But then, quite suddenly, all the apple butter was gone and with it the erotic breakfasts. More was made, but it wasn’t the same. Reecey knew then that it had been those apples. The Waverley apples. She became insanely jealous, thinking the tree gave erotic visions to everyone who ate them. No wonder the Waverleys always seemed so happy with themselves. It wasn’t fair. It simply wasn’t fair that they got to have such a tree and the Clarks didn’t.

She couldn’t tell her parents what she’d done. For anyone to know she’d actually stolen something, much less from a family so recently poor, would be mortifying. So she got out of bed in the middle of the night and crept to the Waverley house. She managed to pull herself up the fence, but her skirt got caught on the finials and she fell. She ended up hanging upside down on the fence for the rest of the night, where she was discovered the next morning by the Waverleys. Her family was summoned, and with the help of Phineas Young, the strongest man in town, she was helped down and immediately sent away to live with her strict aunt Edna in Asheville.

It was there, two months later, that she had the most wonderful passionate night of her life with one of the stable hands. It was exactly what she’d seen when she’d eaten the apple butter. She thought it was fate. She was even willing to put up with her unlikable aunt Edna to keep up the incredible affair. But weeks later she was caught in the stables with him and she was quickly married off to a stern old man. She was never happy, or sexually satisfied, again.

She decided it was all the Waverleys’ fault, and when she was an old woman, she made a point of visiting Bascom every summer just so she could tell all the Clark children how horrible and selfish the Waverleys were, to keep that magical tree all to themselves.

And that resentment stuck in the Clark family, long after the reason faded away.

The day after the Fourth of July, Emma Clark Matteson tried to use the time-honored Clark way of getting what she wanted. She and Hunter John made love that morning, pillows knocked off the bed, sheets pulled from their corners. Had the radio not been on, the kids would surely have heard. He was exhausted and slaphappy afterward, so naturally Emma tried to get him to talk about Sydney. She wanted him to think about how sexy Emma was compared to how old Sydney looked in her plaid shorts yesterday, which she had described to him in detail. But Hunter John refused to talk about Sydney at all, saying she had nothing to do with their lives anymore.