The Garden That Came Back

I did not cry. I stood in that ditch and looked at those roots and thought, as clearly as if somebody had spoken it, Well. They are still alive.

I carried three of them up the bank against my chest like babies, wet them down with the hose, and set them in a bucket in the shade.

*

Brent came over after dark.

My son is forty-five, a good, broad, quiet man with Earl’s hands. He installs heating and air conditioning, and all that week he had worked a long job at a new school in Findlay, out at five and home at eight, too tired to look out a window. He stood in my kitchen with his cap in both hands, and he looked like a man who had just been told.

“Mom,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

“Know what, Brent?”

“That you didn’t know.” He turned the cap. “Meg said you were fine with it. She said you two talked on the phone and you said to do whatever made sense for the party. I figured it was the fence. The edges. I didn’t think she meant all of it.”

I had talked to Megan once, the Tuesday I was in Marietta. She had asked whether they could use the side lane for parking. I said, “Oh, honey, use whatever you need,” because Verna was calling from the other room for her pain pill, and I thought we were speaking of the lane.

“Did she ask you about the garden?” he said. “Not the lane. The garden.”

“No.”

He sat heavily in Earl’s chair. He had not sat in it since the funeral.

“I’d rather you didn’t talk to her tonight,” I said. “She believes she did a kind thing. I think she believes she cleaned my attic. If you go in there tonight and make her feel like a thief, she’ll dig in her heels, and I’ll have lost the garden and a daughter-in-law both, and I only have the one.”

My son laughed once, and it broke in the middle, and he put a hand over his face. I laid mine on the back of his neck the way I did when he was small.

“I’m not going to ask you to fix it,” I said. “I’m going to ask you to wait and see what I do.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know yet. But it won’t be loud.”

*

I did not sleep. I lay in the bed Earl and I shared forty-four years and did what I always do when I am afraid, which is count. Quarts. Porches. Faces. Then I started counting what was left.

At three in the morning I went down the cellar steps in my nightgown with a flashlight. In the corner of the fruit cellar is a wooden shelf Earl built in 1989, and on it sit nine coffee cans.

Folgers, mostly, each with a strip of masking tape and a name in my handwriting. Greasy Beans, Mother Grubb’s, saved since 1986. German Pink. The Nameless, which was what we called the cucumber. Pole Lima. Zinnia, red. Marigold. Dill.

I put my hand on the cans in the dark and felt something I had not felt all that long day. A way forward, and it was small, and brown, and rattled when I shook it.

I carried the Greasy Beans up the steps, set them on the kitchen table, and sat down with them.

*