It was almost nine o’clock, which wasn’t entirely surprising. I had always been a morning person, but after I had gotten married, there was no reason to get up. “It wouldn’t look right for you to work. People would think I can’t support you,” Phillip had told me when I had started to browse the want ads, and when I said I would like to anyway, he was so irritated I had put the argument aside. At first I thought it might just be for a year, and then a year had grown into two, and then somehow the compromise I had made as a momentary peace offering had become permanent. When I had started volunteering at the Stabler, I had been desperate for the contact, the purpose, the meaning. The volunteer coordinator had told me she’d never had anyone master the entire collection of presentations so quickly, which had made me feel slightly embarrassed, but no less eager.
Downstairs, I could hear my mother moving around, a door opening and closing, her quick, efficient steps on the floor. For a moment, I imagined I was a child again, and I could run down to the kitchen and my father would be sitting with his newspapers at the table and I could steal the funny pages and we would read in silence together. It felt so real, the smudges of newsprint on my fingers, the smell of his coffee, the way he would clear his throat as he read an interesting story in the paper, that I caught my breath and held it in for a moment to keep from crying, overwhelmed with memory and confusion and loss.
And then, as if to remind me of the hierarchy of needs and nostalgia’s place in it, my stomach growled loudly. The night before, my mother had gone out and all I’d had to eat was a handful of stale crackers and some cheese of questionable freshness that tasted a lot like dirt. I sighed, pushing back the covers and dragging myself out of bed. I had been sleeping in an oversized shirt and a pair of boxer shorts, which was exactly what I loved to sleep in, and exactly what Phillip would never allow, and I looked down at my rumpled self, shrugged, and headed downstairs.
My mother’s refrigerator was as empty as it had been the night before. I took a swig of sweet tea from the carafe inside (sure, there was no food, but my mother clearly had her standards), wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, and prowled through the pantry and the rest of the cupboards, coming up empty.
As a last-ditch resort, I headed out into the back yard, padding barefoot through the moist grass, still damp with dew and the remnants of the morning’s sprinkler run, the perfect, soft blades tickling my ankles. Summer was my favorite season in my mother’s garden, when everything was exploding, wild and ripe, but it was already beautiful that spring. Early roses were opening, arching their stems as they spread their petals to the sun. The fruit trees bore pale leaves and buds extended blindly from the branches, testing the air. The herb garden held rows of low, cautious greenery, and the hedges and stones bordering the ornamental garden waited patiently for everything to bloom so they would have something to contain. Ducking under one of the apple trees, I walked over to the vegetable garden by the low fence.
It was really too early for anything to be ripe, but I pawed through the leaves, thinking nostalgically of summer afternoons when I would sneak through my mother’s kitchen garden, leaves brushing against my face, and pluck a fat, warm tomato from where it lay, sleeping heavily on the ground, and eat it like an apple, wet juice and seeds and plump, yielding skin. It was months too early for tomatoes, but I found a miracle in the form of a patch of strawberry runners, bearing tiny but inarguably red fruit. I picked them greedily, two at a time, eating one while I held my shirt out to make a basket and dropped the other in there. They were firm and not as juicy as they would be in a few weeks, but they were sweet and fresh and my stomach accepted them gratefully.
When I finally rose up, my tongue stained red, my shirt containing another handful or two of berries, I looked down over the other side of the fence and saw a man crouching low underneath the leaves of a pepper plant. He blinked at me solemnly through the green.
With a startled yelp, I stepped backward into a clump of soft dirt, nearly losing my balance and dropping the strawberries.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He rose, holding his hands out in surrender. He was wearing gardening gloves and holding a rubber mallet in one hand. Now that he was standing instead of crouching in the bushes like a serial killer, he looked much less threatening, even considering the mallet. His T-shirt was stretched out, with holes at the bottom, and his loose khakis had smudges of dirt all over them. His eyes were fringed with lashes I would have traded him for in a second, and his eyebrows were a little too thick, and he had shaggy brown hair and an equally shaggy beard. He looked like a large, friendly family dog. “I thought you were Mrs. Bowers.”
“You were hiding from my mother in the bushes?”
He gave a sheepish shrug. A pair of headphones hung around his neck, the cord trailing down into his pocket, where a Discman pushed the line of his pants out of shape.
“Mrs. Bowers is your mother? She doesn’t like me much,” he said, and he sounded disappointed about it.
“Buck up. She doesn’t like anybody, really. Not even me.”