Seven every morning
We put the tomatoes in the second week of May. Grandpa called the frost date like a weatherman, and he was right about that too.
After that, every morning at seven, I picked him up at Maple Court. We worked together for an hour, and at ten till eight I went to the shop, four minutes away.
He stayed in the yard. He had his phone in his shirt pocket, a jug of ice water, and a lawn chair with arms for when he wanted out of the wheelchair.
Marge Kline next door is a retired nurse, and she checked on him over the fence about every hour, though she pretended she was just out looking at her roses.
“I carried mail through two blizzards and a tornado, Travis. I can sit in a yard.”
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So I let him. He was a grown man. He got to decide.
At noon I came home on my lunch, and Jenny had left a sandwich in the refrigerator for him with his name on it.
The first week, he ate half. The second week, he ate the whole thing. The third week, I came home and he had eaten his sandwich and mine.
“You were late,” he said. “It was going to go to waste.”
By the end of May, he was back up to 156 pounds. The nurse wrote it down on her chart and underlined it twice.
Teaching the boy
When school let out, Miles started coming out with us in the mornings. He was eight that summer, and Grandpa decided he was old enough to learn suckers.
“See this little shoot here?” Grandpa said, holding a Brandywine branch between two fingers. “Where the branch meets the main stem, right in the armpit of it? That’s a sucker. It’ll take all the plant’s strength and give you nothing for it.”
Miles leaned in close. “Do I pull it?”
“You pinch it. Thumb and finger, right at the bottom, clean. Not the flower, son. Never the flower. The flower is the tomato. You pinch the flower and you’ve just thrown away supper.”
Miles pinched one. He held it up like a trophy. Grandpa said, “That’s a good clean one,” and Miles stood up straighter than I had seen him stand all year.
After that, Miles checked the suckers every single morning before he even ate breakfast. He would come in the back door and report, “Six suckers on Mr. Pickles, Grandpa,” like he was giving the evening news.
Rosie was in charge of the beans. Grandpa showed her how the vines twist around the pole, always the same direction, and she spent a whole week trying to catch one in the act of turning.
On his feet
Somewhere in June, I came home at noon and found Grandpa standing up.
He was standing at bed three, with his cane in one hand and his other hand flat on the cedar cap, tying up a Rutgers with a strip of old bedsheet. Loose, so the stem had room to grow.
I stopped at the corner of the garage. I did not want to startle him. I just watched him tie that knot, and then reach for another strip, and tie another.
“How long have you been standing?” I asked when he saw me.
“I wasn’t counting,” he said, which meant a long time.
By July, he was standing at those beds an hour at a stretch, sometimes more. The physical therapist told him whatever he was doing, he ought to keep doing it, because his hip was stronger than men twenty years younger.
He got his color back. He had been gray as newspaper in April, and by July he was brown as a saddle across the back of his neck and his forearms, the way I remembered him from every summer of my life.