The Garden I Grew for the Pantry

The curtain

I came home from Mattoon in the first week of March with a walker and a list of exercises taped to my refrigerator.

Janelle drove down from Champaign that weekend and stayed. She is forty-six, works in an accounting office at the university, and is the most organized person I know. After that she came every other weekend, with a cooler of meals and a plan.

Nadine called on a Monday in the middle of that month. I knew what the call was before I picked up.

“Deloris. How’s the hip?”

“It’s a hip.”

“I only wanted to ask how you’re doing.”

I let a few seconds go by. Then I told her plain, because I have never known another way to tell her anything.

“No tomatoes this year, Nadine. I’m stove up, and I’m sorry. There’s no use pretending.”

There was a short quiet on the line.

“We’ll manage, Deloris,” she said.

She said it too fast. A woman says a thing that fast when it has been decided somewhere without you. But I was not in any shape to think about that. I said thank you and hung up and sat there with the receiver in my lap, feeling like a person who had resigned.

Then it was April, and the grass came green, and Janelle set a chair by the kitchen window.

“I want you to be able to see it come up,” she said.

“There’s nothing to come up.”

I said it too sharp. She went quiet and left the chair where it was.

The next morning I pulled the curtain across the glass.

She opened it. I closed it. She opened it again, gently, and said not one word.

I was a stubborn old woman who did not want to look at a field of nothing. Mostly I was ashamed. For forty years I had been the one who showed up, and now there would be Fridays in June with no truck, and every one of them would be my fault.

After that, Roy started coming on Sundays. He came across the road after church, still in his coat and tie, and sat in Lyle’s chair and drank my coffee and talked about the price of corn and his knees. For eight Sundays he never said the word garden.

When I mentioned, one Sunday in April, that I thought somebody had run a tractor in my back lot, he said, “Probably the Schrocks. They’re always doing something with that ground,” and drank his coffee.