Eight Raised Beds for Grandpa Emil

The fence

People started stopping at our back fence. Marge Kline, the couple across the alley, and then the young man who carries Grandpa’s old rural route, who got out of his car to shake his hand.

By the end of July, Grandpa was sending a paper sack of tomatoes out on that route twice a week, for the widows who still asked about him.

Men at the co-op tire counter started calling it Emil Holm’s garden. Not mine. His. That was exactly right.

Uncle Frank

Uncle Frank called me on a Tuesday night in the middle of July. He never calls anybody. He texts in single words, like “ok” or “yep.”

“She’s not sleeping,” he said. “Your aunt. She drives by your place at night. Sits out in the alley for a while and then drives home.”

I did not know what to say.

“I told her in March she was moving too fast,” Frank said. “I told her he ought to have a say. She didn’t listen, and I wasn’t home to make her.”

He was quiet a minute. “But I was with her in that kitchen, too, Travis. I got there right after the ambulance. I saw her face. Both of those things are true.”

“I know they are,” I said.

“She thinks everybody in town hates her.”

“Nobody hates her,” I said. “But nobody’s going to pretend it didn’t happen, either.”

“That’s fair,” he said. “That’s fair.” And he hung up without saying goodbye, which is how Frank says goodbye.

The text

The first Friday night in August, Sharla texted me.

It said: “I keep hearing about this garden. I’m coming by in the morning to see it. If that’s all right.”

I sat on the back step and read it about five times. Then I drove over to Maple Court, because it was not my decision to make.

Grandpa was in his recliner, with the window open, listening to the farm report on the radio. I showed him the phone. He held it out at arm’s length and read it with his glasses down on the end of his nose.

“Do you want me to tell her no?” I asked. “I’ll tell her no, Grandpa. You don’t owe her anything.”

He handed the phone back to me. He looked out the window a long time. There was nothing out there but the parking lot and the back of the Dollar General.

“No,” he said finally. “Let her come.”

The first Brandywine

He wanted to be out early, so I picked him up at a quarter to seven that Saturday morning. Jenny was up, making coffee.

Rosie was still in bed. Miles was already out in the yard in his green t-shirt, with his little bucket, picking the morning’s tomatoes.

It was bright already, that hard August sun that comes up over Kansas like somebody turned on a light switch.

The tomato plants were taller than I was, staked and tied, with the peppers and the beans running down the other side of the path.

Grandpa had on his faded straw hat, the one he had worn on his route for twenty summers, and a light blue short-sleeve work shirt with his suspenders over it. He looked like himself. He looked like every summer morning of my childhood.

He got up out of the wheelchair and stood at bed two with his cane, and for the better part of an hour he taught Miles how to tell a ripe tomato from one that is only pretending.

You do not squeeze, he said. You lift it up gently in your palm, and if it is ready it comes away in your hand like it has been waiting for you.

When Grandpa got tired, he sat back down in the wheelchair.

And then he reached into bed two and lifted up a Brandywine in his palm, the first big ripe one of the summer, and it came away in his hand like it had been waiting for him.

It was huge. Bigger than a softball, deep red, with those ridges a Brandywine gets across its shoulders. He held it up in the sun and smiled the biggest smile I had seen on him since Grandma was alive.

Miles stood at the bed behind me with the bucket, grinning. I crouched down beside the chair in my gray t-shirt and jeans, one hand on Grandpa’s knee, and Jenny took a picture from the back step with her phone.

I did not even know she was taking it until later.

Then the gate latch clicked behind us.

Grandpa did not turn around. He kept smiling at that tomato.

“Come on in, Sharla,” he said. “I saw you at the gate ten minutes ago. You may as well come all the way. And before you say one word, I have terms.”