The Vegetable Museum

by Michelle Mulder

  I hurry across the yard to the exit and freeze. Because someone’s watching me through the hole in the hedge. It’s a face I don’t recognize, a man’s face. I panic. Running will get me nowhere. Screaming will wake the neighbors—which would save me from a crazy who walks the streets at night but would also land me in a whole pile of trouble.

  He pushes his way through the hedge into the garden. I can see now that he’s wearing a uniform. Not the police. A security guard. “I saw you go in, young lady. The police will be here in a few minutes. I’ve already got pictures, so I wouldn’t bother bolting, if I were you. You might as well give me the box.” He holds out his hand. “You can’t take it with you.”

  SIXTEEN

  “The police convinced Victor not to press charges,” Dad tells my mom. His voice is calm now, not like when the police brought me home last night. “Chloë’s young and didn’t mean any harm, so the courts probably wouldn’t bother with it anyway.”

  It’s evening in Montreal, and Mom’s still at the office. She’s sitting in her desk chair, this horrified look on her face. “What were you thinking, Chloë? I thought we raised you better than this!”

  I stare at her. “This has nothing to do with how you raised me! I wanted to—”

  “I don’t care what you wanted to do, Chloë! You were trespassing! And stealing! There’s never any excuse for that.”

  “But—”

  “I can’t believe this.” She squeezes her eyes shut. I don’t think she’s crying, but she looks wounded, which almost feels worse, like she can never trust me again. “Chloë, all this sneaking around may seem like fun to you, but—”

  “You think I did this for fun?” My voice is too loud, but I don’t care. I push myself up from the sofa. Dad grabs my arm, but I wrench my hand free and stomp off to my bedroom, the only place left for me to go.

  Please pick up. Phoning to apologize.

  I blink at Mom’s text. It’s breakfast time, almost noon in Montreal. But that’s not why I’m surprised. Mom apologizing? Now there’s a first. I turn the ringer back on. The next time it sounds, I pick up.

  “I talked to your Dad,” she says. “And to Sofia.”

  “I know. She texted me.” She sent a photo of the For Sale sign in front of our house too.

  “She told me more about Uli’s garden,” Mom says. “I didn’t know you cared so much about the plants.”

  “Yeah, you made that pretty clear.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry for a lot of things. You know I didn’t set out for everything to happen this way, right?”

  I don’t answer. I’m looking through my tiny bedroom window to the bush planted in front of it. My bedroom at home looked onto our balcony and down to Sofia’s backyard. I wonder what the bedroom in Mom’s new condo is like, but I don’t wonder enough to actually want to stay there.

  It’s Mom who finally breaks the silence. “Thanks for answering the phone. I’ll talk to you soon. And hold on to that Sofia. She’s a keeper.”

  Only Nikko bangs on our apartment door like that, not a crisp rat-tat-tat like Estelle, but a full-bodied bam-bam-bam, as if the door is in the way of sharing the best news on the planet.

  “Nice shirt,” I say. It’s gray with a sprouting seed on the front. “Where’d you get it?”

  “A friend made it. But I designed it. We made one for you too,” he calls back over his shoulder because he’s already halfway down the hall. “Can you come out the front? I have something to show you.”

  I follow him to the lobby and through the front door. Across the street a crowd has formed. They’re shouting something I can’t make out, but it’s happy shouting. At least forty people are gathered in front of the chain-link fence. They’ve got cardboard signs saying things like Seeds Are Our Future and Save Our Vegetables! and even Save the Bees! Cars are slowing as they pass. Someone shows up with a TV camera.

  “Who are all these guys?” I ask Nikko.

  “People who don’t want Victor to turf the seed collection,” he says. “Gardeners, Quakers, soup-kitchen people, homeschooling friends. Choose your battle, Uli said. This seemed like a good one.”

  Without thinking, I hug him. He staggers back, his face turning red. Dad saves us the trouble of figuring out what to say next. He shows up behind me with two pieces of cardboard in hand. “Shall we join them, Chloë?”

