by Melissa D. Sullivan

We all knew that our father’s favorite food was a ripe peach. Every July, he would drive to the Acme and buy three or four or five in plastic bags that clung to our fingers. They would be hard at first, rocks covered with a thin film of custard-yellow velvet.

“Wait,” he would tell us. “You’ll have to wait.”

So we did. On our way to make Cheerios and peanut-butter-and-banana toast, we would pass by the red ceramic bowl on the kitchen counter and poke the peaches, waiting for their fruit to become soft and fragrant, for their promise to become sweet juice, free to burst over our chins and fill our mouths.

One morning, they would be ready. But we could not have them yet. They were for our father first.

“Wait,” Mom would say.

We would wait all day for our father to come home from his cold office building, caressing the peaches each time we walked through the kitchen.

Some summers, he would return as the streetlights turned on, pull his car into the garage and enter through the kitchen door. Before he took off his suit jacket, he would bite into a peach with relish.

We would ask, “Are they good?” and he would say, “Perfect,” and we would be entirely satisfied that we had waited.

Other summers, later ones, he would not come home in time, and the peaches would soften and sweeten until they were rotten, their flesh sloughing off their hard pit, black and gray spotting their yellow bellies. Mom would banish them, tossing them off the back porch into the white sun, but their syrupy scent would linger for hours while we waited for our father to come back through the kitchen door.

I buy peaches now. I purchase them for me and my daughter from a farm stand on the side of a dusty highway. They sit on the kitchen table in the same red bowl.

“Wait,” I tell her. “They are hard. They are not ready.”

But when the peaches are soft and sweet and fragrant, I hand them to her and watch her bite with relish, my hunger satisfied by her enjoyment.

Melissa D. Sullivan is a fiction writer, journalist, teacher, and attorney. Her work has appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, Nightingale & Sparrow, Sum Journal, and elsewhere. She is currently studying for her MFA in Creative Writing at Temple University and lives in the suburbs of Philly with her family. See more at melissadsullivan.com and on Instagram at @mdsullivanwrites.