The Vegetable Museum

by Michelle Mulder

  “Tell me you’re not planning to keep the ashes in a vase on the bookshelf,” I say. I’ve heard of people doing this. It’s ten kinds of creepy. “Maybe we can mix them into the soil beneath the apple tree. Isn’t ash good for the soil?”

  “No way,” Dad says.

  “It’s not?”

  “I don’t know. I’m saying, no, we’re not putting the ashes under the apple tree.”

  “Why not? He loved that apple tree. Did you know he—?”

  Dad shakes his head. “I know the whole story, believe me. But I don’t want his ashes there. Someday that house is going to be sold. How are we going to feel if they bulldoze the whole thing, rip out the tree and build something new?”

  “Sold?” I hadn’t thought about that. “I guess you’re right.”

  Dad doesn’t want a memorial service either. He says he’s up to his eyeballs with sorting through Uli’s stuff and talking to lawyers about the will. The last thing he wants is to organize a public event. “My father never went to church anyway. He’d hate the idea of some random preacher up there talking about him.”

  “You’re wimping out,” I say.

  Mom agrees, arguing through the laptop on the kitchen counter. She’s wearing a silvery blouse I don’t recognize and dangly earrings, as if she dressed up for this conversation. Behind her, our houseplants look as brown and droopy as ever. But Mom herself is different. She’s more focused than I’ve seen her in a long time. “Look, Darryl, yes, you had unfinished business with Uli, but this is your last chance. You need to do something to say goodbye.”

  Dad keeps stirring the pot of spaghetti sauce. “But who do I invite? William on fourth? Did he have any other friends?”

  “Dad! Uli lived here for fifty years! He had a garden full of seeds that people gave him. Of course he had other friends!”

  “But I’ve never met any of those people.”

  “You never asked to either,” I snap back. Dad keeps stirring. Mom watches from inside the screen.

  “I bet he had an address book somewhere.”

  “I wouldn’t know where to look,” says Dad. “If you saw his place, you’d know what I mean.”

  “You’ve been in there?” I ask. “Recently?”

  “Yesterday.”

  I spin around, open the fridge and rummage inside so my parents won’t see me scrubbing the tears from my face. All these weeks, I only ever saw Uli’s garden and basement. I never went into his house to have tea with him or to sit around playing a board game. Or to do any of those normal grandparent-grandkid things.

  My parents keep talking. Eventually Dad takes the spoon out of the sauce and puts the lid on the pot. “Okay, okay. We’ll find the address book. I’ll ask William for some ideas about who to invite too.”

  “Let me know when you’ve got a date,” Mom says, “so I can book my flights.”

  “Really?” I almost smile. Almost. It will be good to have Mom here. As if the three of us are a family again, for a few days anyway.

  After that I guess the waiting will be over. It’s finally clear what will happen next—clear out the house, put it up for sale and move back to Montreal for good. It doesn’t make sense to stay now that Uli’s gone, right? I should feel relieved to be heading home. So why do I feel the opposite?

  EIGHT

  The church doesn’t look anything like a church. It’s a yellow house on a quiet residential street—no steeple, no parking lot. Inside, it’s bright, with big windows and maybe a hundred wooden chairs, set up in horseshoe rows. No crosses, no hymn books, not even any Bibles that I can see.

  William was the one who suggested this place. He calls it a meeting house, and he’s allowed to invite us to have the memorial here because he’s a member of the Religious Society of Friends. I told Dad it sounds like a cult, but he just laughed and said it’s another name for the Quakers, an old and well-respected branch of Christianity.

  “The Quakers still exist?” I asked, picturing William and dozens of other people sitting around in funny hats like the guy on the oatmeal package.

  “They do,” Dad said, “and if you’re thinking of the oatmeal, don’t worry. They wear modern clothes now. They get together to meditate. Sometimes people stand up to speak if they feel it would be useful. Uli went a few times. He knew lots of people there through William, and he liked the quiet.”

  So here we are. Nikko and I are the youngest by far. My parents are next.

