Work Clothes

The pump alarm went off at 5:47.

Kath learned later that it had not been an emergency. It was a tired float switch in the lower irrigation line, a thing everyone at Jackson Orchard knew how to silence by striking the side of the control box with the heel of a hand. At 5:47 on her first morning, it sounded like a fire warning, a hospital monitor, and a truck backing through the wall at once.

She was out of bed before she remembered where she was.

For half a second she reached for the lamp that had stood beside her bed in Toronto. Her hand found hot air. The room, grey before sunrise, rearranged itself around her: sloped ceiling, narrow bed, dresser with the missing knob, violin case on the chair because she had not trusted the floor, suitcase open at the foot of the bed like an animal with its ribs showing.

The alarm cut off.

Silence rushed in after it, too large.

Kath stood barefoot on the worn boards and listened. Downstairs, a door slammed. A man’s voice rose, indistinct but already angry. Water moved somewhere in the walls. Outside, a bird began a single bright phrase and stopped, as if it too had thought better of drawing attention.

She looked at her phone. Eight percent battery. No signal in the room unless she held it near the window and angled it toward the ridge like an offering.

5:48.

Breakfast was six-thirty unless Colin was in one of his moods, then six. Lizbeth’s voice from the night before returned with its bright, useless precision. If you hear Dad yelling, that depends.

Kath dressed quickly in yesterday’s jeans and the cleanest shirt she could find. The suitcase repair Alex had made still held, the torn card taped over the cracked wheel housing. In the dim room, the strip of poster looked absurdly white against the travel dirt. A small, temporary mercy.

She folded her blouse from the day before and set it inside the dresser. The drawer smelled of cedar and old soap. When she opened the second drawer, she found a dead moth, a paperclip, and a guest information card for Jackson Orchard Farm Stay.

WELCOME TO OUR FAMILY FARM.

Below the heading, in neat green type, were promises of heritage fruit, lake views, authentic rural hospitality, and a restful retreat from modern noise.

Kath looked toward the floorboards, where Colin’s voice had begun again, lower now but no less sharp.

“Authentic,” she said under her breath, and closed the drawer.

The violin case waited on the chair.

She had opened it last night and shut it again. That should have been enough. Proof that it had survived the trip. Proof that she had not abandoned every part of herself in Toronto. But the thought of leaving it visible made her skin tighten. Lizbeth had seen too much interest in it. Colin had asked, Play? as if the verb were another tool he might assign or confiscate.

Kath lifted the case and looked around the room.

Under the bed was too obvious. The closet held two wire hangers and a stack of folded quilts smelling faintly of mice. Behind the dresser, there was a gap where the baseboard had pulled away from the wall, but not enough space. She knelt, reached beneath the lowest drawer, and found dust, a marble, and a long flat cardboard box.

Inside the box were guest brochures from three years earlier, a cracked plastic sign that read QUIET HOURS 10 PM - 7 AM, and a roll of brown paper.

Kath removed the brochures, slid the violin case into the box, wrapped the brown paper loosely over it, and pushed the whole thing beneath the bed until only shadow showed.

It was not a hiding place. It was an argument with the room.

She kept the rosin.

The blue cloth bundle fit in the pocket of her jeans. It pressed against her hip as she went downstairs, small and solid as a secret with a pulse.

The kitchen was already in motion.

Jean stood at the stove, turning bacon with the careful concentration of a person handling something more dangerous than breakfast. Colin sat at the table with coffee and his laptop. The invoices from the night before had been stacked, clipped, and shifted to one side. Lizbeth leaned against the counter in leggings, a cropped sweatshirt, and clean running shoes, scrolling on her phone with one thumb.

No one looked surprised to see Kath.

“You’re late,” Colin said.

Kath glanced at the clock over the sink. 6:03.

“I thought breakfast was six-thirty.”

“Thought wrong.”

Jean’s shoulders moved, almost a flinch. “I was just about to call up.”

“No need,” Kath said. “I’m here.”

Lizbeth looked up from her phone. “In those?”

Kath looked down at her jeans. “I did not know what the work was yet.”

“The work is work.”

“Lizbeth,” Jean said quietly.

“What? It is.” Lizbeth set the phone face down on the counter and crossed to the mudroom door. “Come on. I have something less city.”

Kath followed her into a narrow room crowded with boots, coats, bins of gloves, a stacked washer and dryer, and the damp smell of clothing that had been wet more than once and forgiven never. Hooks ran along one wall, each labelled in black marker: JEAN, COLIN, LIZ, GUEST, STAFF, MARKET.

There was no hook with Kath’s name.