  “You have signs too?” I ask. “You knew about this?”

  “Nikko might have mentioned it.”

  “But Victor—”

  “We’ll stand on this side of the street.” Dad hands me a sign, and we cross the lawn to our corner. From there I can see that Slater is out on his lawn too, watching everyone and smiling. Okay, it’s more of a smirk, and he’s probably thinking we’re all a bunch of losers, but he’s not making anyone’s life miserable at the moment, for a change.

  The camera guy pans the crowd of protesters. A few minutes later a woman with glossy black hair and perfect makeup interviews Nikko and then me. I talk about kale that can grow as tall as me, the blue squashes Uli loved, white turnips that are pink inside, purple beans, and the people who gave Uli the seeds in the first place. “If my grandfather had had a dying wish,” I say, “it would have been to save those seeds for future generations.”

  The woman smiles and puts the microphone away. “Thanks. That was great.” She hands me her card. “By the way, have you heard about the seed library?”

  “Seed library?” I ask.

  “It launched last spring. I did a story on it, and I follow them now on Twitter.” She explains how anyone with a public library card can borrow seeds to grow in their own gardens. When those plants go to seed, people harvest, dry and return the new seeds to the library for the next season. “They accept donations too. Someone left them a huge collection a few months ago, and people are all excited about it. It includes some really rare seeds, I guess.”

  Nikko scribbles in his notebook. “Any idea who the donor was?”

  “No,” she says. “I’m sure you could find out though.”

  “I’ll do that.” Nikko catches my eye, and I stifle a laugh because I know we don’t need to try to find out who it was.

  Now I know why I couldn’t find the seed collection. Turns out, Uli did have a plan after all. All these weeks while I was watering, trespassing and guerilla gardening—becoming a much bolder person than I’ve ever been before—the library was preparing his collection for the whole city to use.

  I made a promise to the people who gave me the seeds, Uli said. Darned if I’ll go back on it now.

  When Dad told Uli not to garden this year, my grandfather answered with his best poker face. He even managed to look a bit offended. But I see now that he was bluffing. He’d already looked after the future of the seed collection. What he didn’t want to give up on was me. And our family. Asking me to garden with him was his last-ditch attempt to repair everything that had fallen apart since he’d planted the garden in the first place, the year my grandmother died.

  Even though I’d thought he was a little bit crazy, I’d agreed to it, because I’d left my whole life in Montreal, and I had nothing to lose. I had no idea then that by digging in the dirt, I’d get the stories of my great-grandmother’s tree and my grandmother’s sailboat and why Dad had left this place and why he wanted to come back. But most of all, I’d get to know my grandfather.

  “What do you think was in the red box then?” I ask Nikko when the reporter has gone back to her car.

  “Who knows?” He moves his head in the direction of the crowd across the street. “Do you think we should tell them to stop protesting? That the lost collection has been found?”

  “Nah,” I say. “I bet Uli’s enjoying watching this, wherever he is.”

  “Digging into his big bowl of chocolate ice cream in the sky.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Slater’s family moves out in August. I don’t know where they go, but with any luck, it’s to a fancy suburb far, far away. The house stay
s empty. The house next to it still has renters, but Estelle says they’ll be leaving in October. Uli’s place looks pretty much like it did when the fence went up. The thyme in the front yard is neat and tidy—nothing like regular grass would have been by now. If you look closely, you can see apples on his mother’s tree, still green but getting bigger.

  Our Montreal house sells in September. When we hear the news, Dad and I go for a walk on the beach. At first we talk about this and that: my new classes, Mom’s new condo and Dad’s plan to buy his own kayak—less expensive than a sailboat and much easier to store. Behind Dad, an old man tosses a stick for his dog. Cyclists along the roadway shout to each other in a windswept conversation.

  “We should check out some of Uli’s seeds from the library,” I say. I’ve been reading about it online. The library offers a short workshop where you learn how to harvest and dry the seeds. After that you have access to any of the seeds in the library. “I want to plant apple trees.”