  They’re making a big effort this weekend. Mom’s been here almost twelve hours, and I haven’t heard a single angry word between them. Dad and I picked her up at the airport at midnight. Mom travels a lot, but whenever we picked her up at the airport in Montreal, she’d be in stretchy pants and a comfy sweatshirt. Last night she was wearing tight, stylish jeans and a purple, wraparound sweater. Dad did a double take, but I don’t know if Mom noticed. She was going on about how much I’d grown and how she liked my hair tied back. Eventually, she let go of me, hugged him and said he looked good, that he’d lost weight. He smiled. Things were starting off well.

  Now here we are in a Quaker meeting house packed with people. Dad was shocked when he realized how many people Uli kept in touch with. We’ve spent weeks letting people know about this memorial service.

  “Chloë, could you set up the photos, please?” Dad hands me a display board and points me to an easel in the far corner. I squeeze through the crowd to arrange the four pictures Dad rummaged out of a box this week. The first is black-and-white: a small boy in shorts holding the hand of a woman in a kerchief. I think of Uli’s story about the apple tree. That’s my great-grandmother, who escaped with Uli in her arms, saved the seeds and died before she could get to Canada. I wish I’d asked Uli if I look like her. I’ve squinted at her until my eyes hurt, but the picture’s too small for spotting any resemblance.

  In the next photo, the little boy has grown to a man. He’s wearing a suit and standing beside a woman in a wedding dress. My grandmother Gwen. I don’t know how they met. Dad says he doesn’t know either. (How did he go forty years without thinking to ask?) Dad’s in the next photograph, a baby in his mother’s arms.

  The last picture is of me with Uli, at a Tibetan restaurant the week before he died. I remember groaning when my grandfather asked my father to take the picture. My hair had been stuffed in a hat all afternoon. I had a soup stain on my shirt. But I’m so glad Dad didn’t listen to me. Uli’s arm looks awkward around my shoulders, and even though he was usually serious around my dad, he has an almost goofy grin on his face. It’s a good picture. Our last one together.

  Four generations of my family. Dad and I are the only ones still alive. We should have more photos. I should have more stories. How can we pretend to celebrate Uli’s life if this is all we have to show of it? Why didn’t I ever take a picture of him in his garden?

  “I am so very sorry for your loss.”

  I turn. William holds out his bony, gnarled fingers. It occurs to me that Uli and William were about as different as two people could be. Uli must have towered over his friend, for one thing. This small man is always very neatly dressed in a collared shirt and pants. He’s so formal and polite, compared to Uli’s gruffness. I wonder what they talked about all those years.

  I let go of his hand and remember his frail arms around me when the paramedics carried Uli to the ambulance. I blink hard. “I’m sorry for your loss, too, William. You knew him better than I did.”

  “That too is a loss, my dear. Your grandfather was a fine man. Not a perfect one—no one ever is—but a fine man nonetheless. I do hope you got to see some of that in him in your short time together.”

  I swallow and look away. I want to be back in Montreal. Back in a time years ago, when my parents were still happy and before I knew my grandfather. A time where I didn’t know what I was missing and what I was about to lose.

  “I’m sorry.” William squeezes my hand in both of his and then makes his way to the line of chairs.

  I stand there wishing the f
loor would open up and swallow me whole. Mom places a vase of flowers on a little table next to my mostly dead family, and as if she’s read my mind, she offers me a reason to escape into the kitchen. By the time Nikko and I have the coffee mugs lined up and go back to the main room, most people are already seated. Nikko and I find a place to sit, too, in the front row, next to my parents.

  A thin, old man in a powder-blue suit stands to welcome everyone. He explains that we’re here to honor Uli with quiet meditation but that we’re welcome to offer a story if we feel led to do so. He sits down again. Everyone is quiet.

  Most people have their heads bowed. I do, too, but I sneak looks around the room. I wonder if any of the people who gave him seeds will stand up to tell a story. I can hear people shifting in their chairs and my father breathing next to me. I fidget. The silence feels like we’re all waiting for something to happen.

