Later I would find out what had happened at the potluck the Sunday before the mowing. A woman from the Bible study, who did not know any better, had told Colleen across a plate of ham, “You are so lucky to live on Dot’s road.
I get a lump in my throat every May when I drive past those tulips. Dot gave us all that.”
I do not know what Colleen answered. I only know she mowed them the following Saturday, with my father forty miles away in a rehab bed.
That is where it came from. I learned to hold that in one hand, and what she did in the other, and I never let the first one cancel the second.
Dad came home from rehab in the first week of June. He walked the strip slowly, on the new knee, with his cane, and I watched him from my kitchen window. He stood at the mailbox for a long while. Then he went back in the house and did not say a word, and neither did she.
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By October, though, I had stopped thinking that. I had begun thinking about my mother’s hands.
On the second Saturday of October, Gabe asked if he could go dig a few bulbs out to see how they were doing. I said yes. I gave him a trowel and a coffee can and let him go.
He was gone an hour. When he came back up the driveway he walked slowly, with the can held in front of him in both hands the way you carry something that might spill.
“Mom, look.”
I looked. There were maybe a dozen bulbs in the bottom of the can, and every one of them was soft and gray, with a sour smell, black at the base. One of them came apart in his fingers as he held it up. It just fell to pieces like wet bread.
“These are Grandma’s,” Gabe said. “The ones from the corner. The old ones, from before I was born.”
“I know, baby.”
“They’re dead.” He said it in a calm voice, an old man’s voice. He is a boy who does not cry in front of people. He set the coffee can on the porch step, walked to the truck, got in the passenger side and sat there with the door shut for forty minutes.
I watched him through the kitchen window. Neil came in from the milk run at dusk and stood beside me with his boots still on.
“What’s he doing out there?”
“Grieving a flower bed,” I said, and my voice did a thing I did not expect.
Neil put his arm around me and did not say anything for a while.
“What do you want to do about it?” he said finally. “And I mean what you want, not what you think you’re supposed to want.”
“I want to plant them again,” I said. “All of them. I want to put back every one she cut.”
“That’s about two thousand bulbs, Beth, by the look of that ditch. Maybe eight hundred dollars. And a week of digging.”
“I know. I don’t have eight hundred dollars.”
Neil shrugged. “You know a lot of people.”