Clematis arched over raised beds filled with fuchsia, catmint, campanula, delphiniums, foxgloves, hardy geranium, herbs and lavender. My son had recently found a pair of old stone birdbaths with hooplike trellises over their tops and he persuaded two of the men to bring them to the garden in one of their trucks. Then he wound these with pussy willow stems and filled the bath hollows with cliff roses and crocuses, both native plants in Greece.
“Listen to these names: Russian sage, ice cap, lady orchid peony,” he said to me. “The names are like perfume.” He pointed out how the lavender and rosemary scented the air around the gardens, and explained the sequences in which the plants would flower. The raised beds were edged in artemisia and green boxwood, and through them were veins of gold and purple stone. “The shrubs and the little trees add structure, like the frame on a painting,” he told me.
“How did you learn to do all this?” I asked him.
“I looked it up on the internet. Then I started streaming gardening shows at night on my computer. I figured out how to hit garage sales and where the cheapest places were to buy stuff and get the church a big discount. I find a lot of it from people’s trash, too, frankly.”
He said he was now maybe thinking about studying landscape architecture the following year. “It’s the perfect blend for me. You get to think and move your body around. You don’t get as much of a chance to be depressed because you have to go outside all the time. And you can start your own small company and bid on jobs. People’s houses. Small businesses. You can get a riding mower. People don’t care who the guy is who shows up to do the landscaping. They don’t say, hey, have you got a record? Then maybe someday, I can get contracts for whole subdivisions and parks. There’s this woman online who only designs garden seating. She only designs park benches. And she’s famous.” Once the gardens were completed, he said, he would maintain them as he did the interior of the church.
He starting working longer hours at the church, sometimes close to forty hours in one week, and wished he could work more. Soon he even had a company car. My sister Amelia sold him her old Mitsubishi Eclipse for $500—which I thought was charity until I found out that those cars hadn’t been manufactured since 2008. Still, it got him around. He first stuck rakes in the back, but soon he got help to mount a tow on the rear and was pulling an old boat trailer around onto which he added some planks and a pretty snazzy donated riding mower (apparently, like the waterbeds of a previous era, they were a much-repented purchase). Then one evening he came home with a very old but very theatrical pickup truck on which he had stenciled the image of a globe spilling over at the top with tulips and sunflowers and the words THE WHOLE BLOOMING WORLD, along with the words * Plant Environments *.
“I figured that environments covered everything,” he said proudly.
“It seems like it might be a lot to take on.”
“Just this truck and the mower, and maybe I’ll add a part-time high-school kid to work for me.”
“What about bonding and insurance and all that?”
“Mom, for real. Do you think everybody who drives past here with some rakes and a mower on a pickup truck is bonded and insured?”
“Probably not. But if you are going to advertise, you’ll need to at least look into it.”
“I’ll get to that if this is a go. I’ll be very, very careful. If it isn’t a go, then, oh well.”
It seemed to be a go, however. Within the month, through ever-resourceful Julie and through word of mouth, Stefan had six regular landscaping clients, then ten. Stefan’s eye had been healing nicely and so he was gradually able to lift and tote things safely. The crowning achievement of those initial efforts was being hired to landscape and caretake The Luck Institute, a beautiful building in town with an indoor atrium that housed offices, a jeweler, a bakery and a high-end luggage store. One of Stefan’s jobs would be to create a rotating indoor display that reflected the season. The idea thrilled him. Stefan pitched the theme of boats and sailing for the midsummer season and positioned a derelict old row boat in the middle of the plaza that foamed with dusty-blue buckets of coneflower and particle hydrangea, while sailboats planted with orange and red and blue sedum marched up the outside of the staircase. An old fish trap was festooned with small pots of gerbera daisies and veronica. Strategically hidden clip-on grow lights, set on timers, switched on at night to give the flowers an artificial drink of sun.
He took me to see it one morning, melodramatically insisting I cover my eyes. When he gave the word, I stared, then gasped.
“It’s stunning.”
“Most of this stuff is salvaged,” Stefan said. “I literally got it free and cleaned it up. I’m going to rent a storage shed when the season changes and keep the decorations there, so I can reuse them.”
“The grow lights must have been expensive.”
“They were, but Luck Sergenian approved them since I can use them again for the fall display!”
“Luck is her real first name?”
“Yep. She told me she was born three months early and her parents were superstitious.” He added, “I wondered how many people she’s had to tell that to. She actually said the same about me, asked me how many people did I have to tell that yes, I am that guy, and no, I am not dangerous.”
I thought about why Luck, a local celebrity in her own right who at the age of thirty-one was a home-grown legend as a businesswoman in Madison—first this, wealthiest that, youngest-ever the other thing—was not only trusting when it came to my son, but sufficiently urbane to be able to crack wise about it. “She told me she actually had to do some community service herself for possession with intent when she was in college,” Stefan told me. “Ten months. It was cocaine. The amount she had, it could have been prison time.”
“No wonder they call her Luck...”
“That’s exactly what she says.”
So maybe, this...this chance, this piece of luck, as it were, finally, would be the opening door. Stefan could walk through; we would stumble after him. We would try not to look back. An addict for hope is like an addict for anything: It only takes a taste to get a jones going. And so I let myself think that maybe my son had really turned a corner.
There were still two sides to the life he lived. I would hear him trading playful insults on speakerphone with Will as he got ready for a night out, and he would sound like every other guy his age—bombastic, silly, lobbing testosterone grenades into the air.
But even when I would hear his low voice coming from his room late at night, the sound of his crying, I let myself bless those noises, too. Even grief is feeling, I thought. And feeling outflanks numbness. It is a start: An embryo is an egg is a chick is an eagle. I let myself bless those sobs, awful as they were to hear.
Sometimes I would also hear him talking into his laptop microphone.
“It was her favorite ice cream, but I just throw it up, like how can I eat it if she can’t eat it?”
And...
“I think about it and, if I was sure I would get to be with her, but I don’t believe that way about after you die.”
And...
“I wish I could be a kid, like eight years old. You don’t know about the pain of love yet, and you just want a puppy or something.”
And...
“It’s the first thing you think of when you open your eyes, then you can’t stop thinking about it, I lost her, I hurt her, it’s all my fault.”
And...the worst...
“If I was sure that there was really a heaven, and she would be there, and everybody there was all happy, maybe I would end it. But I have to give this world a chance. I have to give my future a chance. That’s only right.”
* * *
If women waiting for their number to be called in purgatory would be talking about shoes, men in purgatory would definitely be talking about sports. I remembered how, for an anniversary long ago, I had given Jep a list I had made when we were just dating, which I’d kept in an old cigar box of letters.