At exactly five o'clock the front bell rang in our house.
"Big Eddie, how the hell are you?" Johnny asked, standing on the porch in a checkered shirt that reminded me of the tablecloths in old-fashioned Italian restaurants . He had a thick beard and his face had turned rough and leathery. "Just fine," I told him. "Just fine." I held the door open and he stepped in cautiously, as if he still wasn't sure he was at the right place even though I'd been the one to answer the door.
Ruthie came over and introduced herself and politely shook his hand. "I can tell when Ed's talking to an old friend," she said. "Not too many people call him Big Eddie anymore."
"People might not call him Big Eddie anymore," he said, "but I bet I know what they're thinking."
"Johnny," I said, "I've lost a good five pounds since the last time you saw me." I had actually gained about twenty since high school.
"I keep on putting him on a diet," said Ruthie, "and he keeps taking himself off of it."
We laughed, a little self-consciously. Johnny handed Ruthie the box of sangria he was carrying. "Here's a house warming gift for yall," he told us
"Thank you, Johnny. That sure is kind. I haven't had box wine in awhile."
Johnny grinned wide and said, "If I remember right this fat bastard can go through a box in a couple of minutes. He's like a pig at the trough."
"You remember right," I said, "but I can't do that anymore. I'm all out of practice. I don't drink the way I used to. I can still pack away the food, but I can't quite drink the drink."
Johnny nodded and seemed disappointed. He was expecting the Bid Ed he used to know. But in college I'd calmed down. I no longer drank until I passed out in someone's yard, and I didn't speed on the highways around the city, weaving between the big trucks. There had been philosophy and music classes that had gotten me to consider things in slower terms. And one snowy morning, in a near-empty diner by campus, I had seen Ruthie.
To cheer Johnny up I told my wife, "I can't wait to have you see this guy eat. You'd think he was a fucking cannibal."
"Maybe I should get the tape recorder out so we can record it," Ruthie suggested.
"No need for that," he said. "I did learn a few manners out west. I even worked on a few movie crews."
"Really? And here I was thinking you were probably eating rattlesnakes all this time."
"I'm not an animal, Eddie. Goddamn."
Ruthie raised up the box of sangria and said, "Guess I'll go break open this spigot," and she went off toward the kitchen door.
Johnny leaned his head to my ear. "She's really pretty, man," he whispered. "She's way too good for you."
"That's a horrible thing to say," I told him.
"I mean it as a compliment."
"It sure doesn't sound like one."
He was right though. When she sang along with whatever I was playing on the piano, her voice would sound like little pieces of light hovering in the air. Pieces of light I sometimes felt I could almost touch.

We drank some sangria and talked about how shitty it was, growing older, even though none of us had quite reached thirty. Then, Ruthie started getting out the silverware her mother had given to us as a wedding gift, and I lit the candelabrum in the center of the table and brought out the pot of spaghetti puttanesca and the plate of fried catfish and the salad. We gathered around the table and began eating. In the street outside we could hear the neighborhood kids play football even though the windows were closed and the airconditioners were on. They were probably the same kids who'd broken into my truck the week before and stolen some of my tapes. We did not live in a safe neighborhood.
"I tell you, living in the desert does some funny things to you," Johnny said, swirling some pasta around his fork. "I had a place way off from town. It'd been a trailer, but the owner before me had put a wood porch on it and taken off the wheels. The nearest other house was a forty minute walk and you couldn't see it from my place - not even when it was bright outside. So at night, it'd really start to feel like you were the last person on earth. I think if I'd been living alone out there the entire time, I'd have gone crazy. The loneliness of it would've torn me to shreds."
"You weren't alone?" I asked. I couldn't imagine a woman taking up with him.
"I had a girlfriend and a son. Not at first, but later on."
"How'd you lure them in?" I asked.
"Ed, I might be ugly, but I'm not hopeless."
"I shouldn't be talking. I'm about as thin as you are handsome."
"Don't talk like that to a guest," Ruthie said.
"This is how we talk," I said.
"This is how we talk when there's a lady around," Johnny said. "When we're alone, the gloves really come off."
We laughed. Ruthie didn't.
Johnny went on. "Anyway, my girlfriend - I met her one day in Phoenix. She worked at this dirty little hippie cafe. We started hanging out, and before you know there were three of us."
"Where is she now?" Ruthie asked. Somehow she made the question sound accusatory, as if Johnny might have killed mother and child and stuffed them under the floorboards.
"I don't know where she is. I woke up one night, around the time Simon was a year old, and she was gone. She left a note saying she was going, but it didn't say where."
"What about the kid?" I asked.
"Ed, you know what a fuckup I am. No way could a guy like me could be a decent father. I hated to do it, but I gave him over to some friends of mine in San Antonio who really wanted a kid. I did make an effort to raise him. I had him for about two years. But it was too much. You might not believe this, but the child couldn't stand me. It was like the way some dogs don't take to each other. He cried when I was around, and when he wasn't crying he was always doing shit like hitting me in the back of the head. What kind of child hits its father in the back of the head? Repeatedly?"
"With you as a father, a smart one."
"Ed, you aren't being funny," Ruthie snapped.
Johnny didn't glance her way. He stared at the half-eaten catfish on his plate. He looked like he wished he hadn't told us as much as he had. He said, "It was soon after handing the kid over that I sold my trailer and went off to live in L.A. That's where I started working in the movies. It's behind the scenes work - holding microphones and shit like that - but it's fun."
"Anything we would've heard of?" Ruthie asked.
"The most recent one was called Disobedience. And the one right before that was Money Shot 3000. That was sort of a sci-fi thing."
Ruthie titled her head slightly. "They're porn movies?"
"In a sense. I mean, they have storylines and all. They're not like some of the low class crap you see out there."
I chewed and looked at Johnny. It would not have been bad, getting paid to stand around with a microphone as beautiful women had sex in front of you. I would've paid money from my own pocket to do something like that for a day. And it was certainly better than staying around the house, waiting for a phone call with a possible job offer after having gone out on this or that job interview. A call I'd been waiting for since the later part of winter.
"You keep in touch with the kid?" I asked Johnny. I needed to change the subject.
"You won't believe how much I keep in touch with him. He still doesn't like me much, but I visit a good three or four times a year. I'm going win him over one of these days."
"We don't have kids ourselves," I said. "We've thought about it. We've thought about it a lot. But that's about all we've done so far."
The room turned quiet. Those kids were really playing hard outside. Ruthie poured some more wine for herself. She gave me a bold, forceful look over, as if I were a dirty glass she was trying to stare through, and told Johnny, "Ed just wants to have kids soon because he has it in his head that I'm itching to run away. He thinks if we have a kid, I'll feel more stuck with him. Now to me, that's a completely wrong reason to bring a child into this world. I don't know about your parents, Johnny, but mine loved each other when they had me. They didn't have me to throw up a bunch of prison bars around themselves."
I said to Johnny, "Ruthie has an amazing voice. You should hear her sing sometime."
Ruthie continued, "Once he followed me over to West Memphis when I went there to see an aunt of mine. He called in sick to work that day and followed me."
"I called in sick all the time. The school was used to it."
"Sometimes I'm tempted to cheat on him just to prove him right."
"Johnny doesn't want to hear all this, do you Johnny?"
He dabbed his lips with the napkin. "I don't know. It's kind of interesting."
