small plane and sighing, and the blonde woman followed him, tottering up the steps, pulling her suitcase behind her, and Adelaida watched them leave, wrapping her arms around her sides and furrowing her brows tightly until the skin of her face turned white and taut. When there was no one left in the home but her, her father, and two dead men chilling in their ice boxes below the stairs, Adelaida stepped over to her father’s casket and pressed two fingers down on the left side of his body just below the ribs. She counted seven objects, six smooth, round, polished stones, and then the last peach pit, rough and glowing amongst the six diamonds her father had swallowed before flying across the ocean and never looking back again, his young, princely face looking down out the window and seeing nothing but green, green waves. She understood, then, that she had been right, that her father had lied, that he had never been able to swallow a peach pit, though it was true Marilyn Monroe had asked him once, and he could only jump up and down to let her listen to the sound, then tell her he had an upset throat and she must wait another day, for he had always been a cowardly boy. It was true, that by his sixty-fifth year, her father, lost in the haze of younger, brighter days, had come to believe the peach pits to be true, had forgotten about the diamonds nestled in the soft folds of his stomach lining, and had practiced one first time outside his small, angry daughter’s door, reaching out to the doorknob with a soft, placated smile, that she may see him at last, though too many years had gone by and ran away in between, and that he may tell here, there you are, see how your father did not lie. 

When the peach pit slid down the little buds of his tongue, past the red swinging flap of skin at the base of his mouth, and down past the first half of his throat, Adelaida’s father laughed a little, and gave a wide smile. As the pit inevitably sank itself into the grooves and stuck there like a fly, cutting the breath out from his tired lungs, he felt a great sorrow come over him, and ran a gentle hand over the bulging lump, sticking out like a toad from the thin lines of his skin. He listened to his daughter scratching flowers in the wood inside the door, furrowing her brows as he once had when carving a grain of rice into a bird with nothing but a needletip, and then he licked his dry lips and shut his eyes.  

Adelaida locked the door and let her father rest with his old, tired pride, his silk lining, six diamonds, and one rough, sweet pit of a peach, and walked back to their home one door across from the old oak tree where she had fallen and scraped her knee. She made herself a pot of coffee, swirling the dregs around her teeth, and swallowed the little bitter dots one by one, feeling them run down her throat, past her tongue, through her blood, and down all the way to her beating, angry heart. 

♧

October 21, 2026