  Finally Dad stands up. At first, he hadn’t planned to speak: What would I say? That Dad and I didn’t see eye to eye on most things? Everyone there probably knows that already. But then a few days ago, Dad started worrying. What if no one says anything? What if we sit there for a whole hour, and no one has anything to say? That would be the worst send-off ever.

  I guess Dad’s decided to get the ball rolling. He clears his throat. I close my eyes to listen.

  “My father began planting vegetables the summer my mother died.”

  My eyes spring open. I look up at my father, standing next to me. He’s never talked about his mother dying. I only know it was cancer because I asked Mom. Now he’s sharing with a roomful of strangers a story he’s never shared with me.

  I see Mom slip her hand into his, something I haven’t seen her do in years.

  “I was eleven,” Dad continues. “My father brought home some seeds and said we needed to plant them.”

  I wonder who the seeds came from. Were they a gift, or did he get them at a gardening shop or grocery store, like most people do?

  “We dug up the whole lawn and planted rows of carrots, peas, lettuce, green beans—and a pumpkin,” Dad says, smiling. “A huge pumpkin that weighed almost as much as I did. There’s a picture of it somewhere.”

  I never knew he helped with the garden. By the smile on his face, I can tell he enjoyed it too.

  “Gardening was what my dad and I did together to heal. He told me we needed to grow something, to add new life to a year that had been all about sickness and death.”

  Like Uli had done with the apple seeds after he watched his mother die.

  “For as long as I lived in that house, that garden was a place where I could go to think and just be. We worked side by side for hours, sometimes talking, but lots of times just being quiet together. That garden was where he taught me that even when everything feels too hard to bear, good things can grow.”

  I never imagined my dad working in Uli’s garden and loving it just as much as my grandfather did. But I’m glad to know now. I like picturing them there together. I wish I knew what happened to change all that.

  Dad sits down. A few people smile at him. He nods back. I wonder why he’s never told me any of this before. Did he always know he felt that way about the garden, or is it something he’s just figuring out now?

  A woman behind us stands up and talks about meeting Uli years ago at the diner where she worked. Right away I know who she is. It’s the woman who gave him the cucamelon seeds. A man in a wheelchair tells how Uli brought him tomato sauce every summer and sometimes wheeled him over to the garden, just to sit close to the tomatoes that his mother used to grow. One after another, people stand to tell everyone just how much Uli meant to them, how he cared about little things that other people didn’t bother with. He paid attention to details and was a great listener. That starts Dad crying again. Mom puts her arm around him. He leans into her. I put a hand on his knee. He grips it just as hard as he did in the hospital.

  Nikko glances sideways at me. I try to smile back to show him I’m okay, but I doubt it’s very convincing, because I’m crying at the same time.

  Story after story about seeds, memories, little kindnesses and the garden. Every story involves the living museum behind his house, which will one day be sold and maybe bulldozed to make room for something new. It’s the worst kind of end for a museum. Part of me almost wishes we could stay in Victoria, just to look after the garden and make sure the plants live on.

  NINE

  I’ve kept checking in on the garden since Uli died. Every few days, I go over to weed, turn the compost and water the tomatoes in the greenhouse. I found a few more packets of seeds a few weeks ago, looked up online when to plant each one and made myself a little planting calendar that I’ve been following. Corn mid-May. Cucumbers early June. I don’t know why I bother, because it’s not like we’re staying here. But it felt wrong not to. I couldn’t bear to watch the tomatoes die or the little plants get overtaken with weeds now that my grandfather’s gone.

  I need to find the seed collection. If I can do that, then maybe someone else can carry on Uli’s work, no matter what happens to the house. The vegetables aren’t attached to that particular patch of land. Anyone can grow them, and isn’t that exactly what Uli would want? For more people to care about them?

  I don’t know where he put it. Those little packets of seeds on the kitchen counter are the only ones I’ve found so far, but I haven’t looked very hard either. I will now though. I have to. For Uli.

