Buried Seeds

by Donna Meredith

  That night I research bladder cancer on the Internet. If all goes well, the surgery is relatively non-invasive and she should recover quickly. The germ treatment, called Bacillus Calmette-Guerin, appears standard; it activates the body’s immune system to fight any cancer cells remaining after surgery. The prognosis is good, thank God. She will be all right. She has to be.

  ~~~

  It is the first day of my Christmas break, so I am in a great mood as I drop a poinsettia by Rebecca’s house. She is home and doing well, though she will not be back at school any time soon, she tells me over a cup of hot chocolate.

  “Chad wants me to take the next semester off. Which means AFT will be your baby for the rest of the year. Is that okay?”

  “Definitely. What are friends for?”

  “I’m still going to come to some meetings once I get better, but I don’t want the stress of being in charge.”

  “Got you covered. You concentrate on getting well.” I promise to bring over a batch of Christmas cookies for her kids later in the week. I can’t help but wonder what happens to her health insurance if she takes the semester off, but she explains she’s covered by Chad’s. Lucky for her.

  On the drive home, I catch a red light by the Robinson Grand Theater. It has been more than restored; it is grander than it ever was in my childhood. A beautiful, Broadway-worthy building. Th e marquee advertises a production of “The Nutcracker.” It’s been many long years since I’ve seen a ballet. I can imagine the lovely dancers floating across the stage. Clara and the Land of the Sweets. The Sugar Plum Fairy. And my favorite, Mother Ginger with the horde of children scurrying from beneath her skirt. Dewey would opt for a root canal over going to the ballet, but I could see if Trish would like a night out. The light changes and I drive on. The uncertain state of our finances dispels my daydream. This is not the year for indulgences. Maybe next year things will be better.

  At home, I set a pair of ruby-red poinsettias on either side of the fireplace hearth, a ritual I’ve carried out ever since we moved into this house. I hang red felt stockings along the mantel. It’s beginning to look like Christmas!

  Later I drag our artificial tree out of the garage and pull boxes of decorations from the attic. While the Carpenters Christmas album plays in the background, I shake out the tree’s limbs. The musty odors make me sneeze. Twice. The old thing looks rather wretched and raggedy. “Once the ornaments are hung, it will look fine,” I say aloud even though no one is around to hear. I begin unwrapping treasures from folds of tissue paper. A photo of Trish pasted on a tree-shaped piece of green felt, an ornament she’d made in kindergarten. I slide its twist of pipe cleaner over a limb. Next is a carved wooden moose Mom and Poppy had brought back from Alaska, and then gifts from Trish, a miniature lawnmower for Dewey and a tiny garden spade lying in front of tulips for me. The most delicate and time-consuming to unwrap are the old-world glass bulbs passed down from grandparents. My heart overflows with memories.

  One look at Dewey as he comes through the front door tells me something’s wrong. “Bad day?” I ask.

  He angles straight for the refrigerator without stopping to remove his wool sport coat. I hear the familiar pop as a beer can is opened. He returns to the family room and drops into the couch cushions like a stone. As seconds pass, my heartbeat escalates.

  When he finally answers, he avoids looking at me. “Worse than bad.”

  I sink down beside him and place my hand on his knee. I notice I’ve ironed parallel creases down one leg of his khakis. I feel I have failed him by adding one more imperfection to his day, though I doubt he even noticed the dual creases.

  He slugs down almost half the contents of the can and then lowers it to rest on his right knee. “I laid off the last of my crew.” He laughs mirthlessly. “I have now joined the ranks of the unemployed.”

  “Oh, Dew, I’m sorry.” We knew this was coming, but the timing just before Christmas lands like a gut punch.

  He finishes off the beer and muffles a burp. The way he is fidgeting alarms me.

  “Look, I shouldn’t have kept this from you, but two weeks ago, I called Ted and asked if he could get us the loan. He hemmed and hawed, didn’t say yes, didn’t say no. I didn’t see what harm it could do.”

  I clench my teeth. He wouldn’t—because I’d kept things from him as well, so how mad could I get? But I am mad. Spitting mad.

  “What did Ted say?”

  “He’d get back to me and he didn’t, so I called your sister today to see if she could twist his arm a little.”

  I get up and fetch him another beer and grab one for myself too. Damn it, I told him it wasn’t a good idea and he has gone and done it anyway. I sit down beside him again and take a sip of beer to calm myself. Even without Ted’s and my hidden history, without their suspected marital problems, I wouldn’t willingly ask my sister for anything. Ever. Especially money.

  “I’m surprised she took your call. She lets mine go to voicemail. What did she say?”

  Dewey scrunches up his mouth. “That she can’t help us.” He sets the beer I brought down on the coffee table, untouched. “Mac didn’t exactly say so, but I get the impression she and Ted are having trouble.”