I raised my hands and gestured to them in a way that said I'm-done-for-now. I took my wine glass and went from the table over to the piano in the corner - our place was small, and the dinning-room and living-room were really the same room - and started playing an old jazz piece. Though I was playing loud, I would hear them talking real low behind my back. So I started playing louder, faster. The song started to melt apart in my fingers.
Johnny came over and sat on the couch. Ruthie lit a cigarette and stared out the window.
I played slower. I turned that song into a dirge. Then into a few steps struggling in quicksand. Soon, I wasn't playing at all. There was nothing to do but turn around and try to act casual again. I shifted around on the piano bench. "I sure am glad to see you," I told Johnny.
"I sure am glad to see you too again, man. I really missed my old friends out there."
"You certainly left in a cloak of mystery though. You and that stolen car."
"It wasn't even all that stolen. Just borrowed for a long time." He looked at Ruthie. "My dad wasn't a very generous man."
"Really?" she said. She could not have looked less interested. She took another drag from her cigarette and turned her eyes on me. She gave me a questioning look. It felt like she was wondering how I had become the man sitting on that bench, full of mean speculations and uncertainty. She held that look for only a moment, but it would be the image I would remember most about those weeks before I moved out, away from her and Memphis and everyone I had known. Then she looked back out the window.

The evening wore on. The street turned quiet except for a few firecrackers that would go off every one in awhile. Ruthie got out the hookah pipe and I brought in the coffee canister where we kept our bags of pot. We all relaxed and started making dumb jokes and me and Johnny talked about our high school days and me and Ruthie told Johnny how we met and got married. Sun Ra played from the massive speakers flanking the bay windows. A layer of shifting yellowish smoke hung around the Japanese lantern hanging from the ceiling. I took off one of my sandals. Johnny asked, "So when we going wrestle?"
"No wrestling," said Ruthie.
I nodded to her. "No wrestling, Johnny. Not anymore. A few years ago we were at Steve Lamberts place and some of us started wrestling around in the backyard. I wound up breaking my goddamn arm. I couldn't believe it. I didn't even fall that hard. But it was the way I fell. That did it."
"That's a real sad story," said Johnny.
"Sad isn't the word," Ruthie chided. She was smiling though. At some point during the night - probably when Johnny had started talking about missing his son - Ruthie decided she didn't hate my old friend. I'd noticed her voice had turned softer when speaking to him. But we were also all thoroughly stoned. She might have been smiling just because she was high.
"Did Ed ever tell you we used to have our own wrestling team?" Johnny asked Ruthie. "It wasn't through the school or nothing. It was just a bunch of us who decided to form teams and wrestle in our parent's backyards. We even had uniforms. Ed here was glorious."
"I was the biggest, craziest virgin in the world," I said.
"I've seen the photos," Ruthie said. "I don't know if T-shirts and overalls qualify as costumes."
Johnny took a hit from the bong and blew the smoke out toward the ceiling. He looked much older than his twenty-nine years. There were white streaks in his beard. "It was a hell of a lot of fun though," he told her. "Nobody ever got hurt, and I guess it was pretty good exercise, all things considered."
Ruthie took the bong next. She inhaled, exhaled, and sat there thinking for a moment. Then she said, "Maybe you should wrestle, Ed," Ruthie said. "Far be it from me to keep you from glory. And what are the chances of you breaking your arm again?"
But I didn't feel like wrestling. The pain I'd felt at the BBQ was like a ghost that sometimes gently rose up in my arm and reminded me how awful it had been. I felt that ghost in my arm now, and said, "Even if it's one in a million I still wouldn't want to do it."
I took the bong from her. "This son you've got, he look like you?" I asked.
"Yeah. He does unfortunately."
"Ugly children grow up okay sometimes," Ruthie said. "I was homely as they come, but I turned out all right."
Which was less than true. Her black eyes could mess you up. In a room of all right, she was the knife with the diamond handle.
"Ruthie," Johnny said, his eyes going soft, "that child could've looked like a goat, and he could've hit me in the back of the head every day until he was full grown, but I still wouldn't have loved him any less. It's a dangerous thing when you realize you can love like that. It makes you want to puke, knowing you can let yourself get that weak."
"Don't get all mushy," I said, handing him the bong.
"Them sound like fighting words to me."
"Johnny, what good is a piano player with a broken arm?"
Ruthie was staring at the smoke floating over our heads. "You could arm wrestle," she suggested. "That wouldn't be that dangerous. You could have a taste of your former glory."
"Now that's a good idea there," said Johnny.
I was getting tired of the whole night. I'd eaten too much and the pot had given me a dry throat and I didn't want to think about days of yore anymore. Beating Johnny would be a good way to bring things to a close. I said, "All right. What the hell. Let's arm wrestle. Outside though."
Johnny did a sort of whooping war call, raising his fist in the air, and I put back on my sandal.
The three of us went out on to the back porch. There was a small, bright moon out, and the light from a nearby streetlamp threw the shadow of the chainlink fence down across the grass around it. And there was no wind at all. The leaves on our backyard dogwood did not rustle. I said, "There's going be one round and that's it. I won't be able to stand another."
"Hell, when I'm done with you, I know you won't," Johnny warned. He gave the air in front of him a playful punch.
We walked out into the yard. Ruthie sat on the stool we kept on the porch. "Johnny, you can do it!" she yelled out, clapping. "He's big, but he's weak."
We both swiveled our shoulders and stretched and rolled our heads on our necks. The night was so quiet I could hear the cat next door drinking its milk on the patio. Johnny took a step toward me and asked, "Ready, Big Ed?"
"Good to go, motherfucker."
We brought our hands together, placed our feet side by side. In high school, Johnny had been scrawny but relentless. I'd win, but I'd be quiet and exhausted afterwards.
With the count of three, which we did together, it started.
I imagined his arm as a steel lever attached to a machine. It was my job to pull down that lever to turn off that machine. I pushed and squeezed my jaw tight and pushed harder. Johnny was working too.
A solid minute passed. The pain started ebbing in and I didn't like it. I started talking the shit we would talk in high school. "Bet that child's not even yours," I said through my clenched teeth. "Bet she got laid by some greasy sweaty truck driver... decided to give it away... to the dumbest guy she could think of."
He grunted. He swore. He asked, "You remember... Sonya?"
I didn't answer. In high school she'd been the head cheerleader and later on she moved to New York to become a model.
"I gave her head all afternoon once... I had a reputation...This long tongue of mine... She wanted me to try it out on her to see...what it was like."
"Lying bullshiter."
He flicked his tongue out and did another war cry.
I felt his arm harden and start to move forward. He picked up some extra strength, or maybe I had just lost mine. Slowly my arm started to bend. But I tried to hold myself down, and I stiffened my legs and placed all my weight into my shoulder. There was a sudden shudder in my body, though, as if a crack had broken out right through the middle of my torso, and my entire balance tilted. The earth slid out from under my feet. Grass rose up to my cheek, weeds pressed against my ear. Then a pain grabbed hold of my leg like a gnarled talon from the night sky. I was in too much shock to scream. I clenched handfuls of grass and tore them out from the roots.
Ruthie ran over from the back porch. She asked, "What the hell happened? Where does it hurt?"