Lizbeth opened a plastic tote marked WOMEN - MISC and began throwing things onto a bench: a faded work shirt, a pair of canvas pants, two mismatched gloves, a belt with cracked holes, thick socks, rubber boots with dried mud along the soles.

“Try those.”

“Here?”

Lizbeth gave her a slow look. “I promise not to faint.”

Kath took the clothes and turned toward the stacked dryer, using its open door as a partial screen. The canvas pants were too loose in the waist and too short in the leg. The shirt smelled of detergent over old sweat. The socks were clean but pilled thin at the heel. The boots were half a size too large, possibly more, but when Kath stepped into them her feet became anonymous, heavy, useful.

Lizbeth looked her over.

“Better.”

Kath folded her own jeans and shirt, because the alternative was leaving herself in a heap on the bench.

“You can put those in your room later. Laundry first.”

“I have not eaten.”

“You can eat when the first load is in.” Lizbeth opened the back door. Dawn had come up while Kath changed, thin and colourless over the yard. “Guests check out at ten. They think towels reproduce in captivity, but no one has proved it.”

Kath almost smiled. Lizbeth saw and looked faintly irritated, as if she had not meant to be amusing.

“After laundry, packing shed. After packing shed, market bins. After that, Dad will remember five things he forgot to tell you, and you will do those too.”

“Is there a list?”

“You’re looking at her.”

The laundry room for the cottages was a converted corner of the old washhouse behind the kitchen garden. By full daylight it might have been charming: whitewashed walls, a long counter, shelves of folded linen, two industrial washers, a row of glass jars holding clothespins, buttons, safety pins, lost earrings, and keys no one had matched to locks. At 6:12 in the morning, with the machines already humming and the air wet with detergent, it felt less like charm than digestion.

Lizbeth showed her the system once.

White towels hot. Coloured towels warm. Sheets by cottage, not all together, unless she wanted Jean blamed for missing pillowcases. Stains sprayed first. Wine separate. Makeup separate. Blood in cold water only. Do not shrink the spa robes. Do not touch the guest quilts unless told. Do not mix staff laundry with guest laundry because people paying two hundred and eighty dollars a night did not want to dry their faces on orchard labour.

“Two hundred and eighty?” Kath asked before she could stop herself.

“Weekday rate.”

Kath looked at the heap of towels on the floor. Two hundred and eighty dollars a night. A room in the same place where her own door did not lock.

Lizbeth smiled. “Try not to look socialist while folding. It scares the guests.”

“I’ll control myself.”

“Good. Dad likes gratitude more than politics.”

“Does he receive much of either?”

For a moment Lizbeth stared at her. Then she laughed once, sharp and unwilling. “Careful, cousin.”

The word meant something different here. Not kinship. Warning.

Kath fed towels into the washer until her arms warmed from the lifting. Lizbeth watched long enough to confirm competence, then drifted to the door.

“Breakfast if you want it. Ten minutes.”

“Are you not staying?”

“I have calls.”

Calls, Kath learned over the next hour, meant Lizbeth sitting at the patio table near the kitchen in clean shoes, talking into earbuds while Kath moved between the washhouse and the mudroom with baskets against her hip. Through the open door, Lizbeth’s voice rose and fell in a register Kath had not heard in the house. Brighter. Softer at the edges. Practiced enough to be natural if you did not listen too closely.

“No, of course we can do that weekend… Dad is excited… The south block photographs beautifully… Tom, I said I would send the tasting list…”

Tom.

Kath filed the name away without knowing why.

By seven-thirty, she had eaten one piece of toast standing beside the sink and drunk coffee that tasted as if it had been brewed in self-defence. Jean tried twice to add an egg to her plate. Colin interrupted both attempts with questions about whether the Finch cottage had stripped their bed, whether the north cooler was still cycling too often, whether Kath knew the difference between a peach bruise and rot.

“Yes,” Kath said.

“Which is?”

“A bruise is damage. Rot spreads.”

Colin looked up from his phone.

Jean turned back to the stove.

Lizbeth, at the counter, hid a smile behind her coffee.

“Fine,” Colin said. “Packing shed after laundry.”

“Lizbeth told me.”

“Lizbeth tells people many things.”

“This one was useful.”

The quiet that followed closed around the table, around Jean’s hand on the spatula, around Lizbeth’s coffee cup paused halfway to her mouth.

Colin shut his laptop.

“You have a way of answering, don’t you?”

Kath heard Eileen’s voice in memory: Watch who gets mean when the luggage breaks.

“I’m trying to be clear.”

“Clarity is not the same as manners.”

