by Bret Lott
“All colors,” he said, “violet, white, pink, red. Azaleas everywhere. Because Betty loved them. When those things blossomed, the whole yard went crazy. So much color, those bushes like pink and white fires. Blazing violet.”
I heard in his voice a blaze of sorts, a blaze of earth, of greenery, of growth, pruning, growth again. “When do they bloom?” I asked. “Are they in bloom now?”
“No, no,” he said. He sighed. “Not now. It’s winter.”
Summers when we were kids, Tim spent in the garden, the strangest kid any of my friends’d ever seen. While we were on our bikes off to the woods to build forts or to the quarry to swim, Tim was there out back of our house, tilling the ground, ending up with more zucchini than we could ever eat, and ears of corn he sold out on the road in front of our house, and a few pumpkins too, and watermelons that never really got any bigger than a football, and sometimes peppers, sometimes green beans. The weirdest kid on our road, I always thought, and pedaled away hard.
So it was no surprise at all that he’d wanted to move to California, where things grew year round, where daylight lasted years, where all you had to do was put a stick in the ground and it’d bloom. It was what made him happy, a kind of happiness that gave our parents a certain sad joy I’d seen as he drove off down the same road he’d set up his corn stands on the last two weeks of July every year. The same one I pedaled furiously away on.
Me? By then I knew this was where I wanted to stay. I had my friends here, had started working at the paper as a stringer. And I’d met a girl named Susan.
And after Tim had sold his equipment, he found a job as a merchandiser for a soda pop company, building displays and filling bins on the soda pop aisle, until he moved to relief salesman, covering for those regulars gone on vacation. From there he received his own route, and we knew he wouldn’t be back. He’d met Judy by then, and married her, his life in motion full and hard all the way out there in California.
He was a good salesman, knowing something about planning, about the right time to ask for the right sales, about the cycles of things. I thought it silly when once he explained these things to me, telling me that there were indeed delicate theories and ideas surrounding his profession. Sales is an art, he told me, a pure art, when it’s done correctly, like bonsai trees, rock gardens, landscaped yards: There were the right moves, the right approaches, just as there were the wrong ones. Cut one branch too close, the tree withers. Lie about case cost to a manager once, lose sales later. He knew about planting, about waiting, about trimming and pruning back. He knew when to bring in only a few cases, and when to truck them in by the ton.
A few years later, he was able to afford a home of his own, with a yard. And in that yard he brought to play these theories in the way he’d always wanted: the close-cropped grass, the pruned rosebushes, the shaped bushes and trees.
“I thought about what it was he had growing in his yard,” my brother went on. “The Bermuda there in the front, Saint Augustine he had growing in the back, that stuff with the wider blades, the thick stuff you need to cut just as close as the Bermuda.”
I nodded, and he started in again, as though he’d seen me.
“And the trees he had over there were all things you could eat, I was thinking. In the front yard he had an olive tree, around to the side yard a plum tree. In the back he had dwarf lemon and orange trees in those oak half barrels. He had an avocado tree, and a peach tree back there. And against the other side of the house he had a grape arbor. Just a trellis, but Lew liked to call it his arbor.”
Then he gave a laugh, small and quiet, the sound across the line like some foreign language. “The first time I tried any of those grapes,” he said, and I could hear him smiling, “Lew brought over a bunch the size and color of peas and told me I had to taste them, that he’d already had some. He pulled off three or four and popped them into his mouth. I put a dozen or so in my mouth. I bit down. They were hard as acorns, and sour. I spit mine out. Lew laughed and swallowed his. ‘Terrible,’ he said, and he was laughing. ‘Rotten.’
“We even tried the olives once. They were tough and greasy, but they tasted like olives. And the avocados never got very big. But there’d been the oranges and plums and lemons and peaches, bags of them he brought over whenever any of them came ripe. Most of the time I’d ended up dumping half the fruit in the garbage. But how could I turn him down? How was I supposed to do that?”
“Who’s that?” my wife called from downstairs.
I put my hand over the receiver, brought it down to my lap. “Tim!” I yelled.
