by Ruby Lang
She hadn’t expected the pain.
Byron said into her silence, “Your sorry doesn’t get me anything. You need to get rid of this place. I can’t stand to look at it anymore. You want buyers to think they’re going to be able to sit on couches and watch Oprah and do macramé and drink their fancy coffee while they feel good about their lives, or whatever you people do with your time, fine. But this house doesn’t need any more memories. You need to get in a good offer by the end of September or else I’ll take it to someone else.”
He sat down heavily in one of the dining room chairs. Magda wanted to do the same.
Instead, she went to the kitchen and brought him back a glass of water. She watched him drink it.
It wasn’t the time to argue with him, no matter how frustrated and sad and scared she was.
“Uncle Byron, can I get anything else for you?”
“I want to go back to my hotel. It’s in Midtown.”
“I’ll call you a cab.”
“No, I’ll take the subway,” he said sharply.
“Are you sure? I can—”
“I’ve been riding the subway longer than you’ve had all that hair on your head, girl.”
“Let me walk you to the station.”
“I know where it is.”
“I know you know! I know you lived here most of your life. That you know this house, this neighborhood. But it’s hot out and I want to make sure that you’re okay. All right? Let me do this.”
Byron huffed out a breath and said something about interfering women. But he rose to his feet heavily and waited while Magda fetched another bottle of water. He grumbled under his breath while Magda punched the code to lock the house. (A system he’d insisted on installing, Magda thought, although she said nothing.) They walked out into the hot, August air, slowly. Byron led the way, and, of course, inevitably, he chose the route that went past the garden.
Magda felt sweaty and self-conscious. Her hair was probably frizzing. She hadn’t stopped by too often since the debacle with Cool Amanda, the developer.
She should have pushed Byron past quickly; she didn’t need the two main disasters of her life to collide. They’d probably cause a third, even bigger catastrophe, and she didn’t want to be responsible for a giant hole in the space-time continuum in the middle of Harlem. Think of what it would do to the property prices. But Byron couldn’t be steered and, of course, like a bee to a flower—lots of flowers, actually—Byron was drawn.
There were signs up.
Byron knew how to strike at the heart of her, especially when he wasn’t trying. “SAVE THE GARDEN BLOCK PARTY,” he read out loud. “136th STREET GARDEN NEEDS YOU.”
He turned to Magda.
“There’s a link for a GoFundMe. Any idea what this is? Where did this garden come from? Why does it need saving? Looks fine to me.”
She was tempted to say she had no idea what it was. But no, she had to be honest.
She stood up straight. “They’re saving it from me.”
Byron looked at her for a moment.
He snorted. “Don’t be dramatic. You’re grown up and you wear a suit. Doesn’t mean you’re Godzilla.”
“She’s the one selling it,” Tyson Yang piped up, coming up the garden path.
Magda snapped, “It’s the middle of the afternoon. Don’t you have work to do? Or does CPA stand for chartered professional asshole?”
“Magda Ferrer, you watch your language.”
“It’s okay,” Ty said. “It really should be certified public asshole. Besides, she’s called me worse.”
She hadn’t. But if they argued she might come up with something.
Byron wasn’t paying attention to either of them anymore. He walked forward, into the garden, as if hypnotized. “There used to be a house here. Red brick. I know this place. Why is this familiar?”
Magda did not want to follow. “You don’t live that far away—or you didn’t used to.”
Tyson glanced at her sharply, then at her uncle.
His mouth formed an O. Then his face softened. He moved closer to her. “Your uncle who owns the house.”
Ty remembered.
“Yeah.”
“Is he okay? Are you all right? You both look tired.”
She wanted to laugh. “It’s been a hard day for him.”
“The house must hold a lot of memories.”
“This whole neighborhood, it seems.”
Byron was making his way slowly into the garden. She and Ty watched him for a minute in silence.
“I’m frustrated with him. But he’s so lost without my aunt. Even after all these years.”
Another pause. Then Ty said, “Same thing happening with my dad. After my mom died, he became angry and aimless. It was like he forgot how to connect to people. Not even his children could anchor him.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Let’s be thankful he’s not living here. My sister says he moved back to Taiwan so he could be an asshole to everyone in a language he’s comfortable in.”
Magda couldn’t help laughing. “My mother and sisters definitely say all the good stuff in Spanish.”
“You don’t?”
“I speak, but not as fluently. I’m younger than my sisters. I went to different schools from them. My mom and sisters correct me a lot, or don’t wait for me to finish sentences, which makes it harder to talk to them. I love my family and the language and I’m proud to be Boricua. I wish I spoke Spanish better, but I realize they'd treat me that way no matter what language I used.”
“I get it. If you can’t express yourself with the range and fluency, then it can feel like you don’t have any power. I speak a little more Mandarin and Taiwanese than my sister, but the subjects I’m most comfortable with are food, and old people’s health, or at least agreeing everything is bad. It’s not like I could have a discussion about I don’t know—”
“Gardening and being an accountant?”
“My only personality traits.”
“I’ve gotten to know you well.”
He slanted a glance at her and she shivered.
She was the first to look away.
