The Row I Planted From the One That Lived

What She Said

“Did you write this?” Doris asked her. Her voice was rough.

Sophie nodded. She did not say anything. I put my arm around her.

Doris unfolded the note and read it out loud, because I think she could not trust herself to say anything of her own yet.

“Mamaw Doris,” she read. “These are from the one that lived. I named her Lottie. Mama says you had a garden when you were a girl and it got taken. You can have some of ours. Love, Sophie.”

Then Doris Whitlock, who had not apologized for anything in the eleven years I had known her, got down on one knee in the gravel in front of my daughter.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry about your four plants. It was a wicked thing I did, and you didn’t deserve it. Your mama didn’t deserve it either.”

Sophie looked at me. I nodded. And Sophie slid down off that tailgate and put her arms around her grandmother’s neck.

Doris held on to her for a long time. Then she stood up, slowly, one hand on the tailgate, and she looked at me.

“Reba,” she said. “I owe you more than sorry. But sorry is where I have to start.”

“It’s a good place to start,” I said.

“Who told you? About Mama?”

“Wilma.”

Doris shook her head. “Of course she did.” But she almost smiled.

The Porch Steps

We walked her home. All four of us, up the gravel in the last of the light, and when we got to her house she sat down on her porch steps and patted the step beside her.

Irwin and Sophie went to look at the row. I sat down beside my mother-in-law, and for a while we did not say anything at all.

“Every year it came up,” she said finally, “I’d drive past it and I’d feel sick. I didn’t know why. I’d tell myself it was the straw blowing around, or the cages leaning, or the weeds.”

“It looked like hers,” I said.

“It looked exactly like hers.” She pressed the heel of her hand against one eye. “Right along the road, so everybody could see it. Too big and a little wild. Mama never could keep it tidy, she was too busy picking.”

“I watched a man push my mother’s garden under with a dozer,” she said. “I was sixteen. I stood at the end of the road and watched him do it, because somebody had to see it. And then I spent fifty-four years making sure I never had another thing that could be taken like that.”

“And then you took mine,” I said. Not mean. Just true.

“And then I took yours,” she said. “I can’t tell you why. I’d love to tell you I wasn’t thinking. But I knew whose seeds those were, and I did it anyway.”

I believed her. That was the strange part. It was the first honest thing she had ever said to me, and I believed every word.

Dinner

Doris came to Sunday dinner the next day. She brought a pound cake, which is what she always brought, and she sat at the end of the table where she always sat, and Irwin said grace.

It was not suddenly easy. Doris is still Doris. She still told me my gravy was thin, and she still made a remark about the porch needing paint.

But after dinner she walked down to my garden by the road. I had replanted it too, with the other trays, and it was already big and a little wild and full of straw.

She stood at the corner post where Lottie had stood, and she did not say a word about how it looked from the road.