Mom did not say that it was all right. She did not tell him he had done the right thing. My mother has never lied to make anybody feel better, and she was not going to start that morning.
“You should have asked me,” she said.
“I know it.”
“I’m old, Rod. I’m not gone. When you’ve got a decision about my life, you ask me first. Even when you’ve got the papers. Especially when you’ve got the papers.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Next time, you ask.”
“I’ll ask,” he said. “I promise you I’ll ask.”
She nodded once, like that settled a bill. Then she reached down beside her chair, where she kept her thermos and her salt shaker and the old dented coffee can. She picked up the seed tin and held it out to him.
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He looked at it. “What’s that for.”
“Open it.”
He pried off the plastic lid. Inside were her seed envelopes, all the paper packets she had marked over the years in her school hand. Bean seed, tomato seed, a fold of wax paper with marigold seed in it.
And at the very bottom, under all of it, an old seed packet, faded almost white. Somebody had written on the front of it in green crayon, in big crooked letters. Rod’s beans. Keep out.
Rod took it out and held it in his fingers. He was eight years old when he wrote that. I remember.
He had his own row at the end of the garden, and he put up a sign, and he would not let me or anybody else pick off it.
“You kept this,” he said.
“I kept every one of you,” Mom said. “Every seed you ever planted for me. That’s what that tin is.”
There were bean seeds still inside that packet. She had been saving seed from his row for forty-four years. Every summer, she planted his beans in his row, and every fall she put some back in that packet.
They were in the ground on our farm right then. Third row from the shed. I had planted them myself in May, on her orders, and I had not known whose they were.
Rod stood there holding the packet. He did not cry. My brother does not cry, any more than I do.
But he put his hand over his eyes for a minute, standing in front of his mother’s lawn chair in the August sun, and none of us said anything.
Erv walked over then. He did not make any speech either. He went to the cab of the pickup and came back with a pair of leather work gloves, the old ones from behind the seat, and held them out.
“Third row from the shed,” Erv said. “The pole beans need picking. Marnie’s been too busy.”
Rod looked at the gloves. He looked at Mom. She tipped her hat back down over her eyes and settled into her chair, like a woman who had all the time in the world.
“Well,” she said. “Go on. They won’t pick themselves.”
Rod put the seed packet in his shirt pocket and buttoned the flap over it. Then he walked to the end of the third row, stood there a second in the sun, and pulled on the gloves.