  “I told you that might be the case when we got her Christmas card last week.” My sister has always done family photo cards with a two- or three-page typed letter of all their accomplishments. This year’s card—generic variety you can buy at the drugstore. No letter.

  I push down my anger. It is only getting in the way of the important decisions we have to make. I’ve been thinking about our options for a while now, and only one seems feasible. “Maybe we should sell the house and move in with Mom and Poppy. Just for a while until you get another job or we figure out something better.”

  He bends his torso forward, hands clasped between his knees. His thumbs worry against each other, picking at the cuticles. “There’s a job I could have tomorrow if I wanted it.”

  “It’s not a good position?”

  “Actually, it’s a great position. One of my old college friends owns a commercial construction firm. He wants to groom me to take over financial management when the current fellow retires.”

  “Sounds like a great opportunity, so what’s the catch?”

  “The firm’s in D.C.”

  I deposit my beer beside his on the coffee table. One more sip and I might vomit.

  “Oh no, Dew. Visiting Washington once or twice for the museums and history is fine, but the whole idea living there totally creeps me out. I just don’t think I could deal with the traffic, the high rises, all that asphalt and concrete.” Would he really consider leaving Trish and Bella just when they needed us most? We wouldn’t be here to help Mom with Poppy either.

  “I don’t want to live there any more than you do.” Dewey sighs. “Guess we could move out to the farm, temporarily. It would get the mortgage off our backs. How would your mom feel about it?”

  “You kidding? She gets a whiff of this and she’ll be over here packing up the moving truck.”

  “We wouldn’t be total freeloaders. I could help take care of Poppy and fix things up around the farm.”

  I lean over to kiss his cheek. “You’re the best fixer-upper ever, Dew. Mom definitely could use our help.”

  One person down; a few more to persuade.

  Dewey read my mind. “What about Trish and the baby?”

  They were supposed to move in with us right after Christmas. Four generations under one old farmhouse roof—what could possibly go wrong? I call Mom first, and she is ecstatic.

  “I’ve been so afraid I’d have to put Ham in a nursing home,” she says. “It’s getting really hard for me to manage him on my own.”

  When I phone Trish that evening, she says she’s okay with the change in plans.

  “Have you talked to your aunt lately?” I ask. Dewey’s not always that astute at reading people, so if he noticed something amiss, MacKenzie must be a mess.

  Trish hasn’t talked
to Mac, but she promises to check her online sources.

  “I’ve already checked Facebook and everything on Mac’s page looks normal,” I say.

  “There’s a lot of other places to look. Give me a few secs.” She disconnects.

  Fifteen minutes later, Trish calls me back.

  “Mom, you aren’t going to believe this.”

  “What?”

  “No, you gotta see for yourself. I sent you a link. I’ll wait.”

  I boot my laptop and click on the link. I shriek, “Oh my God!”

  Trish snickers. “If you’re calling on God for help, I hope you warn Him to close his eyes.”

  My screech attracts Dewey’s attention. I scoop up my laptop and shut myself and the offending device in the bedroom.

  “Trish, this can’t be Mac. It must be Photoshopped.”

  “I don’t think so. Didn’t she tell you she was playing a lot of tennis?”

  She did, and she bragged about being buff. I had no idea she meant in the buff. Yet the evidence is right there on the screen. Mac and her tennis partner, naked as Adam and Eve in the garden, without a fig leaf anywhere in sight.

  “I’m going to call her.”

  “And say what, Mom?”

  “I’ll ask what in the hell she thinks she’s doing.

  “You should sleep on it.”

  I may never sleep again after seeing my sister on her—I slam the laptop screen down. Try to blank the photo from my mind— reformat my hard drive. No, no, no.

  “I can’t deal with this, Trish.”

  “She can get the photo taken down. It’s called revenge porn— happens to people all the time.”

  “Not to anyone I know.” What a hypocrite my sister’s been! All her holier-than-thou, my-choices-have-been-better-than-yours attitude, just one big load of manure.

  We agree I should take time to consider what I am going to say.

  “But it has to be soon. She has to get that horrible photo taken down. Allison and James will have a heart attack if they see it.” No mother wants her children to think of her—let alone see her—in such a compromising position.

  The baby is crying in the background and Trish has to go.

  Staring at my closed laptop, I debate whether or not to tell Dewey. Finally, I open the bedroom door.

  He pauses the TV show he’s been watching. “You gonna tell me what that was all about?”

  “Can’t.” I inch toward him, the laptop pressed against my waist.

  He shrugs and picks up the remote.

  I sit beside him, open the laptop, and turn the screen so it faces him. He glances over and his eyes pop right out of his head.

  “Holy shee-it!”

  Exactly.

