The Asparagus Along The Property Line

I set every piece myself. You make a little hill of soil in the bottom of the trench and you sit the crown on top of it, buds up, and you comb the roots out and down the sides of the hill in every direction. Fifteen inches to the next one. Then you cover it with two inches of soil, no more, and water it in. You do not fill the trench. You fill it a little at a time over the summer as the shoots come up, so they are never smothered.

My mother taught me that sitting on that same bucket, the year she moved the dozen. I was eleven. She said, you only bury them as deep as they can stand today.

Forty-one hills. Chad went ahead of me making them with his hands.

When the last one was watered he stood up and looked down the row, fifty-one feet of brown stripe with nothing showing.

“Now what?” he said.

“Now we wait. You don’t cut asparagus till the third spring. Take from it too early and it never comes to anything.”

“Two years,” he said.

“Two years to a spear. That’s what she always said.”

He rinsed the spade at my hose, and dried it on his shirt, and went home to sleep before his shift.

He told her that afternoon. He said she went white and said, that dead stuff? And then she said what any person would say who had never grown a thing: that it had been a bare patch full of dandelions, that nobody had said a word, that you could buy asparagus at Meijer for two ninety-nine a pound and she would buy me ten pounds of it.

“She cried some,” Chad said. “Then she got her back up. She said if it was that important somebody would have put a sign on it.”

“She’s not wrong,” I said. “She’s embarrassed. Leave her be.”

She came over that Saturday with a pan of brownies and said she was sorry about the plants. We stood in my kitchen being very polite to each other. I did not help her find the words, and that part is on me.

Because she knew it had been asparagus now. What she did not know was what it had been. Chad could not have told her. He was a boy who slept till noon every May of his life. The only people who knew about the porches were the ones who got up at five.

The patio went in that week, gray and tan pavers in a herringbone with a low seat wall. It was pretty. The first warm evening I saw her out there by herself with a glass of iced tea and her bare feet up on the wall, not on her phone, only sitting, with a look on her face like church.

I stood at my sink and tried to hate it and could not manage.

My row did nothing for five weeks.

The last week of May, the first one came. It was not a spear. A crown that has been cut to pieces and moved sends up a thread, a green thing no thicker than a knitting needle, and within a week the thread opens out into a wisp of fern like a baby’s hair.

By the middle of June, thirty-three of the forty-one had sent something up.

Thirty-three. I had not dared hope for twenty.