I pointed to my ankle. Ruthie crouched down and examined it. Johnny was standing with his hands to his sides, a shy boy all the sudden. "I didn't mean to hurt him," he said. "I had no idea he'd fall like that."
"Johnny, it's all right," I said, huffing with the pain. "It's the big dumb guy's fault for agreeing to this to begin with." Then to Ruthie I said, "Just help me inside. My ankle is going kill me if I don't get ice on it."
"Want me to call a doctor?" Ruthie asked.
"Let's get inside and have a look first. I don't want to call a doctor if I can help it."
I hobbled up. I wrapped one arm around my wife and the other around Johnny. I took jumpy little steps on the good foot. Once I was inside, on the couch, I lifted my leg with my hand and placed it on the arm. Ruthie raised the pant leg. "It's swollen," she said.
"I figured that, dear. What I need is some ice."
She shot her middle finger at me and went off to the kitchen. As I heard her twisting the ice tray I turned to Johnny and saw that he looked stricken with a severe pain of his own. He was staring at my ankle as if he were mesmerized. "What's wrong with you?" I asked. "You got a twisted ankle also?"
"No, no. It was just - I was remembering when something real bad that happened to me. When I twisted my ankle out in the desert one night."
Ruthie came in holding a towel and a bowl of ice. "Hold this," she told Johnny, and she gave him the bowl. She took some ice cubes from it, placed them in the towel, and held the towel to my ankle. It smarted, but she held my leg still.
I said to Johnny, "So what happen to your ankle?"
Johnny looked away from where the swelling was. "It was right after I gave Simon to my parents. That March. I was trying to go to sleep when I heard this crying. It sounded like a baby. Or maybe a little older than a baby. But still, a real young child."
Ruthie placed another ice cube into the bunched towel. "Was it a nightmare?" she asked.
"I thought it must've been. But I kept listening and hearing it. I even pinched myself on the neck, to make sure I was awake."
Ruthie moved my foot without warning me. I called out, "Hey," but the pain wasn't all that bad. No worse than the sharp ache of my ankle just lying still. She placed the ice on it from a different angle. "Go on," she told Johnny.
He went on. "I finally couldn't take it anymore. I was too curious. I got my gun - you never know what you'll find out there - and went out. I started walking in the direction where it'd been coming from."
"Were you drunk?" I asked.
"I wasn't even high, Ed. And the further out I walked, the further that crying sound seemed to get."
He nodded as if he disgusted himself.
"Eventually I stepped the wrong way on a stone. I twisted my ankle and tumbled down the side of this rocky hill. My ankle, it swelled just like your ankle is now. I couldn't get up and walk on it. It was cold too. I didn't have my coat on. So pretty soon, once I wasn't walking anymore, I started shivering."
"My foot look too white to you?" I asked Ruthie.
"It's the ice making it cold," she said. She pressed the ice harder. To Johnny she said, "Go on. What happened next?" For the first time all evening she sounded intrigued by what he had to say.
"I tried to get on my knees and crawl, but every time I moved that one leg my ankle would hurt so bad I'd start gagging. So I sat still for awhile and tried to think. And of course I'm freezing at this point, and it's so dark that after awhile you don't know where you end and everything else begins. And I'm getting closer and closer to giving up. Going to sleep and hoping I'd wake up again. Well, that was when I heard this wild barking."
It was getting on my nerves, how interested Ruthie looked. Her eyes were too wide and alert. She no longer looked stoned in the least. "This isn't going to be some I-killed-a-wild-beast-and-ate-it story is it?" I asked. "I sure am tired of those."
"Nothing like that. The dog was my neighbor's. He had a trailer and a whole bunch of crazy dogs on the property."
"The neighbor found you?" Ruthie asked.
"Eventually he did. When he heard me shoot my gun." Johnny looked at my foot. He said in a hoarse murmur, "You guys want to see something kind of gruesome?"
"Who wouldn't?" I said.
"How gruesome?" Ruthie asked. She loved going to horror movies, but wound up watching them through her fingers.
"I wouldn't offer to show it if we hadn't eaten a long time ago," he told us.
Ruthie looked him up and down. She seemed to take a quick inventory of possible missing parts. "You mean to say you let that dog attack you before you shot it?" she asked.
"I hate killing things," he said. "Especially dogs. It's just their nature, telling them things. They can't help what they do." He bent down, placed the bowl on the floor, and raised the leg of his jeans to the knee. The sight of the scar was worse than gruesome. I had seen meat rotting in the summer sun which looked better.
Ruthie turned her head away after looking for a few seconds. "Put it back down," she said, and he did. She looked strangely moved by the sight of the chewed-on leg.
"That's an incredibly stupid thing to do," I said. "Hell, I'd shoot my own grandmother if I thought she was going to start gnawing on my leg. I really would. I'd even shoot Ruthie here if she did the same. Swear to God I would."
Ruthie looked up at me, surprised. Then she didn't look surprised at all. She glanced at my foot. It had turned white as bone. If you held it up against a bank of snow, it would've vanished altogether.
She looked at that foot. Then she looked at me again.
That was when I lost her.

The next day I made an appointment with the locksmith, and I got most of my hair lopped off. “Short and spiky,” I told the hairdresser. “You know, Pat Benatar style.” Rick always had a thing for long flowing lock for some reason. Damn fetishes these guys get. Then I drove over to the mall and bought myself all the slacks and sweaters I could carry. My natural inclination is for jeans and a leather jacket, but that had to go, at least in the short term. Though I always hated the idea of slipping plastic in my eyes, I even purchased prescription contact lenses for the first time in my life.
Once the locksmith was done, I got my new phone number. Then I drove my Ford pickup to the dealer and traded it in for a tiny Toyota, the kind Rick mocked.
And it was green. To Rick, cars should only be either black or red. Anything else was pansy to him. The dealer cocked his head and asked if I was sure. He seemed surprised at how quickly I made up my mind, and I guess I was too. I was surprised how easy it was to change your whole vibe, become a new person. One day I was me and the next I was a new somebody.
When I got home from work the next day, I opened the mailbox and found a folded piece of graph paper, the kind you used in geometry class in high school. It read: “Dear Janie: Nice fucking haircut. Now you look like a true bitch dyke cunt. Fuck you.” I was tempted to call Charlie right then and there, but for some reason I decided not to. Rick had to get it out of his system, I thought. He just had to figure out that we were done in his own head, that I wasn’t going to put up with him anymore, that he wasn’t part of my plan. I thought for sure he would move on.
But over the next two weeks it just got worse. I’d get more notes and things, then Rick started following me to work. The meatpacking plant wasn’t too far from the vet’s where I worked as a secretary at the time. He’d get right on my bumper for the five miles down Route 28, honking and beeping, then he’d swerve off abruptly onto the access road to the industrial park.
The thing was if I looked back at Rick, he’s smile and wave sarcastically like I was leading him to somebody’s birthday party. Mostly I tried to ignore him like he was a hornet buzzing around my hamburger at a picnic. But that glint got me. Made me start thinking Rick still actually believed we were together, not just wanted to believe—really believed. He had that old flash and shine in his eyes.
This is when I called Charlie.