  ~~~

  I leave numerous voicemails on MacKenzie’s cell, but she doesn’t return my calls, even when I tell her it’s an emergency. Finally, I admit I’ve seen the photo and she should contact a professional about getting it wiped out of cyberspace. That is, unless she wants her children or mother or social circle to accidentally stumble onto it.

  Still she doesn’t return my call. I have done all I can.

  It’s not as if I don’t have other business to occupy my time. Before an ad can even be placed in the newspaper, the real estate agent sells our home to a guy who drives water trucks out to fracking sites. As an environmentalist who loves our state’s beauty, I hate the whole idea of hydraulic fracturing and what it is doing to our land and water—but I can appreciate the jobs it brings for some families. Th e week after Christmas whizzes by, a flurry of taking down the tree far earlier than usual, packing boxes, loading trucks, seemingly endless trips back and forth to the farm. We move Trish and the baby into MacKenzie’s old room first. The next day we move ourselves. Leaving the house we’d lived in for two decades proves more emotionally wrenching than I’d anticipated. We’d celebrated Christmas mornings and birthdays in the living room, satisfied our hunger in the kitchen—and other hungers in the bedroom—spilled snacks on nearly all the family room furniture, collected gobs of knickknacks and memories. Many of our belongings get stacked in the barn until we have a place of our own again. I get through the transition by staying busy. I’m scared it will hit me once I have a moment to sit down for a second and think.

  By that time, school is starting up again and we all adjust to new routines. I have to get up earlier in the morning because I no longer have a garage to park my car in. That means scraping ice from the windshield, not to mention a longer drive to work.

  Dewey spends his days fixing up the farmhouse. He replaces ancient electrical wiring. Spreads sheets of insulation in the attic. Weather-strips windows and doors. He takes Poppy with him to the grocery store, doctor’s appointments, the barber shop. Plays “Go Fish” with him so Mom can visit the beauty parlor—a real treat, she says. If Poppy sets off the door alarm in the middle of the night, Dewey intercepts him. Poppy plays Dean Martin CDs constantly—and if it drives me crazy in the evening hours, I can only imagine the effect it is having on Dewey, trapped in the house all day. He drinks beer, more and more, starting earlier and continuing late into the night. I don’t complain. I worry. He needs a paying job but there aren’t many out there.