“Oh,” she said. “Well, say hi.”
I put the phone back to my ear. Outside, snow still fell. “Susan says hi.”
“Oh,” he said. “Say hi back.” He took a deep breath, as if he were thinking not about my wife but about his question, as though he were wondering how he could have turned down such a gift as all that fruit.
“You couldn’t turn it down,” I said. “The fruit. It would have rotted in his yard if you hadn’t taken it. You did him a favor.”
“True,” he said. “He told me it was Betty wanted the trees. She wanted trees that would grow things you could eat. That’s why he’d planted everything.”
We sat there for a few moments, quiet. Then my brother started again.
“He used to bring her out in the sun while we worked on our yards Saturdays. He’d set up a lawn chair in the middle of the driveway, then walk her out and set her down in the sun, and we’d have at it. She sat there without moving, you know, because of the stroke and everything, and she watched us.”
I heard his voice crack then, a slight falter. He took in a breath.
“Some nights I’d lie awake and think about what it would be like,” he went on, though quieter, slower. “What it would be like to have those things to worry about: the yard, the trees, all those azaleas. Sometimes I’d get up and look out the bedroom window at Lew’s backyard and just wonder. And I’d start envying him, even though he had a wife who’d had a stroke, who he had to take care of all the time.” He paused, took in another breath. “He fed her,” he said, his words even smaller and filled, I could hear, with a quiet kind of awe. “He washed her hair. He took her to the bathroom. He taught her to walk again. Every day for seven months he made her get out of bed and take a step, one more each day. Seven months it took her to walk all the way to the kitchen.”
Then he was quiet. A car passed by outside, almost silent on the new snow.
“But is that so bad?” he said. “Is that a sad thing to have to do? Nights when I was looking at those fruit trees down there it seemed to me he was just carrying out what he wanted to do in the first place, back when he’d married her. He was finishing what he’d said he would forty years ago. He was finishing his love for her.”
I said, “You did the right thing. Taking that fruit.” I paused, and heard how empty the words were, yet even in that emptiness I said it again: “You did the right thing.”
He wasn’t talking about fruit, I knew. And he knew it too.
“So what I did was this,” he said, and I was thankful in that moment for his forgiveness, for the way my hollow words were already gone. “It’d been three weeks since Lew had touched his yard,” he said, “not since Betty’d gone to the hospital. He’d spent the last three weeks at the hospital. He’d already gone into the house by this time, and so I pushed my mower out onto the sidewalk and went over to Lew’s, and went in on his lawn. It was all I could think to do. I had at it. I mowed his grass as close as I could, then mowed it again. Then I took out the edger and went all the way around the yard. Then I turned the dirt in the flower beds, swept everything off—the sidewalk, the driveway, the porch—then I hosed everything down. I could feel Lew watching me all this time, somewhere in the house, but I didn’t care. I was thinking about the lawn, about how it still didn’t look right, something still didn’t look good about it.
“So then I went around to the side gate and let myself in, wheeled the
mower and edger in, and had at the backyard. I gave it the same treatment as the front. I never cut grass any lower in my life, I swear it.
“And all this time Lew’s back there in the house, watching me, I can tell. I felt like he was right there with me, right behind me sometimes, watching me weed the beds, trim the yard, dump grass into barrels. Sometimes I’d look out the corner of my eye to the sliding glass window onto the porch, but I never saw him. I just kept on.”
He was quiet again, but now I heard something. At first I thought it was the radiators in the house beginning to steam up, to whistle before they let loose. But I listened closer, and heard my brother crying.
I said, “You know, we love you,” meaning, I love you. Instead of saying that, I’d put some of the responsibility onto my wife, my children. “We love you,” I said again.
He cleared his throat, went on as though I hadn’t said a thing. “Things still didn’t look good. I thought a good trim and cut and weeding would do the trick, but it didn’t. So I went to my garage and got the garden shears. That was it, I knew. Things had to be cut back. Things were shaggy. I started with the oleanders along the left fence. Then I got a pair of pruning shears and cut back the rosebushes against the back fence. They didn’t really need it, but I still cut the hell out of them. And each snip, each branch falling back, made me feel better.
