Raising Hope (35 page)
I smile at her from under my sun hat and see that she’s squinting and chewing on the inside of her cheek, looking at me as if I’ve shown her a complicated mathematical equation. Well, gardening is one of those things you learn best by doing. You can think about it all you like, but there’s no substitute for just getting your hands dirty and planting. “Here,” I tell her, handing her a trowel. “You try.”
She digs the hole just fine. Everybody knows how to dig a hole. Then she picks up a plant and gingerly taps the bottom of the pot. “Be a little more forceful,” I tell her. “You won’t hurt it.”
She taps harder and the plant slides out. Then it’s in her hands and she says, “I know you said something about pulling on the roots?”
“Mmm-hmm.” I nod. “Tip the plant upside down so you can see the bottom. What pattern do the roots make?”
“A circle,” she says. “The roots are growing in a circle.”
“Right. That’s because the plant was growing in a pot. Now, we don’t want the roots to keep growing in a circle when we put it in the ground; we want the roots to spread out so they can take in the nutrients and water the plant needs. We want the roots to expand.” I move my fingers apart to show her what I mean. “So you need to tease those roots on the bottom, to separate them and spread them out.”
She begins to pick at them, then says, “Uh-oh. I broke some.”
“That’s okay. That happens. The plant will thank you for it, because it’ll really thrive when it’s in the ground. You’re setting it up to establish itself well.”
“Okay,” she says, nodding. She hesitantly sets the plant in the ground, then picks up soil with her hands to fill in the rest of the hole.
“Now pat around the plant. You’re kind of giving it a little hug to send it on its way.”
Hope firmly tamps down the soil surrounding the plant. “I did it,” she said.
“You did it,” I agree, putting my arm around her shoulders. “Now you know how to plant.”
We work side by side, edging the meadow garden with the annuals I was able to scrounge up from the nursery this late in the season. It’s pretty, what we’re doing. I think it will be lovely for Ruth’s wedding.
“Who taught you how to plant?” Hope stands and stretches, then kneels again to continue working.
“My mother,” I tell her, a surprising lump forming in my throat. “Mamie.”
We cleared the land to make the meadow garden the summer I was ten. Mama just decided one day that she was sick of looking at the ugly overgrown field at the bottom of the hill, and she told me we were going to make a natural garden.
“We’ll make a place where the birds will like to come. And the butterflies. And other little creatures.”
I liked the sound of that.
She and I worked in the mornings, when it was relatively cool, clearing the brush and high grasses that had taken root in that field for years and years.
“You’re being silly, Aimee,” my father scoffed at her as we waved him off to work in our jeans and T-shirts and scraped arms. “Why don’t you hire someone to do that clearing?”
“Sara Lynn and I are making something, Eliot,” she told him. “We’re doing this ourselves so when we’re done, we can say, ‘That’s our garden.’”
He just shook his head and got into his car as we headed down the hill for another morning of backbreaking labor.
In the afternoons we rested. Mama put calamine onto my bug bites and said it was a miracle we hadn’t got poison ivy yet, and we sat out on the porch and ran the ceiling fan on high as we leafed through her gardening books and decided which plants to put in our meadow garden.
“What about black-eyed Susans, Mama?” I asked, pointing to a picture in the book.
“Oh, yes,” she said, and made a note in her gardening notebook. “That’s a fine idea.” Then she took the book and flipped through the pages. “And I wanted to ask you about the varieties of butterfly bushes we should have. There.” She pointed to the pictures on the page she had marked. “What do you think?”
We deliberated over the plants we’d have in our meadow garden more thoroughly, I’m sure, than the jurors down at the courthouse were deliberating over the case Daddy was trying. It was that important to us. We were altering the landscape, after all. We were taking a piece of the earth and saying, “This is what we will make of it. This is how it will look.”
It took a solid week to clear that land and then another week to bring in soil and spread it. “Don’t you want me to spread that soil for you, Mrs. Hoffman?” Gabe from the nursery asked as Mama showed him where to dump the pile of topsoil.
“No, thank you, Gabe. Sara Lynn and I are quite capable of handling that. This is our summer project, you know.”
I never doubted her, not once. If she said we could do it, well then, we could and we would.
