The Asparagus Along The Property Line

My mother’s name was Rosemary Sauer. She planted that bed the spring she was carrying me, which made the bed forty years old that April and made me thirty-nine, with a birthday coming in September. My father dug the trench for her because she was too far along to bend, and she sat on an overturned bucket and handed him the crowns one at a time and told him he was doing it wrong.

You have to understand what that bed was on our road. From the first week of May until Father’s Day my mother went out every single morning in her housecoat and my father’s barn boots, with a paring knife and a dishpan, and she cut what had come up overnight. In a warm spell asparagus will grow six inches in a day. One family cannot eat what a bed that size will give.

So she gave it away. She bundled it with the rubber bands she saved off the newspaper, a pound or so to the bundle, and she walked it up and down Maple Road and left it on porches. She did not knock. You came out for your paper and there it was, lying on the mat with the dew on it.

Nine houses on our road. Thirty-some Mays.

My father went first, eleven years ago, his heart. When the couple next door to my mother moved to Arizona seven years back, I bought their place, a plain little two-bedroom with a bad roof, so that I could be forty feet away when her own heart started to do what his had done. I was already divorced by then and working at the hospital in the county seat, nineteen miles off.

She died two years ago that October, in her own bed, with the ferns gone gold outside her window. I was holding her wrist. I knew the minute.

The house went to my brother, Chad. People lift their eyebrows at that, so let me say it was fair. I already had a house. Mom left me her savings and her car, and she left Chad the house and the two acres, and she told us both a year ahead so there would be no surprises. Chad is four years younger than I am. He was living in an apartment over in Muskegon then and working second shift at a plant that makes seat frames for trucks.

For two springs the house stood mostly empty. I mowed. And I kept the bed. I cut every morning before my shift and carried the bundles down the road in the dark at a quarter past five.

Then Chad met Kristin.

I liked her. I want that said too. She was thirty-four and worked the front desk at a dentist’s office, and she had a big easy laugh, and she looked at my brother as if he had hung the moon. They were married at the courthouse in January, and in March they moved into my mother’s house.

She never met my mother. They missed each other by a little over a year.

Kristin grew up in apartments. She told me so the day they moved in, standing in the back yard with her arms wrapped around herself, looking at two acres of dead March grass as if somebody had handed her a state park.

“I have never once had a place to sit outside,” she said. “Not even a balcony. I’ve got nine thousand dollars saved for a patio. Two years of Saturdays at the banquet hall.”

I remember thinking, good for her.