“I finished that, and then I started in on everything else in his yard. I cut everything back. I knew he was watching me, but I didn’t look to see if I could catch him. I cut back the avocado tree, the peach and plum trees. I cut back branches until it looked like dead winter and some big storm’d torn leaves, branches, everything off. I went back to the grape arbor and cut the hell out of everything back there. Everything I cut will come back, I was thinking. It’ll all come back in a matter of time. And then I went at the azaleas. I got down on my knees and started working them over, trimming and shaping and trimming, and that was when Lew came out.”
He took a breath. “I looked up from a flower box, and there he was, his arms crossed, his head lowered. He didn’t look at me, only at the bushes. He nodded, and I went on. I didn’t say anything.
“He went around the yard then. He went to the arbor and touched the branches, went to the orange tree and put his hand around the trunk. He squatted down and ran his hand across the grass, that grass I’d cut so short. Then he came over and watched me finish shaping the azaleas. Then I led him out into the front yard and started working on the azaleas out there. We never said a word. He just watched me. And then I came home.”
I said after a moment, “Good.” I said, “You did the right thing.” Those same empty words as before, still just as empty.
Still nowhere near what he was talking about.
We were quiet. Static rose on the line, snow fell, the sun shone. I watched the clock on the nightstand, watched the red numbers change three times—5:21, 5:22, 5:23—without a sound between us.
And then, as though the words were preordained by the incalculable weight of winter here and sunlight there, he said, “I miss them.”
“Me too,” I said, without a moment of pause, and we both knew, without anything other than the silence to pass between us and these small words, that we were touching the loss of our parents, the world delivering us by whatever means possible the means by which you will find love.
Even in loss, you will find it.
Here was what he was talking about: love, and grief. Both as pure and true as sunlight and snow.
I said, “I love you,” and the echo on the line brought it back to me. I love you.
“I love you, too,” he said, and I saw my brother, sitting in his recliner, looking out a window on the same world I knew. This one. Ours, made so by the history we shared.
We talked a little longer, about his job, about Judy, and then we got off the phone. I looked outside. The snow had stopped.
I went downstairs to the living room. My wife sat on the sofa, reading a book. My two children were lying on the carpet, a newspaper spread out before them. They were clipping things out of the paper: articles, ads, photos. They looked up at me, smiled, and went back to whatever it was they were doing. Susan turned to me.
“What did he have to say?” she said.
“He wanted to tell me a story,” I said. I shrugged. “I can tell it to you later. What are you reading?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Trash. You wouldn’t want to know.” She smiled.
And then I smiled back to her, and I looked at my children, my wife, this house. All moving, living, breathing.
All of them stories.
And because they were living their own stories, and because I loved them all, and loved my brother, and my parents, and loved this house and the snow outside and my life, I did the only thing I could do: I went to the closet, put on my coat and gloves, and told my wife and children I was going to the market for some milk and eggs. Susan told me we had plenty of milk and eggs. I said, All right, I’m going for bread and juice. But, she started, and I kissed her before she could say anything.
Outside it was almost as light as day for the way streetlights banged up off the snow. I started the car, got out and brushed snow off the windshield and rear window, then went for a drive.
It was all I could think to do.
I drove up into the hills outside of town, back to the empty fields and rows of empty tobacco barns, my car moving quietly across the snow. I passed cornfields and tobacco fields and pasture, the snow violet in the dark. And I thought of how, a few months from now, those fields would be green with rows of corn, and later in the summer big-leafed tobacco plants would come up, and only a few months later, young people from town would harvest it all. The green would be gone, and here would be the snow again.
I turned the headlights off and drove along, the car, it seemed, even quieter now. I tried to picture, as I had a million times before, my parents driving a summer road through the Berkshires, holding hands after a weekend away, their children grown and gone and themselves on their way home one last time.
And I saw them, saw their hands together, and saw, too, love.
