Hyacinth looked out at the line of people entering the church, and a wave of sadness fell over her at the thought of not knowing much about Mr. Jeet. So much of their time together had been spent with Hyacinth telling Mr. Jeet about her day or answering his questions. Later, after his strokes, there’d been less talking and more just sitting together in a contented silence. She wished she could turn back time and ask him to tell her more stories about his life. Seeing all the unfamiliar faces made her feel farther away from him than ever.
Since Mama and Papa were involved in organizing the funeral, the Vanderbeekers could enter through the service door at the back of the church, which meant they didn’t have to get in line. They found Miss Josie at the front of the church, shaking hand after hand and responding to person after person coming up to her saying, “I’m sorry” or “We’ll miss him” or “He lived a good life.” Not too long after that, people were seated and the service began. The Vanderbeekers were asked to sit in the front row with Miss Josie and Orlando, but Hyacinth wished she were in the back. She felt hundreds of eyes staring at the back of her head.
A big photograph of Mr. Jeet was on an easel just a few feet away from them, so Hyacinth had plenty of time during the service to stare at every detail. The photo must have been taken before she had known him. He was impeccably dressed in a white button-down with thin gray stripes and a jaunty peacock-blue bow tie, but his face was smoother and he didn’t have as many eye crinkles.
The service was long, with a lot of talking, and she was glad for the times the gospel choir stood and sang, their beautiful burgundy robes swirling around their ankles. Their rich voices soared through the church, bouncing off the domed ceiling. They sang “Amazing Grace,” followed by “Trouble of This World.” Finally, when the service was about to end, they finished with a song called “I Wanna Be Ready” that Hyacinth remembered hearing in a video her teacher had shown at school. It was a performance by a dance company started by a man named Alvin Ailey. They had a piece called Revelations that was the most beautiful thing Hyacinth had ever seen.
Before the service ended, Triple J announced that a garden party in honor of Mr. Jeet would follow next door and everyone was invited to join his family and friends as they celebrated his life.
Over the weekend, the Vanderbeekers had gone around to local businesses to let them know about the funeral and garden celebration. They had seen many of the people who worked in their neighborhood in the service, but when they walked next door to the garden to help Mama put out cookies, they were surprised to see that many of the people who worked at the local restaurants had also brought food. There was so much that Oliver and Orlando and Angie and Jessie returned to the church to lug more tables into the garden. Isa, Mama, Hyacinth, and Laney sorted through the food and set it out on big platters from the church kitchen. There were dozens of cheese croissants and apple turnovers from Castleman’s Bakery, boxes upon boxes of fried chicken from Kennedy’s Fried Chicken, a mountain of biscuits and strawberry butter from a local breakfast place, and pots of coffee and hot water for tea from Harlem Coffee.
After the food was set up, Jessie pulled out Miss Josie’s turntable and Orlando connected it to large speakers, and Jessie put on Mr. Jeet’s favorite Ella Fitzgerald record. The Vanderbeekers sat behind a table with a big sign that said “Share a Memory.” They had cut thick strips of fabric in a rainbow of colors and put out cups filled with fabric markers. People were asked to write one sentence of their favorite Mr. Jeet memories on the fabric and tie it on the chainlink fence at the entrance to the garden.
Hyacinth felt shy at the thought of talking to hundreds of strangers, but as people came to the table and asked about the project, she saw their smiling faces and remembered that they were all connected because of Mr. Jeet. Once she explained the project, people were eager to write their memories down. Afterward, they would tell the longer versions to the Vanderbeekers.
“Are you the Vanderbeekers?” a woman asked when she and her husband stopped by the table.
“We are,” Laney said, her chest puffing out.
“Oh, we’ve heard so much about you!” the woman said, then looked at her husband. “These are the kids that Mr. Jeet talked about all the time.” She turned back to the kids. “My father grew up with him in Georgia, and whenever Mr. Jeet came to visit, he would show us photos and tell stories about your family. He was like a proud grandfather.”
