The sunrise basket

Every fruit-person in Orchard Valley knows the story, because Marigold Melon tells it every Blossom Festival. One spring morning, just as the sun cleared the orchard rows, old Marigold found a woven picnic basket tucked between the roots of the oldest peach tree in the valley. Inside, on a folded red gingham cloth, slept a baby peach — perfectly round, blush-pink, with a single green leaf curled over her stem like a question mark.

There was no note. There rarely is, in the old tales — fruit-person babies, the lore says, sometimes simply arrive, the way peaches arrive on branches. Marigold, who had run the Peach Pit Diner for forty years and never had a child of her own, looked at the sleeping baby, looked at the sunrise, and said the line the valley still quotes: “Well. The diner just hired its newest waitress.”

Raised by the diner

Georgia grew up the way diner kids do: doing homework in booth six, learning to skate before she could properly walk, and absorbing Marigold's two great lessons — everyone's hungry for something and kindness is a renewable resource. By twelve she was bussing tables. By sixteen she had invented the Skate-Spin Serve. By eighteen, the regulars had started calling the place “Georgia's,” and Marigold didn't correct them.

Why “Melba”?

Ask Georgia and she'll grin: “Marigold named me after her favorite dessert — and her favorite customer.” In-world, the Peach Melba sundae is the diner's signature dish, and Georgia, the story goes, was the only baby in the valley sweet enough to be named after it. Whether that's true or just Marigold being Marigold, nobody has ever dared to check.