For starters, my romantic history at that point was not worth a damn. Rick was just the latest in a string of idiots, really. Dan and Steve were losers but when I told them it was over they acted like gentlemen and bowed out gracefully. But Tom and Paul and Willy were not one bit happy being dumped, and they let it be known. I don’t know if it was something about men those days or what, but like Rick, these guys just couldn’t handle rejection. Paul, for instance, actually told me that he’d pay me a thousand dollars for just two more weeks. “Are you kidding? What kind of whore do you think I am?” I said. Tom tried to make up a plus and minus chart. Said he wanted to convince me that I should at least give him more time. He said he had it all figured out and all I had to do was listen to his logic.
But it was Steve who really gave me a glimpse into a dark side of things. He shook hands with me when I broke it off, and I didn’t hear from him for a while. I thought he swallowed it fine. Then he started e-mailing detailed descriptions of encounters with women he supposedly slept with (he called them “romantic encounters”). He would call me late and hang up. Steve kept it up even after I told him never to contact me again. A month later it finally petered out.
I guess I’ve always been a bit boy-crazy. God gave me a pretty face and a nice rack. I know that. Guys like looking at me and I don’t mind it. Never have. Even when I was fourteen I would just love swaying across the school cafeteria. I would feel their eyes following me. I would feel the weight of my own body through the air. I could tell they would fight each other just to talk to me, that they had to rush home and ram their hands down their pants. I realized I had clout, and I liked this. I liked being able to change a boy’s entire mood by just moving across his line of vision. If other girls hated me why should I care?
Even when I found a man I loved I had a hard time settling down. I couldn’t stop thinking about the others, all those eyes that desired me. At twenty-two I was engaged to Eddie, my boyfriend from the community college. It was so sweet: we both got our associate’s and he said he wanted me in his life forever. He was a solid kind. But I would go out to bars with my girlfriends and watch the eyes follow me, slobbering eyes. It felt…good. Something new. I just couldn’t help it; I had to go home with a few of them at least.
Then I met Daryl. My first real job was at a store that sold Persian rugs. I would set up appointments with clients, sell rugs on occasion, design ads for the locals, that sort of thing. Daryl was one of the guys out on the sales floor. Handsome and smart. I just couldn’t say no. Over and over. When Eddie found out, he split for Portland. I don’t blame him one bit.
With Rick I thought it was different. At work Michelle said she could vouch for him. Sensitive. Funny. Good job, his head square on his shoulders. Dina said he was “a real grab.” Carla said he was a “swell guy.”
For the first two months I thought so too. He would take me out to whatever restaurant I wanted. We would catch a movie or go out to the diner for pie and coffee. When he’d drive me home, Rick would pat my knee to the beat of a Rolling Stones tune, then massage my shoulders, clutching my thighs with splayed fingers. I liked that. Inside he would lean into me, clasping my face in between his hands. The roughness set a fire off within me. I could feel his breath on my neck. I always thought Rick had a baked smell, like Thanksgiving stuffing. He would grind into me and tell me I’m “one special lady.” Rick could do some talking.
“You’re something else,” I’d say, unsure how to respond. I didn’t think of myself as special, or a lady but it was nice to hear. I was just a secretary down at Parkland Veterinary Clinic, the woman who phoned dog owners reminding them of their Thursday appointment. The only thing I had going for me was a decent appearance and a split-level on the edge of town that I got for a steal on auction. I had a simple kind of life.
Rick would sit on my loveseat, hand under his chin, and listen to me talk about my dysfunctional family like I was speaking of the divine rapture or something. He was a good listener, or pretended to be. He made me feel like everything I did or said was important, and for a while Rick did make me feel poles apart from the rest. He would rub my arms and tell me I’m a “strong person,” and that my parents were lucky to have me. He would tell me I have “a good heart.” The thought of this still sends shivers up my arms. Rick seemed like a real sensitive guy.
Then something switched in our relationship, and it never switched back.
What happened was we went out one Saturday to the county fair. Every August I had to go see the pigs and sheep and ride the Ferris wheel. It was my way of staying in touch with my childhood, I guess. I just liked it. From the beginning I could tell Rick didn’t want to go, even in the car. He referred to the fair as “that thing,” and he didn’t touch me at all on the drive down. It was weird.
“Man, it smells like shit out here,” he said once we entered the gates.
“Well, that’s just the farm animals,” I said. “It’s always like that.” I slipped my arm around my waist, trying to lighten his mood.
“Yeah, they stink like shit,” he said. “Dumb ass animals.”
It was strange: Rick was always moody, but that day he was acting like a spoiled child. I was surprised. I just didn’t get why he was in such knots.
Finally, we went to one of those things where you try to toss the rings onto the clown’s pointy nose. On three tries he didn’t even get close. I didn’t want to say anything, but he was so damn serious about it. Like I could care less whether he won me a purple stuffed monkey, or some other waste of space. But after his third miss, I just burst out laughing. Tried to cover my mouth and everything, but I just let it come.
“You think that’s fucking funny?” he said. “My failure’s amusing to you?”
“I think your over-reaction to this stupid game is funny,” I said. “Come on Rick. Relax would ya?”
Instead he snapped his head, and made a beeline for his Jeep. He didn’t say a word to me. I followed him, but I wasn’t about to hurry on his account. Just by looking at the back of his neck I could tell he was furious. Bristled. The whole thing was idiotic, laughable really.
Now Rick could’ve just left me there in the lurch, but instead he sat in his car, engine running, hands gripping the wheel. As soon as I got in he lit out of there, tearing up the sod, speeding down old rural Route Two back home. By this point the sun was low on the horizon, a blare right into our eyes on the windy road.
Then he let me have it.
“I was nice enough to go along for your hick-ass bullshit,” he said. “But I’m not about to be mocked while I fucking do it.” His eye was twitching and he kneaded the wheel. We pretty much had it out for a good half hour. At one point he even had to pull over. I thought then that he might punch me, and I was ready to make a run for it through the cornfields if I had to.
His people were drunks or in prison, and the last thing he wanted was a life like them, he said. Rick thought he was better than them. “I want to keep it clean,” he said. That was one of his favorite expressions. “I want to keep it clean as a whistle.”
Rick was just another self-loathing redneck.
So I asked him, “Am I a hick then because I like to go to the county fair? Is that what you think?”
He blinked and swallowed. Looked off. I saw his hesitation. That’s what I remembered when I decided we would part ways. The blinking. The swallowing. For about ten seconds Rick stared out over the burnished road, the sun highlighting every pore. I saw exactly who he was.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think that.”
This was the beginning of the end for us. We kept trying for a few more months, but after that fight in the car I knew it was over. After the fair I was just some redneck pussy he could take out his aggression upon. Someone he could look down upon. Those last few months we fought every day. I’d tell Charlie and my sister Diane that Rick was just confused, that he tried too hard, that he wanted to be somebody he wasn’t. But when I told Rick I had enough of him he pounded his fists into the wall of my kitchen, and teared-up. He grabbed me by the scruff of my blouse and said we were meant for each other, and that I just didn’t see it yet. He shoved the dishes off the kitchen table and said he was going to make me see it.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “Watch me.”
When he stomped out of my house, I looked at the two holes in the drywall set in there like the eyes of some deep-sea creature.

Charlie took me for a walk around my neighborhood. He has always been good at calming me down. I’m sure this is why he wanted me to get outside, to see a broader view of things. We didn’t talk about Rick at all. Instead I asked him about his girls and work, things like that. We spoke slowly and breathed the air deeply and watched the tree limbs sway in the breeze. This was March: the weather was starting to turn.