With impeccable timing Uncle Byron came back and interrupted the moment.
“Why didn’t anyone try to save the house that used to be here?” he asked, hands on hips.
“Did you know the previous residents, uncle?”
“I don’t remember. You’d think I’d be able to recall an entire solid brick building on a block I walked down my whole life.”
“It was an empty lot for a pretty long time,” Tyson said. “At least ten years. Long before my time.”
Byron rolled his eyes. “The young sure do like to remind old people they’re old.”
“I’m not that young, and you don’t seem past your prime, yet.”
“Didn’t Magda tell you? Talking pretty to me doesn’t work. Besides, what I want to know is what used to be here and what happened to the building.”
“I could ask Mrs. Espinosa. She’s lived on the block for at least thirty years. But this garden has been thriving here for three, thanks to the hard work of people in the neighborhood. We really made something beautiful here, which is why we want to save it.”
“You shouldn’t try to give me the hard sell on your causes, young man. Especially when what you’re peddling seems to be a bunch of socialist vegetables.”
“All that hippie-dippy shared work makes the crops sweeter, sir.”
Byron raised an eyebrow and turned to Magda. “Your young man has a mouth on him.”
* * *
“Your young man has a mouth on him.”
Ty was beginning to like being this dirtbag who’d tendered his resignation without the prospect of another job in sight.
He’d quit his job! Well, effective two
months from now.
And he’d taken a day off in the middle of the week because he felt like it and because he had to use his accumulated time off. He’d turned into a person who had so many texts that he had to block off times during the day when he could answer them, like when Mrs. Espinosa was all-caps excited because she’d learned a lot from her three-day grant-writing workshop and when Mr. S had waylaid their city council member into talking to the Parks Department.
Ty had turned into someone devil-may-care, someone who had a cause and allies, and a nemesis—a pretty one, no less.
Of course, if Magda were truly his nemesis, he probably wouldn’t be thrilled that she hadn’t bothered to correct her uncle when he’d called Ty her young man.
And if they were mortal enemies, he probably wouldn’t be considering getting a T-shirt—two, one for him, one for her—that read, Certified Public Asshole. He’d also spent time getting Save 136th Garden gear made lately. Maybe she’d want some of that, too. He could make up a whole gift package.
Clearly, he had to work on this nemesis thing a little more if he was contemplating sending his enemy free stuff. Jenny would probably laugh at him for being pathetic. Trust Ty to try to give a present to the person he’s supposed to hate.
Then again, Jenny said she envied him, and he was enough of the stodgy older brother that he was thrilled his cooler, badass sibling admired him. But he was also torn up about it. He had known she’d been dissatisfied with her job, with her relationships, with everything. It was how he’d felt, too. The restlessness, the grief, had been part of both their lives for so long since his mother had died. He hadn’t seen it for what it was. A certain numbness had become normal for him, and for his sister. And while he was sad he hadn’t perceived it in himself, he felt worse that he hadn’t detected it in her. It wasn’t that he could really protect her from hurt, but he’d loved her, ever since she’d been a red-faced bundle brought home from the hospital, ever since he’d had to learn exactly how tightly and carefully to hold her, and later he’d learned how to let go when she didn’t want to be carried.
Jenny was right. It was time for a change. For both of them. He would stick around to make sure the gardeners raised more money, of course. But there was nothing else really keeping him here. He was to find a job elsewhere, get rid of his apartment, start a new, uncomplicated life.
He watched Magda and Byron picking their way through the garden and a sharp pang went through him.
Okay. Yes. While he didn’t consider the gardeners his best friends, he would miss everyone. He would even miss battling with Magda, hoping, waiting to see her every time he put down his tools. He would miss that cocktail of expectation and anxiety that stirred up in him every time he saw her walking toward him.
Magda and Byron left the garden shortly afterward, and Ty repaired the wire fences that kept the rats and squirrels, and possibly raccoons—there’d been a Tweet from the city sanitation department about them—out of the gardeners’ precious tomatoes. He thought he’d heard the last of Magda’s uncle. But later that night, someone named Byron Jackson left a hefty donation to the garden’s GoFundMe. It could have been a coincidence. People from all over were contributing. But Ty’s suspicions seemed to be confirmed by the message the donor left: This better have gone through because I’m not entering all my numbers into these boxes again.
* * *
The next week, Magda brought another potential buyer into the garden.
It was a stiflingly hot day—at least a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and Ty didn’t even want to think about the heat index. He’d tried to send most of the seniors home, promising he’d come back later in the evening to water their plots. But Mrs. Freeman had left a cooler full of drinks in the shaded corner near the shed. A group of kids was working in the back area, supervised by elderly Ms. Mosley, who at least had agreed to sit on a lawn chair, a hat protecting her finely wrinkled brown face. But the teens seemed subdued, poking sullenly at their panel. It was hard even for 136th Street to be magical. There were no breezes to make the leaves ripple invitingly. The brightness of the flowers seemed dimmed by the sun’s relentless light. Worse, their combined forces couldn’t combat the smell of New York City at the height of summer.
