The Asparagus Along The Property Line

Next crown. Fork. Hands. Lift. Turn. Bucket.

The light went pink and then gray.

About the twentieth piece, I found a spear.

It had already come up, ahead of the others, the way one always does. It was no longer than my finger, purple at the tip, and the tiller had snapped it off clean.

I brushed it off on my scrub top. I held it under my nose. It smelled the way my mother’s hands smelled every May of my life, green and a little bit like rain.

That was when I sat back on my heels.

I did not make a sound. I have never been a noisy crier. But I sat there in the turned dirt with that one little spear in my palm, and my eyes ran until my collar was wet.

Then I put the spear in my breast pocket, behind my pens, and went back to work.

The kitchen light came on in my mother’s house around then. Kristin’s car had been in the drive all along. I looked up and she was at the window over the sink, the same window my mother used to rap on with her wedding ring when supper was ready.

She waved. I waved back with a hand full of dirt.

A minute later the back door opened and she came out on the step in her sock feet with a dish towel over her shoulder.

“Megan? Is everything okay?”

“Benny told me I could have these roots before they get hauled. I hope that’s all right.”

“Oh, gosh, of course. Take anything.” She looked out over the black rectangle and the string, and her whole face was lit up. I had never seen a person so happy to look at dirt. “I am so glad to see that weed patch gone. It was the one ugly spot in the whole yard.”

There are sentences that arrive in your mouth already made. I had one. It was six words long. That was my mother’s asparagus bed.

I looked at her standing there in her socks with her nine thousand dollars’ worth of joy, on the step where my mother used to stand and shake out the rugs.

What would it have done? It would not have put one crown back in the ground. It would have taken the happiest evening that girl had had in that house and turned it to ashes, and I would have done it only so that somebody besides me would hurt.

“Thank you,” I said. “It’ll be a pretty patio.”

“You’re going to be on it all summer,” she said. “I mean that.” And she went back in, and I heard her turn the radio up.

I worked on by headlamp after that. When both buckets were full I laid the pieces in my wheelbarrow between two wet bath towels. Asparagus roots must not dry out.

At half past eleven, headlights swung across the yard, and my brother’s truck pulled in from second shift.

He sat in it with the engine running for longer than a man needs to. Then he walked across the grass in his work boots, slowly, and stopped at the string, with his lunch cooler in one hand.

“Meg,” he said.

“I’m almost done.”

He looked at the turned ground, and the wheelbarrow, and the tiller. I watched him work it out. Chad is not a talker, but he is nobody’s fool. He set the cooler down in the grass.