When we walked by Charlie’s car, he unlocked the trunk and pulled out a sleeping bag and a suitcase. I shook my head and said that wasn’t necessary.
“I hope not,” he said. “But this has got to stop.”
What could I say to that? It had been two months since Rick and I broke up, and Rick was gaining momentum, if anything. Charlie said that short of moving and finding a new job I’d done all I could.
“Time to draw a line in the sand,” Charlie said. “Tomorrow you and I call to see about a restraining order on this guy. Enough.”
“Okay,” I said. “All right.”
As much as I wanted to think of myself as independent, I was comforted by Charlie’s presence, by his car in my driveway. The Colt 45 sat on my bureau. But the downside was I also felt trapped in my own house.
Charlie and I both called in sick the next morning, and went to see about a restraining order. This was easier than it sounds. On television it always seemed so simple, but when we tried this avenue it was a long-ass wait for nothing. After all the paper work I filled out the police told me the case didn’t seem to warrant any restraining order.
“This man is following me around on a daily basis. How is that not grounds for a restraining order?” Charlie’s eyes narrowed into dagger points.
“Now that could just be coincidence,” the cop said. “In the end it’s his word against hers.”
“It could be a coincidence if it was one day,” Charlie said. “But this is a series of days we’re talking about.”
“Then it could be a series of coincidences,” the cop said.
“Jesus Christ,” Charlie said. If it weren’t for quitting booze entirely I would have loved a beer or two at that point.
“He punched her out. How about that?”
Well, the policeman took that more seriously. But because we didn’t report it at the time, they said there was little they could do about it now long after the fact. Charlie could file a report, but if I didn’t have bodily evidence, we could forget it. Ultimately the cop said it was still my word against Rick’s.

It felt good having Charlie sleeping in the room next to me, like old times. When I was in elementary school my mother told my father to never set foot in the house again. As far as my sister and I knew that didn’t seem to upset him. He got an apartment in town, and would pick Diane and me up from school—sometimes drop us off at home—
his engine grumbling. In the car he would smoke his cigarettes, and ask us how Mom is doing. I don’t know if my mother owned a gun, but she did get the two German Shepherds. Then my father got a job as a long-distance mover. I was nine and Diane was seven. That was about the last time either one of us saw our father. Two years later he stopped sending checks. I guess he thought we were all grown up by then.
For three years my mother really struggled. She hired a baby-sitter for us during the week, this old lady in the neighborhood we called Big Betty. Don’t know where that came from since she wasn’t big, and her name wasn’t Betty. She did have a huge nest of hair though, which she kept up in a beehive most of the time. After work Mom would bring home fast food and collapse on the sofa, or just go straight to bed with a glass of rum. Sometimes Big Betty would stay with us even then, telling us stories about her grandchildren, or things she read in the newspaper, or calling her relatives on the phone and having us talk to them. Big Betty kept us busy with talk.
Meeting Raymond was an accident. During the day my mother was selling mattresses down on the strip, and she took up a part-time job as a grocery store clerk on the weekends. One day Raymond walked into the mattress store. He had just moved to town with his son Charlie after a long divorce down in Florida. He was trying to start over. New mattresses were part of that. My mother and Raymond hit it off from the get-go.
I’ll never forget the first time Mom brought Charlie and Raymond over for dinner. Mom had told us that she found a special man, and she had been dating him for nearly three months at that point. It was time for the families to meet, she said. Mom made a fancy pork dish with a sauce of some kind and mashed potatoes and side dishes all over the table. When they came in I thought they must have the wrong house. Raymond was so kind and handsome, with this way of cocking his head slightly that made him seem like a movie star or a politician. He would just listen. I’d never seen a man do that before.
And Charlie. Charlie had the same ways his dad had. The only difference was Charlie was only one year older than me. He hardly said a word the whole night, but I couldn’t take my eyes off him. His face seemed carved out of marble somehow. He just seemed more solid than most, but calm and friendly at the same time. I watched the candles flicker on his face; I watched his eyes glow in the circles of light.
A year later Raymond proposed to my mother, and he and Charlie moved into our house. All of us were on top of the world. Charlie and I became best friends, which Diane came to resent. He looked out for me, gave me a boy’s perspective on life. Diane and I shared one room, and Charlie slept in the room next to ours. There was an energy back in the house. I would palm the wall as if it was his head, or chest, or back, as if I could feel him inhale and exhale through the wall.
I always loved mowing the lawn for some reason. Maybe it was because it gave me a chance to make something shabby look new. Then there was the lush scent of grass clippings. I would recline on the lawn afterward, and I didn’t care if the clippings stuck all over me or not. But when Charlie came I gave the job to him. We argued about it first, but then I was glad to turn it over, only to him. I would watch him mow the lawn, his shirt off, the clippings gusting up onto his chest and sweaty back, his muscles knotting and flexing with each turn of the mower.
All I wanted was to settle down with somebody. I am easy-going, laid-back, easy to be with. I never wanted to be one of those people who were so rigid they drove you nuts. With Charlie there I felt secure. This was all I wanted. This was everything.

Charlie didn’t spend the night every day of the week, but three days out of seven was enough to throw a wrench in Rick’s stalking. As far as I knew he stopped driving by the house, and he didn’t follow me in his car anymore. But Rick would still leave profane notes for me, and send me threatening e-mails. These were enough to keep Charlie around.
“It’s important to keep your head up,” Charlie told me. “Don’t let him beat you down.”
Charlie and me were at his favorite pizza place, “Sweet Home Alabama” blaring on the jukebox. He was saying how just varying my routine is important, just in case. Then I asked Charlie if he ever had a woman act this way to him. “Not that I know of,” he said. “But women don’t seem to get this way as much,” he said. “You know? And not with me.”
“Yeah, right,” I said. “What are you talking about?”
He dashed oregano and pepper and garlic powder on the pizza and we dove in.
That night he watched a movie while I talked to Diane on the phone. I hadn’t spoken to her in months. In the fall doctors removed a third of her tongue—cancer. I flew out to Indianapolis to see her, which I think she appreciated. She was jittery from the lack of nicotine—the doctors made her quit cold turkey.
“Hey, Shirley,” she said. This was a warm greeting for her. In some ways, Diane had a much tougher time in life than I did. Sometimes I felt guilty about it, or pitied her. That night I told her about Rick and all, about what was happening. Having heard some of my previous stories, she wasn’t surprised. Then I made a mistake: I mentioned that Charlie was helping out. She slipped into one of her rants about how Charlie stole me from her, literally snatched me from her, and how before he came along we were tight like sister should be. “What the hell happened?” she asked. Then she kept on asking it. I apologized for even mentioning him.
“Just forget the whole thing,” she said. “I have enough problems out here as is.”
She slipped through my fingers. Ultimately Diane just sees herself as alone in life, sees herself as driven by loss. Bum luck. I remembered how once she told me she found out where our father lived. She drove out there and followed him around. She even bought a gun. She told me she fantasized about putting one through his skull then driving over the body. She told me she liked imagining her car wheels rolling over his chest and neck.
When Charlie was finished with his move he gave me a hug and said he should go home that night, that Charlotte was starting to feel neglected.
“It looks like everything here is under control for now,” he said.