  Many mornings I go to work half asleep because at Bella’s first miniscule wail, I wake and can’t get back to sleep, an instinctual response to a crying infant I can’t repress. A few weeks pass, cold and dreary, and I wonder as I always do this time of year if I will ever see a blue sky again and if I will ever go outside again without my eyes watering from freezing gusts of wind. The ride to work offers a respite, a few blessed minutes of silence, alone in my own space, no moon hitting my eye with a big pizza pie, no infant wails, no dirty diaper odors. I love my family. I love them better when there are not so many of us crammed into one small space. I love them best when I’ve had a good night’s sleep.

  I am not the only one with sleep deficit. Kev, a first period student who is never a bundle of energy, drags through the door so slowly on Monday, I wonder if he could be stoned—but how likely is that at this hour of the day? I think he’s wearing the same flannel shirt he had on Friday and the day before that. The odors coming off him would embarrass a homeless person. His curly brown hair is unwashed, uncombed, his eyes riddled with red lines—a road map spelling trouble. I make a mental note to find a moment to talk privately with him.

  The tables along one wall are covered with flats of Black-Seeded Simpson lettuce. Every kind of experiment imaginable will be performed on my saved seeds before the year is out. In the past my students sowed seeds in sand and clay. We sowed them on sponges. Students manipulated the pH of the soil with everything from tomato juice and soda pop to powdered limestone and laundry detergent. We played with the temperature and the light—both natural and artificial. We are growing lettuce hydroponically.

  They design their own experiments, and it looks as if one group this morning is hooking up a battery to electrically charge the soil. I move over to quiz Marla about the experimental design, as she is the one taking notes and directing activity. In theory, electrically pulsed soil could affect bacterial action, which could affect plant growth. A cool idea, and it seems to interest everyone in the group. Except Kev. He hangs back, uninvolved. Eventually, he retreats to a desk and lays his head down. It’s not allowed, but I let it slide. Five minutes before the end of class while students are writing results of the day’s work in their science journals, I call him out into the hallway.

  “What’s going on, Kev?”

  His eyes flick away. “Nothing.”

  “I know something’s wrong.”

  “Nothing, just tired.”

  “I’m not buying that. You can talk to me about whatever’s going on, or one of the counselors.”

  “Nothing to talk about.” He shuffles his weight from one foot to the other.

  “Not talking isn’t an option. The choice is in listeners: me or a counselor.”

  In the silence, I can almost see his brain twisting
and wrestling, a push and pull between the desire to unburden himself and the desire to hold in whatever is wrong. He is only fifteen. Whatever it is, he shouldn’t carry the load alone.

  “I haven’t gotten much sleep lately. That’s all.”

  “Hmmm. Why is that?”

  He shrugs. “My dad hasn’t been very happy.”

  “Oh?”

  “Lost his job.”

  Naturally Dewey flashes through my mind, but I’m aware our situation is unique. My mother’s home had empty rooms and she welcomed the help. Dewey feels needed. Is needed. We are lucky, although it doesn’t feel lucky to lose your home when you are fifty years old. And the stress is getting to him, hence the increased beer consumption. Still, it could be worse. Much worse.

  “That’s tough. How’s your dad handling it?”

  Wild rage ignites in Kev’s eyes, overriding tears I sense just below the surface. “He ain’t, he ain’t handling it. Now you happy? Glad you asked?”

  “Yes, I’m glad I asked. I’m worried about you.”

  I understand his reluctance to talk. We are taught to hide our dirty laundry. I don’t know if it’s like that everywhere, but that’s how it is around here. We cope. We make do with what we have. We don’t whine when the last glass company leaves the state or the coal mine shuts down after stripping the hillside of every living thing. We don’t cry when the last mom-and-pop store downtown shutters its windows, or when even Dynamo Deals closes its doors. Instead we let the frackers come in and drill wells beside the grade schools and on the edges of our farms because they promise jobs. We take our college degree in business and wait tables or flip burgers if we have to. We go back to college or a vo-tech school and learn to empty bedpans or take X-rays because people are always going to be sick. Especially if they worked in the mines or drank polluted well water near the fracking sites.