The road lay before me, a narrow violet ribbon through the hills, my headlights still off, and I knew that whatever way I went, whichever turn I took, that road would lead me home. I just had to be careful, to stay awake, to let the road be the road, and me the traveler on it, though there was in this realization no lesson from my parents’ having lost their lives by leaving the road. Only that mine wasn’t over yet, that the road before me was ready to take me where I was loved, and where I loved.
And I drove.
THERE HE WAS: ROGER. MY SECOND SON. MY BABY BOY. IT WAS him. Really.
But it wasn’t, of course. Not here at O’Hare. He was home in Charleston, where he works and has his family set up: Marlene, and the two girls, my granddaughters: Susan and Jeannie. I knew that, knew he wasn’t here in Chicago. I’d just talked to him a week or so ago, and he hadn’t said word one about traveling anywheres, though he does travel a good deal.
But for a second or two I believed it was him, there at the gate across from me sitting here and chewing on a bagel with cream cheese out of a tiny plastic container, like you’ll get butter in, and I looked up from the fact sheets on the cookie line I’d just taken on, the point of my trip, really, these cookies and whether or not I could take on another line, sell them to Winn-Dixie or Harris Teeter or Piggly Wiggly once I got back to Orlando, where I live and work as a food broker.
Boyce, my husband, Roger’s father, is gone. He died two years ago.
But for that minute or so it was him, Roger, there at the gate and letting the ticket agent have it for whatever reason. Roger, a good three inches taller than his father and with that skinny beard and hairline working back on him, that gray hair at the sides, gray just like his father’s. Roger, overweight, slouching like he does because he’s as tall as he is, and wearing those same clothes he always does: flannel shirt and tweed jacket and khaki tr
ousers. Uniform of the profession, of course. He’s a history teacher, and gives papers at minuscule conferences all over the country on Charlemagne and his cohorts, hence why he travels, and hence, too, why I thought for that minute or so it really was him. Roger, gone to give another paper on his hero, Charlemagne.
Then he turned his back to me, this piece of bagel in my mouth now like a wad of warm wax, my baby boy at the gate across from me, and I saw the bald spot at the back of his head, and I figured only then it wasn’t my son but somebody else. Though Roger’s hairline is retreating on him, he doesn’t have a bald spot, I know that much.
So it wasn’t him.
He turned back to the agent, a wiry kid with perfect blond hair who was staring at the monitor just below the countertop, and started in on him again. He had a ticket in his hand, this man I’d thought was my second son, and shook it just a little, then put a hand to his hip, tilted his head, let keep coming the words he wanted to give out to the blond kid. His eyebrows were jammed together in the middle, I could see, his mouth inside that beard and mustache working away, that ticket quivering not twelve inches from the kid, who only stared at the monitor, his hands working, I guess, at the keyboard down there.
And darned if this man didn’t even argue like Roger does, the way he tilts his head, hand on his hip like he owns the world, and you, measly you, and the problem you’ve given him, are the source of all the strife on planet Earth. That way.
Just like his father. And I saw in that moment that, of course, Boyce was the one used to hold his hand on his hip, and I knew then too what I’d known since Roger was a child and held his hand on his hip in just that way, tilted his head when he’d had enough of me and wanted that third cookie or to ride his bike one more time around the block: It was his father I was watching, or might as well have been. Boyce. Him, in my son.
I live outside Orlando in a huge apartment complex not a mile from the airport. There’s a pool there, a Jacuzzi hot tub, a sand volleyball court, barbecue pits, et cetera. The apartment itself is a small thing, a single bedroom and a bathroom, a kitchen and living room, all of it painted white once a year by the real estate company that owns the entire operation. There’s a garage, too, one of a hundred in a long row set apart from the apartments themselves, and I sometimes forget which one is mine, just start pressing the garage door opener on my visor once I get close to where I think it ought to be, and look for the one that lifts up. That one’s mine, and I pull in, maybe two feet on either side of the car once I’m in, then pop the door closed on the visor, go out the back door of the garage to a little garden area planted with ivy, and to the front door of the apartment.