Into that walked Magda, tense and upright, a wavy dark line in the heat, along with her latest client. She was in the suit again. He was surprised she kept wearing the outfit because despite the short sleeves of the jacket it looked far too hot for a day like today. Maybe it held her up, held her in. It steeled her to whatever it was they would find here.
The woman beside her fanned herself.
No one went up to say hello.
Maybe it was the weather, or maybe it was Magda and the buyer, but the atmosphere seemed too stifling. Ty dropped back and watched them. This buyer seemed serious. She took a lot of pictures, including photos of the signs they’d put up, and thumbed notes on her iPhone. When she had a question for Magda, she asked in whispers.
Somehow, that seemed a lot more ominous.
It was eighty-year-old Ms. Mosley who started the heckling. “We don’t want a building here!”
“No building!” shouted a couple of the teens.
“No building! No war! We don’t want it anymore!”
Ty wasn’t sure what current battle they referred to, but he couldn’t really argue with any of those sentiments.
Magda was approaching, saying calmly, “If the gardeners come to me with an offer, then I will present it to the seller.”
“How can we trust you to do that?”
“No building, no war!”
“I’m required to present all reasonable, good-faith offers to the seller by law. But also, I want to. If you can come up with the money, then I will help you.”
Ms. Mosley waved her away.
The buyer said quietly, “We should go.”
“No building!”
They were walking away. Everything was fine. It had only been a couple of minutes.
Then Ty saw Mrs. M get up. She shook aside the wire Ty had put up, stood, and pulled her arm back. She had something in her hand.
Rather than thinking, Ty reacted.
He dove in the missile’s path, felt the shocking wet splat of it against his shoulder, the yielding of Magda’s stiff suit as he brushed past her and fell to the ground.
“Ty, are you all right?”
He breathed.
He sat up and grimaced.
“I’m fine. It’s just messy.”
It was a tomato.
And judging by how juicy the damn thing was—it was seeping through his shirt, and parts of it were tricking down his collar—it had been a good tomato. Probably heirloom.
God, he’d learned enough about gardening to know this.
Magda had dropped to her knees. She was hovering right over him. He looked up into her eyes as she stared down at him and for a moment they breathed together.
He’d saved her from a tomato thrown by an elderly woman—one with a good arm.
He was not going to laugh. And judging by the tremble of her mouth, she was struggling not to either.
Why, of all people, did he have to share all this sense of humor, all of this understanding, all of these moments, with her?
He saw as she took another deep, calming breath—smoothing the humor out of her face—and surreptitiously checked her suit. It struck him suddenly that maybe she didn’t have another. But that was ridiculous, wasn’t it? Surely she could afford more than one or two suits? He shouldn’t make himself out to be more of a hero than he was.
The buyer was watching them, still curiously detached from the scene.
Tyson scrambled up.
“I’m so sorry,” Magda began. She turned from him to her client and back again as if she didn’t know where to start.
“It’s fine,” he and the woman said at the same time.
He let it go—let her go—and watched as they left the garden, much more quickly this time. He kept watching as they moved out of sight.
Mrs. Mosley was sitting again. She seemed quite proud of herself. The kids clustered around her and Ty made his way cautiously up to them.
“Mr. Yang! You’re bleeding.”
Ty picked some tomato pulp off of his shoulder and said, “First blood in the garden battle belongs to you, Ms. Mosley.”
It wouldn’t set a great example for the kids if he burst into laughter, he reminded himself. But also, he should probably say something about choosing how to protest? It wasn’t like he knew any better himself.
Luckily, one of the teens, David, was already considering the numerous consequences of Ms. Mosley’s move. He inspected the mess on Ty’s shoulder, saying, “Da-ang, Ms. Freeman’s going to kill you, Ms. M. You grabbed one of her tomatoes.”
“I think it was an heirloom,” Hector added.
“Okay,” Ty said, trying to get people back on track, “while protesting is genuinely great as long as you do it safely and talk to your folks, I guess”—he was floundering—“maybe throwing tomatoes at a person who can also help us isn’t the best idea? Also, if you’re going to start throwing things at people and risk being charged with assault”—he made sure all the kids heard that part—“then, maybe instead of grabbing the precious tomatoes, you should consider throwing a zucchini. Because we’ve got way more of those.”
No one was listening to him. Ms. Mosley’s eyes gleamed. “Still got it,” she said, shaking her arm.
“Living your best life, Ms. M!”
Ty sighed. Maybe they were right. It was hard to tell. It was not supposed to be his problem. He should walk away.
Chapter Eight
Later That Day
Magda was in the townhouse when she heard the buzzer. It was Ty, holding his palms up to the camera in the I come in peace stance.
Magda hadn’t been expecting him—especially because of what had happened earlier, but she was perversely glad to see him. He’d saved her—or at least, her potential buyer, or the buyer’s suit. Magda had taken off her own short-sleeved jacket and was considering putting on the workout clothing she’d toted from Brooklyn. She didn’t have any more appointments today, but she needed to clean plaster dust off the floors because of the repairs to the second-floor bathroom and polish the dining room table before she could make her way to the subway. Even then, it would be a long time before she’d make it back home to her apartment, judging by how slowly the trains were running in this hot weather.