  Dad shakes his head. “There wouldn’t be apple seeds in the collection.”

  “Of course there would be! Uli’s mom trekked across Europe with them in her boot, and he went back to Edmonton to—”

  Again Dad shakes his head. “Apples are like people. Children never look exactly like their parents. When you grow apple trees from seed, the fruit on the new tree never turns out exactly like the fruit it came from.”

  I frown. “But then how—?”

  “The apple Uli’s mother brought from Poland was small and mealy. But when Uli planted the seeds in Edmonton, the apples that grew on one of those trees were big and sweet,” Dad says. “He wanted apples like those ones, so he went back to the farm and cut off a few buds—scions, they’re called. Little slivers of tree with buds on them. Then he grafted the scions onto rootstock.”

  I stare at my father. Grafting. Like what Uli did with the cherry trees. I didn’t know Dad knew all this stuff. Or cared. But maybe all these years caring was just too painful, the same way it hurt for him to visit Uli’s garden or go into his house. “Rootstock? What’s rootstock?”

  “It’s part of a plant—the roots and a bit of the stump. You can choose different kinds, depending on how tall you want your tree to be. Then you graft parts of another plant onto that rootstock so it all grows together as a single tree.”

  “Huh.” Why has no one—not even Uli—ever told me this before?

  Dad’s really getting into the conversation now. “The rootstock part grows down into the soil. The grafted-on parts grow up and determine the kind of fruit. If you graft a few buds from Uli’s apple tree onto some rootstock, it’ll bear apples just like the ones on the tree you grafted from. They’ll be clones, actually.”

  Weird. But excellent too. “I always pictured Uli bringing back seeds from Edmonton. I even imagined him tucking them into his shoe, like his mom had.”

  “Nope. Little branches. He grafted them and planted a tree at each of his houses.”

  I turn to look at him. “What do you mean, at each of his houses? Are you saying there are three of Uli’s apple trees?”

  “There were,” Dad says. “The one behind the rental got cut down.”

  “But there’s still one behind Victor’s house?” Which is empty at the moment, as we happen to know.

  Dad nods. “Yup. Same variety.”

  I turn and head toward the road.

  “Where are you going?” He hurries to catch up with me.

  “Where do we get rootstock? We have some grafting to do.”

  “Now?” he asks.

  “No time like the present,” I say. “How many buds do we need?”

  “Depends how many trees you want to grow. I can ask if we can plant them around the building, or maybe we could plant a few in different places around the city.” He winks. “We’d increase our odds that way.”

  “Gambling with fruit trees,” I say. “Uli would have loved that.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Uli’s garden came together with the help of countless people, and the same goes for this book! Thank you to BC Arts Council for the funding that allowed me to work on this project. Thanks also to Doug Woodworth, Jerome Bender, James Craig and Matthew Rutherford for speaking with this random children’s author who called up with questions about gambling and trespassing. Thank you, Susan Braley, Susannah Adams and Farheen Haq, for listening to me talk endlessly about this story and encouraging me to keep going. Robin Stevenson and Kari Jones, I appreciate your astute and honest feedback at particularly confusing stages of the manuscript. Bob McInnes, thanks for lending me your ice-cream-rescue story. (Bob once rescued ice cream in much the same fashion that Nikko did—a true bicycle visionary!)

  Thank you, Chris Adams, for being so passionate about this book and for weeding out agricultural errors. (Pun intended. Sorry. I couldn’t resist.) I’m grateful to everyone at Orca Book Publishers who helped bring this project into the world, especially my editor, Tanya Trafford, who has an incredible gift for seeing the potential in a story and who masterfully guided me in just the direction I needed to go, and Rachel Page for the beautiful book design. And thanks to Julie McLaughlin for the awesome cover that makes me grin every time I think about it. Finally, thank you, GastÓn and Maia, my excellent family, who have cheered me along every step of the way. It really takes a village to write a book, and I’ve been incredibly lucky with mine. Thank you all.