“Is your dad here?” Laney asked, looking around at the packed garden.
“My father passed away a few years ago,” the woman told them. “But he had a long and wonderful career in the Georgia state senate.” She went on to talk about how her father and Mr. Jeet had gone to college together at Savannah State University and had been involved with a group who wanted to bring attention to the lack of voting rights in Alabama.
And that is how the Vanderbeekers learned something entirely new about Mr. Jeet. When he’d been in college, he was one of the hundreds of people who, when marching from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights, were brutally confronted by state and local lawmen on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on March 7, 1965.
“Did Mr. Jeet get hurt?” Oliver asked, his eyes wide with this new revelation of Mr. Jeet as a young man.
“No, he and my dad were at the back of the march and were able to get off the bridge quickly,” she said. “I have a photo of them from college. Hold on.” She took out her phone and scrolled through the photos. “Ah, here it is.” She passed the phone to the Vanderbeekers and they huddled around it, staring at a black-and-white photo of a young, dapper version of Mr. Jeet, his spine straight and his eyes sparkling. Even back then, he wore a bow tie. He stood with his friend, their arms slung around each other’s shoulders, the logo of Savannah State College looming behind them.
“He adored you all,” she said to the Vanderbeekers before she and her husband went off to tie their fabric pieces to the chainlink fence. “You gave him so much joy and kept him young.”
Buoyed by this encounter, the Vanderbeekers greeted the next people who visited the table. They were gardeners Mr. Jeet had worked with at the New York Botanical Garden.
“Oh, I remember you! You’re the Vanderbeekers!” everyone said when they introduced themselves. “We remember you from his retirement party. Of course, there were only three of you back then,” they said while looking at the three older kids.
“He spoke of you like you were his grandkids,” one of them said. “He showed us photos of you all the time.”
The Vanderbeekers soaked up the stories of Mr. Jeet, and then the gardeners wrote their memories on strips of fabric. “His hands were like magic with the plants” and “He loved the garden” and “He treasured every living thing.” Then they complimented the Vanderbeekers on their work on the community garden, admired the lavender maze, which played classical music when people walked through it, and gave Jessie and Orlando advice on irrigation and how to create the perfect environment for making compost. Laney and Hyacinth had lots of questions about tomatoes; they had tried growing them that summer and ended up with huge tangles of vines and bugs and no tomatoes at all. The gardeners shared their best tomato tips (of which there were a lot, sometimes contradictory, which set off a debate about pruning and whether the addition of an Epsom-salt blend while watering made a difference or not).
After that, they met people who had lived in the neighborhood back when Papa was growing up and had since moved out of the city. They shared memories about how Mr. Jeet would sit outside on the brownstone stoop in the evenings and chat with people coming home from work. He would take post-dinner walks in the summer, occasionally joining a group of teens for a game of basketball or helping a family carry furniture up the stairs to their new apartment. People called him the mayor of 141st Street.
Eventually the emotions that Hyacinth had harbored during the beginning of the funeral began to change. Instead of feeling as if she didn’t really know Mr. Jeet, she realized that he had always been the same pe
rson she’d known him to be, even though he had lived a whole lifetime before she was even born. And that knowledge filled a little of that lonely place in her heart that had been missing him so desperately.
Twenty-One
Jessie was pulled away from the memory table to help Mama with the food, and as she loaded more fried chicken onto a platter, she caught sight of Orlando surrounded by a group of people she had never met. Curious but not wanting to interrupt, she strolled past the group in hopes of overhearing their conversation.
“We miss you,” said a woman who looked very much like Miss Josie.
“The football team stinks without you,” said a boy who looked about their age.
“It’s so cold here,” a woman wearing bold purple glasses commented, pulling her jacket closer around her. “It was seventy-two degrees when we left Georgia.”
“When your mom comes back,” another lady said, “you know she’ll be in Georgia. She never did like the big city.”