For a moment I fantasized that Charlotte and the girls died in a plane crash, that Charlie was racked with need. I thought if the worst were ever to happen, I would be the first person he would call upon. Or I could be. I imagined Charlie nursing his pain with beer and shots of vodka. I imagined laying him back on the sofa and pressing my body into his, holding his face in my hands, hearing him whimper my name. It was wrong. I felt immediately guilty at this thought. It sent a shiver up my arm anyway.
Charlie shook his coat on and kissed my forehead.
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” he said. “Be sure to look up.”
I nodded. Watched him slip into darkness.

The next day I got three phone calls at work from Rick. The first time he hung up. The second time he called me a “stinking slut,” and hung up. The third time he screamed, “I’m going to bash your fucking head in,” then hung up. I thought about calling Charlie, but decided it could wait. It wasn’t an emergency situation. I didn’t want to annoy Charlie by running to him at the first sign of trouble. I didn’t want him to think I was that frail. Rick had acted this way before. This was just more of the same, I told myself.
After work I went to the grocery store. I wanted to buy some food for the next time Charlie came over: popcorn, apples, cereal, French roast (his favorite), ginger snaps. As I placed the grocery bags in my car I noticed the sky had an odd tint to it—
blurred or smoky.
I pulled into the driveway and stepped out of the car. I opened the trunk and lifted the bags. Then it hit me, a thudding triangle of pain tearing into my head. I could feel my body slump against the bumper. Then another rending blow. I could feel the warm stickiness on my hair, on my face. I felt my body slip down, slip under. I felt cold, as if the cool air was seeping in and the warmth was seeping out.

The skin of Charlie’s nose flickered in and out. Mr. Cort’s hat. My mother’s eyelashes. Charlie’s brow, beaded with sweat. The back of his hand smearing it.
Nausea burned up my throat. Two women peered over me and touched my shoulder. One woman winked a green eye.
I could hear inner workings. Sounds of machinery echoed from below. In the darkness the blankets were heavy. I tried to lift myself but my head seethed with pain. A dozen winged hands clamped me down.
Charlie’s eyes and mouth. My mother’s cheeks and hair. Diane’s neck. The pale freckles on Charlie’s chin. Raymond’s eyebrows. Charlie’s teeth and smile.

When the drugs lifted, the pain remained, like silt at the bottom of a dried creek bed. They told me I had sixty stitches in my head divided between two places. A concussion. Lucky I didn’t have a coma. When I could raise my body to a sitting position I still wasn’t hungry, as if the medication carried that away.
My mother told me that Frank Cort found me slumped in my driveway. Nobody knew how long I was there. Groceries were strewn all over the driveway, and blood was leaking from my head. She patted my cheek and massaged my neck and arms. She said that nobody knew what happened. I watched Charlie. He said he called the police, but they hadn’t any luck. Diane embraced me. Charlie stood on the other side of the room, his jaw clenching and unclenching. He couldn’t stand still.
I had a severe concussion and that the doctors said I was very lucky. My mother said they didn’t know exactly what struck me, but that whoever did this to me hit with full force. For the first time I could remember I wanted to hide.
Somehow I felt this was my punishment for thinking those thoughts about Charlotte, about Charlie’s girls. Still, Rick seemed to be some kind of vengeance sent for an expressed purpose. Rick is my regret come to surface, I thought. This is my own fault, I told myself. I told Diane and my mother that I’d like to speak to Charlie for a moment. Even though my mother couldn’t understand, I was never interested in religion or fate or God. This was different.
The door clicked behind them. The grains in the particleboard reminded me of the doors they had at Lubbock High. Charlie stayed where he was, leaning against the far wall. His teeth gleaned in the light when he opened his mouth to talk. He stammered, stuttered, looked away.
“I don’t even know what to say,” he said.
“Neither do I,” I said. I didn’t even want to hear the name Rick, I told Charlie. He nodded.
“Just give me the address,” he said.
I told him and he closed his eyes for a moment. I could hear a nurse in the hallway teasing a patient. “Henry, chocolate pudding again? You going on a diet now?”
“That’s it,” Charlie said. “No more chances.”
I knew what he meant. He told me he was going that night or the night after. He would call my answering machine. If it was successful he would just let the machine pick up, press a button, and hang up. If he wasn’t, he would tell me in person.

When they released me a couple days later Diane drove her rental car and my mother sat in back. My mother gently rubbed my neck and told me that she called my boss and he told me to take several weeks off. Diane drove us to Mom’s house and Mom helped me upstairs to my old room. My mother sat me on the bed and kneeled next to me.
“What would you like? We can get some of that Mexican food you love. Pancho’s? We can get movies. Sodas? Ice cream?”
I nodded. Normally I would have hated so much blatant attention, but this time I didn’t care. It felt good to be coddled. All I wanted to do was recline in my childhood bed and let life unfold. I could feel the stitches in my head and my scalp throbbing. I felt like the bride of Frankenstein, without the husband.
That evening I let Diane bring the television and VCR from downstairs into my room, as I always wanted to do when I was a teenager. This seemed ironic—when I finally got my wish I was an adult who faced a near-death attack. My mother brought me chicken chimichangas. I doused them with hot sauce and my appetite returned. I watched NASCAR. Something about the cars circling around and around hypnotized me, relieved the tension. Mom and Diane just let me be. That night I just wanted to be with my own thoughts.
I turned the television on mute. Still watching the cars circulate, I thought about Charlie. I remembered watching him play football. I loved watching him the other boys. He would lower his shoulders, and plow right into the opponent, and the other boy would flail backwards, arms limp, head snapping back. It was exhilarating. Terrifying. Maybe if I weren’t related to him I would have thought he was too rough. But when he pounded some poor defenseless kid into the grass, my heart leapt, and that tingly feeling wound through me.
The television station cut from the race itself to one of the crew. Without the sound the guys in the pit looked like idiotic robots, and the race seemed absurd. Charlie used to mock television when we were kids: “Why would I waste my time drooling like an idiot over a bunch of flickering images,” he’d say. Charlie would rather interact; in this way he was almost more feminine than masculine. At Fieldstone’s, the grocery store where he worked as a teenager, Charlie would chat up just about every customer. He could remember the minutest details from the lives of each regular customer. The customers would line up just for his friendly checkout service. It made perfect sense to me that Charlie would get a business degree from college, come back and start up the best tree removal service in the area. Everything Charlie touched turned to gold.
Laying in my childhood bed I remembered walking to Fieldstone’s to buy sugar or milk for Mom, but also to visit Charlie. I would stand in the magazine aisle and simply watch Charlie work the crowd. I would feel an onrush of pride, pride that I knew him, that he was my stepbrother. One day he brought me a charm bracelet from the store. It was summer and I was a camp counselor at the art camp that year. Charlie handed me the bracelet and said, “I was thinking of you today, for some reason.” I never told him how much that bracelet meant to me. It was and still is, by far, my most prized possession.

The next morning I awoke in a cold sweat. I don’t know if it was the medication wearing off or the fact that I just remembered to check my messages. Either way, I lurched out of bed and lifted the receiver.
I knew if I did actually sleep with Charlie I would probably lose respect for him. He was the closest I knew to the perfect person. He always seemed to do the right thing, to be in the right place at the right time. As I dialed my voice mail I realized that in making my romantic decisions I wanted to prove something to myself. For some reason I chose trash. This is why I loved Charlie. He was the shining example of “The Good Guy,” the moral man, a rarity, a knight in shining armor.
