The Garden Waiting by Mom’s Porch Steps

A week later

On Friday the twelfth, a week and a day after she came home, I was out after supper pulling the first weeds out of the bean rows when Keith’s truck came up the lane with a load on the flatbed trailer behind it.

It was lumber. Two-by-tens, cedar, a stack of it. And the skid steer, on a second trip, with a bucket full of something black.

He and his boy unloaded without saying much. Then Keith walked over to the porch where Mom was sitting in her chair with a glass of tea, and he stood at the bottom of the steps by the walker.

“I want to build you some beds,” he said. “Raised. Waist high. Along the porch side of the plot. So you can work them standing up and never have to get down on that hip.”

Mom looked at him over her glass.

“The dirt is yours,” he said. “It’s from the pile by the fence. I didn’t haul it off. I couldn’t make myself haul it off.” He looked at his boots. “It’s been sitting there all month.”

Mom set her glass down on the porch rail. She looked out at the trailer, and the black dirt in the skid steer bucket, her forty years of leaves and manure and coffee grounds.

“Well,” she said. “Don’t just stand there. You’re losing light.”

They worked until dark that night and all day Saturday. Keith cut and screwed the cedar into four boxes, eight feet long and three feet wide, thirty inches high, with a cap board around the top she could lean on.

His boy ran the skid steer and filled them with her old dirt, one careful bucket at a time. Keith raked it level with his hands, the way Dad used to rake the seedbed in his garden.

I watched him do it from the porch. My brother, who never says he is sorry for anything, raking dirt with his bare hands so his mother would not have to kneel.

On Saturday afternoon, when the last box was full, Keith sat down on the bottom porch step next to me, by the walker. He smelled like cedar and sweat. We sat there a minute without talking.

“The social worker did say assisted living,” he said finally. “She did say it. I heard it and I ran with it. I thought I was being the responsible one.”

“I know,” I said.

“I figured if the garden was gone, it would be easier for her to go. That’s the truth of it. I thought I was helping her let go.”

“She’s not letting go of anything, Keith,” I said. “You’ve met her.”

He laughed, a little, and rubbed his face. “I’ve met her.” Then he said, “You did a good job on the rows. You can get a walker down between them.”

“I measured,” I said.

“I saw.” He was quiet. “Dad would have been proud of that.”

I didn’t trust my voice, so I just bumped his shoulder with mine, the way we did when we were kids on the school bus, before I was the one driving it.