“Why’d you leave, anyway?” the boy asked. “You had a good job at the farm stand, you were all set to play quarterback, and you know Grandma makes the best Southern food in the county. Honestly, I can’t see you staying here. It’s so . . . dirty. And crowded.”
“I like it here,” Orlando said. “It doesn’t seem dirty to me.
But Jessie noticed that his voice didn’t have much energy behind it. Did he seem resigned? Jessie wondered if part of it was the grief of still not hearing from his mom or because Mr. Jeet was gone. Either way, she felt as if her best friend was slipping away and there was nothing she could do about it.
She got ready to keep moving past Orlando and his Georgia fan club—Mama still needed help with the food—but Orlando caught sight of her and called out her name. She made her way to him, lifting her hand in an awkward wave.
“Who are you?” asked the teen, squinting at her suspiciously.
“Who are you?” Jessie shot back, already annoyed by him.
“This is Jessie Vanderbeeker,” Orlando explained, and everyone in the group said “Ahhh” in a way that let her know this was not the first time they had heard her name.
“You live in the brownstone,” the teen said knowledgeably. “You’re the science nerd.”
Orlando quickly interjected, “I think we prefer the term ‘science expert.’”
Jessie was unbothered by the comment. She was a science nerd; who cared?
“We’ve heard so much about you,” said the woman who looked like Miss Josie. “I’m Miss Josie’s sister, Orlando’s other great-aunt. You can call me Aunt Jolene.”
“Nice to meet you, Aunt Jolene,” Jessie said, holding out her hand.
“Nice to meet you as well,” she said, smiling.
Miss Josie came by the group, kissing everyone on the cheek and getting her freshly applied lipstick on them. The teen rubbed it off vigorously.
“Orlando, would you grab me a cup of water, please?” Miss Josie asked.
“I’ll go with you,” Jessie said hurriedly.
“Me too,” said the teen.
Jessie sighed; she really didn’t like that guy and was hoping for some time with Orlando without crowds of people.
“I’m Jackson,” the boy said as they made their way to the drinks table. “I’m Orlando’s best friend.”
Jessie wanted to clarify that she was Orlando’s best friend and had been for years, but before she could say a word, Orlando bumped her elbow.
“Are you hungry?” he asked her before turning to Jackson. “This fried chicken is so good.”
Jackson plucked a piece off the platter and took a bite. “It’s okay. Can’t compare to Aunt Jolene’s cooking, that’s for sure.”
“That’s for sure,” Orlando agreed, but he took another bite of the chicken anyway. He didn’t seem bothered by the subpar-chicken-that-was-not-made-by-Aunt-Jolene.
“Jessie’s mom owns the local cookie café,” Orlando said to Jackson. “Best cookies ever. It got written up in a bunch of magazines. There’s a table full of her cookies over there.” Orlando pointed to the table, which was covered by a blue floral tablecloth.
Jackson eyed Jessie, then looked away. “Yeah, I’m not that hungry. Hey, so when are you coming back to Georgia? We sure could use your throwing arm. Team’s not the same without you.”
Orlando shook his head. “I haven’t decided what I’m going to do yet.”
Jessie breathed a sigh of relief, but Jackson continued to probe.
“What do you mean, you haven’t decided? You want to stay here? The land of no football? No decent fried chicken?”
“This is a very nice neighborhood, thank you very much,” Jessie said, glaring at Jackson. “Orlando is on the cross-country team, and he’s going to help Mr. Beiderman run the New York City Marathon.”
“Cross-country?” Jackson scoffed. “Now, that just sounds boring. Where’s the strategy? Where’s the teamwork?”
“There’s strategy and teamwork,” Orlando said.
“I’d like to see you run as far and as fast as Orlando can run,” Jessie said. “Cross-country is really hard.”
Jackson shook his head as if questioning whether Orlando was even worth knowing anymore.
“You need to come home,” Jackson said. “Everyone misses you.”
“I miss being down there too,” Orlando said. “Like I said, I’m still thinking about it.”