  MICHELLE MULDER is an award-winning author of many books for children, including several titles in the Orca Footprints series and the middle-grade novels After Peaches, Out of the Box and Not a Chance.

  These days, when she’s not writing or going on adventures, she enjoys reading, swimming, gardening, hiking and pedaling her bicycle around Victoria, British Columbia, where she lives with her husband and daughter. For more information about Michelle and her books, visit michellemulder.com.

  One

  “You’re here!” I sit straight up in my metal bunk bed, yank at the mosquito netting and wrestle my way out.

  Aracely stands in the doorway, laughing at me. “Of course I’m here. I live here, remember? You’re the one who takes off at the end of every summer, Dian.”

  I ignore that comment and zigzag between suitcases and boxes to hug her. She doesn’t have to know that I didn’t want to come this year. She’s the only person who might make this summer bearable, and I don’t want to hurt her feelings.

  She kisses my cheeks, tucks her black hair behind one ear and surveys my baggy, tie-dyed shorts and red polka-dot blouse. “It will never get better, will it?”

  I clench my teeth and shake my head. The clothes are one of the reasons I didn’t want to come. Every summer, my parents bring suitcases full of donated stuff to wear while we’re here and leave behind when we go. The outfits are almost always awful, and they’re never anything I’d choose. This spring, when I realized that my parents weren’t going to let me stay home with my grandmother while they came here, I lobbied for them to at least let me bring my own clothes to wear. (They’re secondhand too, because according to my parents, buying brand-new clothes exploits poor workers in other countries and impacts the environment. But at least in Canada I get to choose my own clothes.) Mom asked if I planned to leave most of my own clothes behind at the end of the summer, and when I said no, she and Dad looked at me like I was dumping toxic waste into the village stream. They gave me a long lecture on compassion being more important than vanity. I shot back that they should have some compassion for me for once. They hit the roof, and here I am, at the end of June, in polka dots and tie-dye. At least they promised not to take any pictures of me this summer. That’s their grand gesture at understanding what it’s like to be me.

  Aracely shakes her head. “If you were my size, I’d give you half my clothing. You know that, don’t you?”

  I smile because I know she’s trying to help. Last summer, out of pity, she dressed me up like the other girls our age in Cucubano, in a tight pink top and a short skirt. She said I looked hot, but I
felt like a Barbie gone horribly wrong—too tall, too flat, too skinny. Aracely is only a year older than me, but she has curves in all the right places, and at fourteen she could pass for sixteen.

  The only sad thing is that big scar on her cheek. A donkey bit her when she was four, and someone stitched it up for her, but not well. It’s not like people here get free plastic surgery after an accident like they do in Canada. The scar takes up most of her cheek—a jagged line, rough around the edges where the donkey’s teeth scraped over the skin before biting through.

  The first time I saw her, I was terrified. Then again, at five I was terrified of most things, and it didn’t help that my parents had brought me to a tiny settlement in the Dominican Republic where the ground was orange and everyone lived in wooden huts and spoke a language I didn’t understand. I remember hiding behind my mother in the schoolyard, with all the local mothers and their kids watching us. The adults were smiling at each other, and the kids stared at me, wide-eyed. My mother had a firm hand on my shoulder to keep me from bolting, and her grip tightened when the little girl with the horrible scar marched over to me. The girl took a pink hibiscus flower from behind her ear and placed it behind mine, then took my hand and led me off to play. She taught me how to pick the sweetest oranges, where to find the best climbing trees and how to catch a butterfly. Along the way, she taught me Spanish.

  The priest who invited my parents here hired Aracely’s mother to do our laundry, cook our meals and look after me. I spent most of that first summer at Aracely’s house, and that suited me just fine; I loved feeling like part of a big family. As we got older, Aracely and I would take off on adventures of our own. My parents would assume I was with Aracely’s mom, and Aracely’s mom would assume I was fine because I was with Aracely. It worked out great, because no one would have let us do half of what we did if we’d actually asked permission.