  Over the next few weeks, I help my dad sort through Uli’s things. Today, while Dad fumbles for his keys, I spot Slater sitting on his steps next door, playing with his rat. I’m pretending not to notice him, but then a short old man slams out of the house. “Back at five,” I hear him say to Slater. “Heat up the lasagna your mother left in the fridge, okay?”

  “Heat it up yourself,” Slater snaps.

  The old man slams his car door and drives away. I look at Dad. He shrugs and lets us into the house. Walking into Uli’s living room is like stepping back in time: worn, red shag rug, orange lampshades, avocado-green couch. Even the books on the shelves look old. Each time we come over, I start searching for the seed collection. But Dad is only ever here for a few minutes before he suddenly remembers something that needs urgent attention back at the building. And he won’t let me stay here alone. Yesterday he planned to spend the whole day in Uli’s basement, sorting, but when I got home from school, he was scrubbing moss from our front walk with something that looked like a toothbrush. He even launched into a speech about why this was the perfect tool for the job. I told him to quit stalling.

  I get why it’s hard for him though. First he has to deal with all the memories. Then he has to deal with all the junk. The entire basement is crammed with rows and rows of shelves, stacked with boxes of—not family treasures, but rags, newspapers and even cardboard toilet-paper rolls. This afternoon I’m determined to keep Dad here long enough for me to find that old shoebox full of seeds, stories and maps. I’ll look in every single box in the basement, I think. But after two hours I’ve thrown everything I’ve come across into the “garbage” pile. (Everything except for Uli’s impressive elastic-band collection, that is. It’s a ball of bands the size of a small watermelon. In my whole life, I don’t think I’ll need that many elastics, but if I do, I’m ready. In the meantime, maybe Nikko and I can toss it around at the park or something.)

  “Look at this!” Dad says.

  I expect to turn and see him holding up a framed photo or a favorite book from when he was a kid. Instead he’s got a fistful of colored cords, all different lengths, none longer than my arm. “What’s that?”

  “My rope collection! I wonder if I remember…” He’s sitting cross-legged on the floor now, twisting a green cord into a complicated knot. “I do! Look at that! It’s an Ashley stopper knot. That’s how you make sure the rope doesn’t slide through a hole.”

  “You collected cords…to practice knots?” I’ve heard of some weird hobbies, but as Uli would have said, this one takes th
e cake.

  “Here’s another.” Dad grabs two cords, yellow and blue, and ties their ends together in a complicated way. “An alpine butterfly bend!”

  I like seeing him there, looking happy for the first time since he stepped into this house. I can’t stand being inside anymore, though, especially since I’ve run out of places to look for the seed collection. “Can I go tidy up the garden?”

  We both know it doesn’t need any tidying. I’ve been here almost every day since Uli died, and the place is spotless. Dad hasn’t said anything. I think he gets why I keep working on it.

  “Chloë,” he says, putting down his cords, “I need to talk to you about that. You’re going to have to start thinking about letting the garden go. The longer you hold on, the more painful it will be to say goodbye.”

  “But it needs looking after,” I say. “No one’s going to buy a place with a weed pit in the back.”

  He frowns. “Chloë, it’s not going to be sold right away, I don’t think.”

  What is he talking about? Isn’t he selling this place so we can both move back to Montreal? Didn’t he say we shouldn’t put Uli’s ashes under the tree because someone might take the tree down when the place is sold? “You said—”

  “I know,” he says. “Look, I haven’t been totally upfront with you about this, but I guess you’re going to find out soon enough. This house didn’t belong to Uli.”

  “What?” That doesn’t make sense. Why would he plant a tree in front of a rental? And create an enormous food garden full of valuable endangered plants?

  “I’m sorry,” Dad says. “I should have told you sooner. But watching you looking after the garden and putting so much time into it…I didn’t know how to tell you.”

  I don’t know what to say. “When…how long do we—?”

  “We’re paid up for a few more weeks. Then it’ll go back to the landlord.” My dad is looking down at the floor. “He’ll probably renovate before he rents it out to anyone else, but either way, he’s not going to want either of us on his property after June 1. I—”