As I pressed star, then my phone number and pass code, I thought of a conversation I had with Charlie a few months after his father and he moved in to our house. We were in the back yard, helping my mother rake leaves. I held the plastic bags open while Charlie bent over and scooped the dry leaves into the gap.
“Don’t you ever worry about your mother?” I asked. I looked up into a curtain of leaves. A thick cloud of maple and elm and oak fluttered behind Charlie’s head. The rustle sounded almost like water. I could smell one of our neighbors burning leaves a few blocks away.
“Yes,” he said, looking away. “But she had mental problems. She wasn’t good for any of us so something had to happen.”
He told me he just wasn’t interested in maintaining a relationship with her. She would write him once a month, but Charlie would never respond. It seemed like an un-Charlie-like thing to do, cold and callous.
“You have one new message, and eight saved messages,” the automated voice said. “To listen to your messages, press one.” I did.
Now I understood.
When I listened to the message I heard a faint hissing at first, for about two seconds. Then a single beep, more hissing, then the phone clicked dead. I dropped the phone immediately, as if it was hot to the touch. I inhaled and exhaled. I ran my thumb along my right wrist, where I usually keep my charm bracelet. It was inside my home, on the bureau in my bedroom. Safe. Protected. My pulse throbbed, and it felt good.

The phone rings an hour later. “The arts and crafts project with the ladies is such a hit that we’re starting a second round,” Maud says. “So sorry, sweetie. I guess it will be a lunch instead of a brunch.” Angie stays on the phone for a few moments more as Maud describes the craft project. It has something to do with naked dolls becoming clothed and makeup-ed. But Angie isn’t listening anymore--the front door just rattled.
Angie stands in the doorway between the kitchen and living room, staring at the front door. Tuning out Maud’s loud voice, Angie listens for the noise again. It might be her neighbor Joyce, stopping by for an actual visit. She’s been over twice before but always refuses to come in. First, she dropped off cookies in a hurry after insulting Angie for being single. Joyce was a bit softer the next time, asking for her plate back and commenting about the last heat wave.
The door rattles again. The doorknob is actually twisting and creaking.
“I’ve got to go now,” Angie says quietly, interrupting Maud. “I’ll see you at noon.”
Angie sets the phone down on the floor. It’s probably one of the neighborhood kids pulling some prank like she’s Boo Radley. She dismisses the idea then forces herself to walk the few feet to the front door. The doorknob is no longer moving. Maybe the person has given up. Angie peeks out the door’s small window.
An old woman stands on the stoop. At first, Angie think it’s Joyce with a new perm. But this woman is shorter, maybe five-feet, and wears a bright yellow pullover and light blue pants. Around her permed white hair is a green scarf, and reading glasses dangle from her neck on a beaded chain. She looks like spring. She must be one of Joyce’s friends, accidentally at the wrong house.
Angie turns the lock and opens the door.
The woman jerks her head up and peers at Angie. “Thank you for opening the door. I seem to have misplaced my key.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’ll just get to work in the garden now.” The woman makes a move forward, like she’s actually going to walk into the house, but Angie blocks her.
“I’m sorry, but you must be confused. This is my house and my garden. You must be looking for someone else.”
“Look, young lady,” she says with sudden authority, “I don’t know who you think you are, but I am Mrs. Evelyn Wheatley and I own this house and that garden. So you best let me by.” And without another word, she pushes past Angie and marches straight through the living room to the kitchen.
Angie scrambles after Evelyn, almost forgetting to shut the front door. “How did you get here?” she asks after reaching Evelyn who stands at the open backdoor, surveying the garden.
“By taxi, of course. I’ve never driven a car a day in my life.” She clears her throat. “I woke up this morning and realized I hadn’t worked in the garden all last week. So I called a taxi and a nice gentleman in a tweed jacket picked me up and brought me home.”
Evelyn clearly doesn’t know what day or month it is. And now Angie remembers. She must be the former tenant, the widow who was moved to the nursing home. How did she get out?
“Did anyone see you leave?”
“Of course not. It’s none of their business. I leave every morning to work in the garden. But for some reason the taxi wasn’t waiting this morning, so I had to call one.” Evelyn steps down into the thick grass and thrusts her hands on her hips. “This garden is disgraceful.” She walks to the nearest flowerbed and digs her fingers into the dirt. “The daffodils and tulips should’ve been dug up by now and stored in the cooler.” She pulls out a bulb and knocks away the dirt. “And the young red oaks should’ve been pruned.” Sticking the bulb in her pants pocket, Evelyn begins to walk around the yard, touching each plant and tree, explaining what pruning, weeding, and planting needs to be done.
Angie simply stands at the backdoor, watching Evelyn’s careful movements. She must be at least eighty, yet her steps are sure. Her voice is clear and distinct, not at all like she imagined the voice of a person with dementia to be. Evelyn speaks with authority to the plants, to the small lives she’s cared for for who knows how many years. Evelyn returns to the flowerbed where she pulled up the daffodil bulb. She bends and slowly sits on her knees then rolls up the sleeves of her pullover.
“I need a trowel, wheelbarrow, pruning shears, the water hose, and a pair of gloves—the flowered ones.”
Angie stands still, transfixed. Shouldn’t she call the nursing home and let them know where Evelyn is? But before Angie can retreat into the kitchen for the phone, Evelyn turns and says, “Well, are you going to get them, or not?”
Angie drops her gaze and begins the walk around the house to the garage. Inside she gathers all of what Evelyn has requested, except for the flowered gloves. The only ones she can find are the same brown and black ones she touched when she first dug through this pile some two months ago. When she brings over all of the gardening tools in the wheelbarrow, Evelyn says, “These aren’t the gloves I asked for. I need the flowered ones.”
“I couldn’t find them. I’m sorry.”
Evelyn looks from the gloves to Angie. “Fine. These will have to do.” She turns back to the flowerbed and away she goes—pruning, cutting, and digging.
There is nothing else for Angie to do but watch. So she sits down at the threshold of the backdoor and folds her arms across her knees. Evelyn’s hands move swiftly but with a gentleness Angie can’t quite comprehend. It’s like this woman knows each of these plants intimately and so even though she has to pull up some and prune back others, it’s all done with love. More than that, Evelyn is enjoying herself. In fact, she’s humming.
Maud hadn’t looked this way when she tended her garden, but then, she’d chosen a garden for different reasons. The day Angie left for college, Maud appeared in her husband’s carpentry workshop to inform him that he would have to stop acting like his job was his life and spend more time with her. Maud had grown jealous of the wood, which was ridiculous. Of course he loved the wood more than her, as he should have. She hadn’t deserved him. After her monologue ended, he had smiled, waited for her to stalk out, and then installed a lock on the workshop door.
And so Maud churned up the back corner of their backyard and started a garden. At first, there were only strawberries and cucumbers. Each month whole sections of grass succumbed to tomatoes, string beans, garlic, oregano, lavender, parsley, carrots, cabbage, broccoli, and kale. She began spending whole mornings in the dirt, on her hands and knees, each week adding a new row. During those last six months, Angie’s father spent his early mornings in a lawn chair watching his wife work the earth.
