She did not take off the coat. She did not look around. She put her gloved hand into the dirt and made a hole six inches deep, and Lily put her small hand next to hers, flat on the ground, and said, “Deeper.”
“Like this?”
“Deeper. Grandma went down to the line on her trowel.”
Colleen went down to the line on the trowel.
She put in the first bulb. Lily pushed the soil over it with the heel of her hand. Then, without being asked, the old man in the Packers cap handed Colleen his bucket, and the woman beside him slid over to make a spot in the row, and Elroy Strand showed her how to set the second one.
When I could breathe, I walked over. I stood at the end of the row, a few feet from where she knelt. She did not look up. Her hands were shaking so much she dropped the third bulb, and Lily picked it up and handed it back.
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“I want you to know why,” Colleen said, to the ground. She spoke low enough that only Lily and I could hear. “I am not saying it makes it right.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Every person in that church tells me how Dot did things. How Dot made the coffee. How Dot never missed a Sunday. It was the tulips that did it. A woman told me she gets a lump in her throat every May, and I thought, I have nothing on this road that anybody ever got a lump in their throat over.”
Her voice went thin. “I wanted one thing out here that was mine. That is the whole of it. It was a small, ugly thing and I did it three times.”
“Colleen,” I said. “That is a reason. It is not a right.”
“I know.” She finally looked up. Her glasses were fogged. “I know it’s not.”
“But the strip was never Mom’s alone. It was always everybody’s. That’s what she wanted it to be.” I looked down the road at all those backs bent against the wind. “You can plant with us. Nobody here will say a word. But you don’t get to be the only one on this road who never carried a bucket.”
“I’ll carry one,” she said. “I’ll carry the whole row.”
Dad had come up behind us on his cane. He was standing very straight, as straight as I have seen him stand since the funeral.
“Colleen,” he said. His voice carried. He did not shout it, but people nearest us stopped to hear. “I should have said something in May, and I did not, because I was afraid of losing a good thing. I was wrong.
That strip belongs to these kids and their grandmother. Nobody mows it. Not you, not me, not the county. If anybody ever cuts a stem out here, it will be the children, when they are ready to cut it.”
“Yes, Harlan,” Colleen said.
They planted her two hundred together, the new red ones from the greenhouse, along with the last of the donated bulbs, starting at the culvert and working back toward the mailbox. Gabe directed. Tessa counted.
Elroy Strand found the one stretch of ditch that had gone uneven and filled it with a coffee can of topsoil from his truck. Lily knelt beside Colleen the whole time, a small yellow jacket beside a gray wool coat, correcting every bulb.