“No,” Kath said before she could stop herself. “It is not.”

Lizbeth made a small delighted sound.

Colin stood. The chair legs scraped the floor.

Jean said, “More coffee, Colin?”

The offer was absurd. It worked anyway. Colin looked at his wife, then at the clock, then at Kath.

“Packing shed,” he said. “Now.”

The packing shed was cooler than the kitchen but louder. Fans ran high in the walls, moving air that smelled of cardboard, fruit, dust, and the sharp green breath of leaves brought in with the bins. Fluorescent lights flattened every colour. A radio played somewhere near the loading door, half static, half weather report. On the concrete floor, yellow lines marked paths for carts and forklifts. Signs hung above workstations: SORT, LABEL, MARKET, CULL, COMPOST.

Kath had thought fruit would smell sweet.

It did, though the sweetness came edged with fermentation, bruised skins, damp wood, cold metal, and the faint chemical tang of sanitizer. It was a living smell and a dying one at the same time.

An older man with a grey beard and a ball cap introduced himself as Miro and showed her how to sort peaches for the farm stand. Firm but not hard. Fragrant but not soft. No split skin. No brown at the stem. A shallow bruise could be turned away from the customer if the fruit was for the discount basket, but never for the premium flats. Premium meant tourists. Tourists photographed what they bought.

“And if I cannot tell?” Kath asked.

“You will tell.” Miro put a peach in her palm. “Fruit wants to be known. People make it difficult.”

Kath liked him immediately and trusted that meant she should be careful.

For the first half hour, the work pleased her. Not because it was easy. Because it was exact. Her hands learned the weight of a good peach, the give that meant today, the looseness that meant yesterday, the faint smell that meant tomorrow would be too late. The rules were physical. They did not pretend to be love.

Then Lizbeth arrived with labels.

“Dad wants these under Kate.”

Kath looked at the roll she dropped on the table. The labels were for the small kraft bags used in the farm shop: PACKED BY KATE J. in tidy green print beneath the Jackson Orchard logo.

“Kath,” she said.

“What?”

“My name is Kath.”

“Kathie, Kath, Kate. It is all the same.”

“No.”

Miro’s hands slowed over the fruit.

Lizbeth’s eyes flicked toward him, then back to Kath. “It is for the customers. Kate Jackson sounds local. Kath O’Kane sounds like you are about to start a podcast about grief.”

Heat moved up Kath’s neck.

“My name is not Jackson.”

“You are family.”

“O’Kane is also family.”

Lizbeth leaned one hip against the table. “Listen. Dad has spent years making this place look like it belongs to people who know what they are doing. Guests like continuity. They like family. They like a story they can understand before they finish their cider sample. Kate Jackson is easy.”

“For whom?”

Something changed in Lizbeth’s face. The charm remained, but its purpose shifted.

“For the people feeding you.”

Miro set a peach very gently into a flat.

Kath looked at the labels again. PACKED BY KATE J. Not a mistake. Not a nickname offered in affection. A small printed future in which her name had already been made more useful without asking her.

“I can pack without a label.”

“Everyone gets a label.”

“Then print the right one.”

Lizbeth laughed. “On your first day?”

The question carried the whole house inside it. The small room. The no lock. The iced tea she had not wanted. Colin’s papers. The two hundred and forty dollars in her bag. The work clothes that were not hers. The phone she had not charged because there were no free outlets in her room and she had not yet dared to ask.

Kath could refuse. She could make this the hill. There would be dignity in it, perhaps. A clean, useless dignity.

She took the roll of labels.

“Fine.”

Lizbeth smiled.

Kath peeled the first label and pressed it onto a bag. The adhesive caught her fingertip. PACKED BY KATE J. She smoothed it flat until no bubble remained.

Inside her pocket, the blue cloth around Eileen’s rosin pressed against her hip.

Not that, she thought.

They could print whatever they liked on bags.

They would not have that.

By noon, Kath’s shoulders ached. By one, the too-large boots had rubbed the skin raw behind both heels. By two, she had learned that market bins had to be attractive without looking arranged, full without bruising the bottom layer, rustic without being dirty, abundant without implying waste. Lizbeth taught this by undoing Kath’s work.

“No. Too perfect.”

Kath looked at the peaches she had just stacked. “Too perfect?”

“People want to feel like they discovered the best ones. If you make it look like a display, they think grocery store. If you make it look a little accidental, they think farm.”

“It is a farm.”

“Exactly. So try harder to look natural.”

Kath stared at her.

Lizbeth grinned. “You are going to be fun once you stop being tragic.”

“Do you rehearse these, or do they arrive fully formed?”