This went on for a good two years. Until one summer evening Maud left the supper dishes in the sink and marched out the backdoor to the shed for the hoe and pitchfork. Earlier that week the doctor had ordered Angie’s father to bed, indefinitely. The Hospice nurse was coming over twice a day to see that he was comfortable. It was difficult to ignore the steady beeping from the heart monitor and the periodic drip of the IV. Angie was still sitting at the kitchen table when Maud shoved open the backdoor. And two hours later, the backyard was a heap of compost. The next day, she turned the ripped, juicy plants back under the soil and laid out slabs of new sod.
Angie smiles at Evelyn even though her back is turned. If only Maud had felt this way about gardening, maybe things would be different. If only she hadn’t preferred it to being with Angie while her father wilted away. Even if her husband had been dying, why did Maud have to ruin other pieces of life just because she was losing the only one she had never been able to control?
Angie sighs. Evelyn shouldn’t be here. She needs to go back to the nursing home. What if she’s missed her morning’s medication? What if she has a heart condition? What if she dies right here in the garden? How would she explain it? But Evelyn won’t die. She’s obviously healthy. Angie is sure of at least that.
She watches Evelyn work along the east flowerbed for what feels like half an hour. Angie really should call and at least let people know that Evelyn is here, safe and happy. But it’s because Evelyn is so happy that Angie doesn’t want to call anyone. Shouldn’t this poor woman be allowed a few hours of pleasure in the garden she was forced to give up? Maud will be coming over soon, so Evelyn will have to be gone by then. If Maud finds her here, she’ll start a phone calling campaign to the police, the fire department, and every nursing home in town. She would set the situation right and be the heroine of this poor old woman’s confused life.
Angie reaches down to scratch her ankle and realizes her legs have fallen asleep and are now tingling wildly. She stands and shakes out each leg. Her stomach aches. She glances into the kitchen and sees that it’s almost eleven o’clock.
“Mrs. Wheatley?” Angie says, and Evelyn turns to look at her. “I’m going inside for some tea. Would you like something?”
“I’d love tea, thank you.” She smiles broadly and for a moment, stops digging. “Henry and I used to drink tea every morning and evening. We would go through a box of teabags a week.”
A few minutes later, Angie returns with two mugs. She sets hers down on a small concrete stepping stone then carefully carries the other to Evelyn, who removes her gloves to take the cup in her hands.
“Thank you so much.” Evelyn sips at the tea. Angie turns to go back to her seat by the door when Evelyn says, “Now, who are you again?”
Angie stops and looks down at the seated Evelyn. She asked the question with such a patient tone that Angie almost doesn’t know what to tell her.
“I’m Angie Sampson.”
“And do you have a husband?” That seems to be the golden question. Every woman over forty wants to see Angie married off. Life’s starting to feel like a Jane Austen novel.
“No, just a mother.”
Evelyn nods. “So what are you doing in the neighborhood?”
“Well, I live here now.”
Evelyn meets Angie’s gaze and takes another sip. “So I hired you to watch the house while I’m away?”
“Something like that.”
Evelyn looks back at the flowerbed. “But where’s Henry? He was here when I left last. Is he at a doctor’s appointment? Oh no,” she sets the cup down in the flowerbed, “was I supposed to take him? Is he waiting in bed?”
She is pushing herself up when Angie steps forward and helps her back down. “No, no. Henry isn’t waiting. You haven’t forgotten anything.” She pats Evelyn softly and hands her the cup.
“Are you sure? Because sometimes I forget the most important things. I once forgot his birthday. Isn’t that terrible?” She turns to Angie with a desperate look.
“No, not at all. My mother has forgotten mine plenty of times. But each time, it was still my birthday.”
Evelyn smiles and takes a drink. “I like tea. Henry and I always did. I once tried to grow tea plants, right over there in that back corner, but they wouldn’t take. Not enough rain, the books said, even for Houston.”
“I can imagine.” Angie drops to her knees beside Evelyn. “So you planted this garden?”
“Why, of course I did! Henry doesn’t know the first thing about planting anything. But he helps me, mostly with the lifting. He always was a strong man.”
Angie smiles. She wants to hug her. “So do you have any children?”
Evelyn shakes her head. She sets the now-empty cup in the grass then slips back on her gloves. “I always loved children though, especially girls with their pigtails and lacy dresses, like postcards. Henry would’ve loved a little girl.”
Angie almost can’t stand it anymore. She wants Evelyn to stay, not in the kitchen or the living room, but in the garden, her garden. Evelyn belongs here on her knees with the brown gloves and the green scarf drooping from the side of her head, surrounded by clumps of dirt and small piles of fresh weeds. The garden looks right again, just like it had when Angie first moved in, when fertilizer and mulch were still in the grass and under the bushes. Evelyn can’t go.
“What’s the name of the bush you’re pruning right now?” Angie asks, squatting down next to her.
“It’s a lantana and these are the blueberry bushes,” she says, nodding to the right. “We planted those so we could make blueberry pies and jams. I canned eight jars one year, but mostly we just sprinkled them over toast.” She pauses and Angie can see her smiling. “Joyce still comes and picks the blueberries for jams, so at least they’re not all going to the jays and mockingbirds.”
“Joyce, next-door?”
She frown, but keeps digging. “She’s such a wonderful lady. But I haven’t seen her in a few days, which worries me.”
Angie considers telling her about Joyce, that she’s just fine and still comes by. But then Evelyn might want to go see Joyce, and then she would leave, and then Joyce would make her go back to the nursing home. But Angie wants Evelyn to stay. Maybe she can even convince Maud to let her join them for lunch.
Evelyn drops the trowel and turns to Angie who is still sitting next to her. Evelyn’s whole face seems to droop, and her mouth hangs slack. Her eyes search Angie’s face as she touches her cheeks with the dirty gloves still on.
“Who are you?” she says, her voice fading into a frail moan.
“I’m Angie. I take care of the garden while you’re away.”
“Where is Nurse Mabel? Why isn’t Henry here?” Before Angie can stop her, Evelyn is standing and pulling off the gloves. “Where is Henry? I need to go home.”
Angie stands and takes both of Evelyn’s shaking hands. “You’re already home. Right here. This is your home. This is your garden. You are fine. Everything’s fine.”
“Everything’s not fine,” she says, shaking her head. “Where is Henry? Why isn’t he here?” She tugs at the green scarf and twists it fiercely. Her eyes dart around the yard. “Why am I here? I need to go home.”
“Listen to me, Mrs. Wheatley. You are home. This is where you need to be.”
Evelyn stares wildly back at Angie then pulls her hands from Angie’s grip. “I need to go home. I need to go home. You have to take me.”
Evelyn stumbles toward the backdoor, but Angie reaches out and holds her by the shoulders. “Henry will be here soon. You were right. He is at the doctor. But he’ll be home.”
“He will?”
“Yes, he wants to see you.”
Evelyn’s shoulders relax under Angie’s hands, and she smiles. “Oh, I’m so glad,” she says then pulls at her green scarf. “I miss him, very much.”
Angie steps forward and hugs Evelyn, who stands limp and quiet. If Angie can only convince Evelyn to return to the flowerbed, to slip back on her gloves and stay for just a little while longer, then everything will be fine. Angie will drive her back to the nursing home before Maud comes over. She will explain that Evelyn just wandered down the street and into her yard, no harm done. No one will ever have to know that for one morning, Evelyn returned home and restored her garden. And that Angie kept her there while she waited for her mother.