Jessie wanted to put in a good word about Harlem. But when she thought about what Orlando had told her about Georgia, about the huge football fields with perfectly trimmed grass and the big sky that surrounded them, she wondered how the little patch of grass that they called a garden could even compare. It must seem so puny and claustrophobic. And their skinny brownstone, where Orlando didn’t even have his own bedroom? Jessie wouldn’t blame him for choosing Georgia and football and his relatives over loud, polluted, crowded New York City.
And that left Jessie with more of an ache in her heart. Her time with Orlando was coming to an end.
By the time they’d gotten Miss Josie her water, the party was winding down. People were heading back to their cars or to the subway or bus, and Jessie stepped outside the garden to take a breath. The thought of losing yet another person she loved was too overwhelming to bear. She wrapped her arms around her stomach and wished she could visit Mr. Jeet just like she had done thousands of times in the past decade. Mr. Jeet always knew how to make her feel better when she was having a bad day.
An unexpected wind whipped down 141st Street, and Jessie pulled her jacket closer around her and zipped it up. A rustling noise made her pause; it wasn’t the usual sound of cars rolling over autumn leaves down the street. She turned her head and found the source: it was the sound of hundreds of fabric strips snapping in the wind.
The fabric rippled like river rapids, but she still could see words here and there. Words like “laughter” and “warm” and “strong” and “curious.” And she stood there, watching the fence and all those Mr. Jeet memories, the wind and the words washing over her, whispering over and over that everything would be okay.
Tuesday, October 29
Five Days Until the New York City Marathon
Twenty-Two
Mama and Papa had given the kids a choice about going to school the day after the funeral. Surprisingly, everyone decided to go. They had been absent since the previous Thursday, and they couldn’t imagine just sitting in the brownstone thinking about how one person was missing.
It was one of those mornings when everything felt heavy, as if it took twice as much energy as usual to move. Clouds were so thick and gray that they seemed to weigh down the city with gloom. The Vanderbeekers dragged themselves out of bed and through the familiar routine of making their beds, brushing their teeth, changing, and sitting down for breakfast.
“The offer stands; you can stay home an extra day.” Mama looked at her kids in concern.
“I think that’s a good idea,” Papa said. “We can play board games!”
; “Ugh,” Oliver responded. It was the first sound he had made since waking up.
“I’m not going to take that personally,” Papa said.
“You shouldn’t,” Mama said, patting his shoulder. “Although it wouldn’t hurt if you let the kids win at Bananagrams once in a while.”
“Seriously,” Jessie muttered under her breath. “So competitive.”
Oliver stood up. “I’ve got to go. Coach Mendoza is having early basketball practice.”
“I missed a test and two quizzes yesterday,” Jessie said. “I’m going to get more behind if I stay home.”
The kids gathered up their things and headed out the door. A fierce wind dipped in and slammed the door shut behind them, and the brownstone gave a sigh as they disappeared down the street.
* * *
Hyacinth was so sad about Mr. Jeet that she didn’t even think about having to go in early and wait in the cafeteria. She had brought her knitting; it always helped to keep her hands busy. She had started a blanket for Orlando, and with the weather getting colder, she wanted to get it done quickly. She hoped to finish it by the marathon.
Without even bothering to see who was also at the third-grade table, Hyacinth sat down and pulled her knitting bag from her backpack. Her plan was to make a patchwork of squares in various colors that she would then sew together so it would end up looking like a quilt. She liked the idea of a quilt; her mom had made her a baby quilt when she was born that Hyacinth still slept with, despite the frayed edges and the batting having mostly disappeared after hundreds of washings. Quilts always made a place feel like home.
Hyacinth had calculated how many squares she’d need before she started to knit. She needed seventy total and had completed eighteen so far, and Herman had pitched in and made ten. Each square was eight by eight inches, and she’d determined that she needed seven squares across and ten squares down so it would be big enough for Orlando, who was six feet tall. That left forty-two squares to complete. Herman would help, but he had a lot more homework in sixth grade and less time for knitting these days.
The Vanderbeekers Lost and Found Page 11