“Both.”

It should have made Kath dislike her more. It did, a little. Not enough. Lizbeth’s cruelty was braided with intelligence, and intelligence always made cruelty harder to dismiss. She saw too much. She saw the difference between display and abundance, between guest towels and staff towels, between Kath refusing a name and Kath calculating the cost of refusal.

That was the danger.

By midafternoon, the heat had thickened. Smoke softened the far ridge though no one said fire. Guests drifted through the farm shop in linen and sandals, touching fruit with the reverence of people who did not have to lift it by the crate. Kath stood behind the counter while Lizbeth took photos for the orchard account.

“Hold that basket.”

Kath lifted a basket of peaches.

“Not like evidence. Like you are happy to be here.”

Kath adjusted her grip.

“Smile.”

“No.”

Lizbeth lowered the phone. “No?”

“No.”

“It is one photo.”

“Then you smile.”

“I am not wearing the cute farmhand outfit.”

Kath looked down at the canvas pants, the borrowed shirt, the boots with mud not her own. “This is cute?”

“In a struggling-orchard-orphan way.”

“I’m twenty-eight.”

“Fine. Struggling-orchard-spinster.”

Kath set the basket down.

Lizbeth’s expression sharpened. “It is marketing.”

“It is my face.”

“Your face is currently on my father’s payroll.”

There it was again. The conversion. Body into labour. Name into label. Face into orchard story. Kath could almost admire the efficiency if she were not the material being processed.

“Then tell your father my face is unavailable.”

A woman near the jam shelves glanced over. Lizbeth saw it, and her smile returned at once.

“Cousins,” she said brightly to the woman. “We are still breaking her in.”

Kath felt the phrase in her jaw.

Breaking her in.

The woman laughed politely and bought two jars of apricot jam.

At four, Jean found Kath behind the washhouse, sitting on an overturned crate with one boot off and her sock peeled down. The blister on her heel had opened. Dust had stuck to the raw edge.

“Oh, love,” Jean said.

Kath pulled the sock up. “It’s fine.”

Jean gave her a look so suddenly direct that Kath stopped moving.

“No,” Jean said. “It isn’t.”

She went into the washhouse and returned with a small first-aid kit, a damp cloth, and a pair of socks rolled together. She knelt before Kath could object.

“You do not have to–”

“Hold still.”

Jean’s voice, when not routed around Colin, had a small firm line through it. Kath obeyed.

The cloth was cool. Jean cleaned the blister with efficient gentleness, then covered it with a square bandage and tape. Her hands were rough at the knuckles, nails cut short, a pale scar across the back of one thumb.

“Those boots were Lena’s,” Jean said. “She lasted six days.”

“Who was Lena?”

“Help from Kelowna. Before her, Marta. Before her, Sophie. Before her…” Jean pressed the tape down and did not finish.

Kath looked toward the orchard rows. “People leave.”

“People do.”

“Why did they?”

Jean packed the kit slowly. “Different reasons.”

“That means the same reason.”

For a moment, Kath thought Jean might answer. The older woman’s mouth trembled around the shape of something honest. Then the washhouse door opened and Lizbeth stepped out with a basket of damp towels.

“There you are. Dad wants the cottage linens turned before six.” Her gaze dropped to Kath’s bare foot. “Already?”

Jean stood. “The boots rubbed.”

“They rub everyone.”

“Then everyone needs better boots.”

Lizbeth blinked. So did Kath.

Jean looked down at the first-aid kit as if surprised by herself. “There is another pair in the old tack room. They might fit better.”

“Great,” Lizbeth said. “Now that we have held a foot clinic, can we finish the laundry?”

Kath put the boot back on. The bandage changed the pressure but not the pain.

“I can finish.”

Jean touched her shoulder once, lightly, before stepping away. “Eat something first.”

The touch lasted less than a second. It still unsettled Kath. Care in this house was more dangerous than insult because care made the body admit it had needs.

She ate a bruised peach over the washhouse sink, juice running down her wrist. It was too ripe, almost collapsing, sweet enough to hurt her teeth. She washed her hands, changed into the second pair of boots from the tack room, and went back to folding towels.

At six-thirty, when the cottage linens were done and the market bins covered, Colin found her in the packing shed wiping down the sorting table.

“Lizbeth says you argued about labels.”

Kath kept wiping. “Lizbeth says many things.”

“Look at me.”

She did.

Colin held the roll of PACKED BY KATE J. labels in one hand. “This is not Toronto. Customers here do not need a genealogy lesson with their peaches.”

“Neither do I.”

“You are under my roof.”

