The Asparagus Along The Property Line

The talk around the grill had thinned out. Everybody on Maple Road over the age of fifty knew what she was going to say, and not one of them had said it to Kristin in two months of waving, because how do you?

“Watch the porch?” Kristin said.

“Why, for the bundle.” Lois looked at her with real surprise. “Didn’t anybody tell you? Every morning in May that woman was out here at daylight in her housecoat with a knife. And she’d tie it up with a rubber band and leave it on your step. Every house on this road. She never knocked. She never once let you thank her. If you tried, she’d say it was only going to go to waste.”

“Thirty-four years I got that asparagus,” old Mr. Kowalski said from his lawn chair. He said it to his plate.

“When my Harold was so sick,” Lois said. Her voice did not rise at all. “The last spring. He couldn’t keep a thing down from the treatments. Not broth. Not toast. And Rosemary came over with it creamed, in a little covered dish, still warm, and I said, Rosemary, he won’t. And she said, just set it by him. And he ate it. He ate every bite. She brought it every day for three weeks, till the bed quit, and it was the last thing that man ever asked me for by name.”

Nobody moved.

“And then this one,” Lois said, and she found me at the edge of the grass and pointed her cane at me, “took it right up after her mother passed. I’d hear her on my step at five in the morning. I never let on I was awake.”

I had not known that. I looked at my plate too.

Kristin was standing in the exact middle of her patio with the pitcher sweating in her hand. I watched her look down, slowly, at the stones under her sandals. I watched her understand where she was standing.

Then she looked up, across the yard, past the string lights, to fifty-one feet of raggedy green leaning into my baling twine.

Her face. I would not wish that on anybody. I had spent two months half wanting to see it, and when it came I would have given a good deal to take it back off her.

“It’s along the line, Lois,” I said. I made my voice ordinary, the voice I use for telling a family the doctor will be in shortly. “I moved it in April. Thirty-three came up. Give it till the third spring, and then you watch your porch.”

“Well, thank goodness,” Lois said, and sat down at last. “Kristin, honey, is that lemonade?”

Kristin poured it. Her hand shook. She got through the next hour, and the hour after, and she thanked every person for coming.

She did not look at me again that night. Chad did. Then he set his tongs down and went and stood beside his wife and stayed there until the last car pulled out.

She was on my step at seven the next morning.

I had the door open before she knocked. She was in the same clothes. Her eyes were swollen nearly shut.

“Why didn’t you tell me? You were out there on your knees. I stood on that step and called it a weed patch, to your face, and you said thank you.” Her voice broke. “You said it’ll be a pretty patio.”

“It is a pretty patio.”

I sat down on the top step, and after a second she sat down too.