The Garden Waiting by Mom’s Porch Steps

She did not look up when she said it. She just put the bean in the trench and went on. Kaitlyn, beside her, went quiet too.

Ginny told a story while she set cages, about the year in 1993 when the river came up and her basement filled with water, and Mom showed up with a canning kettle full of chicken and dumplings.

“She didn’t knock,” Ginny said. “She never knocks. She came straight in the back door with that kettle and said, the water can have the basement, it can’t have your supper.”

By three o’clock the bean plants were set and the seed rows were covered and tamped with the back of a hoe. Twenty-three of the tomatoes were set and caged. Kaitlyn hauled water from the hydrant in five-gallon buckets and never once complained.

Ginny and Rose and Kaitlyn left around four. Ginny’s knees were too stiff for the last little bit, and Rose had cows to check. I said I would finish.

I set the last tomato in by myself, a Grandma Ebel’s pink, closest to the steps. The sun was slanting soft over the hayfield, and my jeans were mud to the knee.

Behind me, across the yard, the gray metal walls of the new pole barn had gone up that week. The roof tin was on. It stood there on its dirt pad, big and plain, catching the late light.

I pressed the dirt down around the stem with both hands and set the wire cage over it. I looked at the walker, still parked at the bottom of the steps, empty, waiting.

Then I sat down on the bottom step next to it, with dirt to my elbows, and I cried for about three minutes.

Not because I was sad. Because it was done, and because Mom would have done it faster.

The week in between

I came out every evening that week to water. I carried a coffee can of water to each tomato, and ran the sprinkler on the beans in the evening so the leaves would not scorch.

On Tuesday the first bean hooks came up in the seeded rows, pale and bent like little question marks. I counted them like a kid counting Christmas presents. Seventy-one the first day.

Keith’s truck went by twice that week. Once, I saw it slow down at the end of the lane. It didn’t stop.

On Wednesday evening, his wife Corinne drove out by herself in her car and walked over to the plot. She looked at the cages and the bean rows for a long time.

“He doesn’t know I’m here,” she said. “I just wanted to see it.”

“It’s her garden,” I said. “It’s just in a new spot.”

Corinne nodded. “He’s not a bad man, Tracy.”

“I know he’s not,” I said. And I did know it. That was the hard part. A bad man would have been easier.