“I know.”

“You are eating my food.”

“I know.”

“Using my water, my power, my landline if you need it, my name if it helps sell what keeps this place alive.”

“Your name does not keep this place alive.”

His face darkened.

Kath should have stopped. She knew it as clearly as she knew the weight of the cloth in her pocket. But the day had worn down the polite layer of her caution, and beneath it was something older than fear.

“The people working do.”

Colin stepped closer. The fans hummed above them. Somewhere outside, a cart rattled over gravel.

“You think one day in borrowed boots tells you how a farm runs?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“It told me how this one runs.”

The silence was total enough that Kath heard a peach drop from the far end of the sorting table into the compost bin, soft and final.

Colin smiled then. Not happily.

“Your mother had that same clever mouth when she came here. Thought a sentence could feed her. Thought music could make her special. Do you know what special people leave behind, Kath?”

He used her name. That frightened her more than Kate would have.

“Debts,” he said. “Boxes. Paperwork. Other people cleaning up the romance.”

Kath’s hand closed around the rag.

“Do not talk about her like that.”

“Then do not make me.”

“You do that yourself.”

For a moment, she thought he might strike the table, the wall, her. He did none of those things. He placed the labels down in front of her with great care.

“Tomorrow these go on the bags.”

“No.”

“Tomorrow,” he said, “these go on the bags, or tomorrow you can start paying market rent for that room upstairs.”

There it was. Not loud. Not dramatic. A numberless invoice opening under her feet.

Kath looked at the labels.

“How much?”

“What?”

“Market rent.”

His eyes narrowed.

“If you are going to threaten me with a bill, name it.”

The question irritated him because it made the threat material. It also irritated him because he did not have a number ready, which told Kath something useful.

“Do not get cute.”

“I am asking what I owe.”

“You owe gratitude.”

“That is not rent.”

Colin leaned in. “You owe your mother enough not to make trouble in the only family house willing to take you.”

That one found the bruise.

Kath knew it because Colin saw her flinch. He had found the handle.

Eileen would have told her to step back before a man learned where the bruise was. Kath stepped back too late.

“The labels go on the bags,” he said.

He left her there with the roll between them, as if he had placed a stone on a grave.

Kath finished wiping the table. Then she peeled one label from the roll, stuck it to the back of her own hand, and looked at it until the letters blurred.

PACKED BY KATE J.

The adhesive pulled at her skin when she removed it. A pale rectangle remained.

Upstairs, after dinner, she opened the cardboard box beneath the bed.

The violin case lay under its sheet of brown paper, untouched. Kath sat on the floor and rested one hand on the lid. Downstairs, dishes moved in the kitchen. Lizbeth laughed at something on her phone. Colin’s voice came and went. Jean ran water.

Kath opened the case.

She did not take the violin out. That felt too dangerous, too close to wanting. Instead she unwrapped the rosin. The blue cloth unfolded over her knees. The amber block inside had worn down along one edge, shaped by her mother’s hand over years of use.

Kath brought it to her face and breathed in.

Rosin did not smell like perfume. It smelled like resin, dust, bow hair, practice rooms, heat from stage lights, her mother’s black sweater, the old apartment in February with the radiators clanging and Eileen playing scales because grief, when it came early, could be bullied for an hour by discipline.

For the first time all day, Kath let herself miss her.

Not efficiently. Not usefully. Not in a way that could be folded, sorted, labelled, or sold.

Her throat closed. She pressed the blue cloth to her mouth until the feeling passed enough to breathe through.

Then she wrapped the rosin again, placed it in the case, and changed her mind.

No.

She took the rosin back out and put it in her pocket.

The violin could stay hidden. The rosin would stay with her.

It was a small rule. A private one. But it was hers, and the relief of making it startled her.

Kath slid the case deeper beneath the bed, behind the brochures and the cracked QUIET HOURS sign. She pushed the suitcase in front of the gap, broken wheel facing out. A poor barricade, but a barricade all the same.

At the window, the orchard was nearly dark. The last heat lifted from the rows in wavering bands. Somewhere beyond the ridge was the lake, invisible now but still there, holding the day’s light after the land had given it up.

Kath took the PACKED BY KATE J. label from where she had stuck it to the dresser.

She folded it once. Twice. Again, until the printed name disappeared into the creases.

Tomorrow she would put the labels on the bags.

Tonight she put the folded square under the loose baseboard behind the dresser, not because it mattered to anyone else, but because she needed one place in this house where the wrong name could be buried.

When she stood, the new boots had left a smear of orchard dust on the floorboards.

Kath did not wipe it away.