It was Labor Day when we finished planting, and school was to begin the next day. Our garden didn’t look like much. Those plants wouldn’t come into their own until the next growing season.
“Wait,” Mama said. “Just wait.”
It was a long winter that year, and snow blanketed the meadow garden from just after Thanksgiving all the way into March. But in April, the forsythias and shads we had planted bloomed their heads off. And in May, the lilacs formed their purple blossoms. Summer brought the butterfly bushes, the echinacea, the phlox, and the black-eyed Susans. The purple asters bloomed in the fall, and in the winter, red winterberries gleamed against the white snow.
It was a late August day of that first growing season that Mama called me from my room where I was reading and told me to walk with her down the hill. The garden was in its glory then—the purple of the butterfly bushes, the rosy pink of the sedum, the lavender of the early meadow asters. “Look at what we’ve created, Sara Lynn,” she told me, her hands on my shoulders as we drank in the garden with our eyes. “Look what we did.”
I didn’t say anything; there wasn’t a need. The garden said it all. I just nestled back into her strong, firm body and let her wrap her arms around me. I could feel her chest moving up and down with the breaths she took; that’s how close we stood. I could feel her heart beating against my ear, and I closed my eyes for a second, a part of me rushing backward through time to the beginning place, when she and I were one.
“It was my mother,” I tell Hope again, spreading out the roots just like Mama showed me. “She taught me all I know.”
O
h, my God, I’m getting married today. It’s the first thought that pops into my head when I wake up. As I look up at the ceiling in the room I’ve occupied for twelve years, I can’t believe I’ve spent my last night here. Then I think about Jack, and I smile. After the rehearsal dinner last night, he drove me home and we sat in his car for a bit. “Ruth,” he said, taking my hand, “I won’t see you tomorrow until you walk down the aisle, so I want you to know this now: I love you so much, and I’ll take good care of you and the baby.”
My first instinct was to say, “I’ve done a pretty good job of taking care of myself for thirty-seven years. You won’t have to put yourself out much.” But I stopped myself, and I leaned against him, saying, “I know you will, Jack. I love you, too.”
I kissed him then and said, “See you tomorrow, I guess.”
He lifted my chin to look in my eyes, and he smiled the smile I’ve grown to love, where the lines at the sides of his eyes deepen. “See you tomorrow, kid.”
And now it’s tomorrow. My wedding day. I lie in bed and think about Ma for a minute, and I sort of wave to her in my mind.
Hey, Ma, wherever you are.
Her voice inside me speaks up:
I’m in heaven, you damn fool. Where else would God put me after suffering with you and your brothers all those years?
I wish you were here, Ma,
I say to myself as I slide out of bed.
I am here, Ruthie,
she tells me.
I’m right here where I’ve always been.
Still in my nightgown, I pad in my bare feet down to the kitchen. No sense in getting dressed. I’ll have to get gussied up in a few hours anyway.
“Oooh . . .” sigh Mamie and Sara Lynn. I swear, they look at me as if I’m a vision floating in the air these days.
“The bride appears,” says Mamie.
“It’s just me,” I say, waggling my fingers at them. “Just old Ruth.”
“You’re getting married today,” Sara Lynn says.
“Really?” I joke. “I forgot.”
Hope says, too casually, “There’s something for you on the dining room table.”
“Is there?” I look at her sharply. Everyone in this house has been acting positively giddy. You’d think
they
were the ones getting married.
As I walk into the dining room, all of them following me like I’m the Pied Piper, I see a vase of red roses on the table. “Oh, from Jack?” I say. “That’s nice.” They’re all looking at those roses like they’ve never seen flowers before.
“Read the card,” says Sara Lynn.
“Okay,” I say, plucking the tiny envelope stuck in the flowers. I open it and read: “Thirteen red roses—twelve for you and one for the baby. Look in the driveway and you’ll see your real wedding gift.”
I stare at Sara Lynn, then Hope, then Mamie. “You’re all in on this, aren’t you.”
Hope jumps up and down and says, “Come on, before the secret slips out.”
“What is this, a damn treasure hunt?” I grumble, even though I’m about as happy as I can be.
I stomp out to the front hall. “I suppose you all want to come with me,” I say, standing there and waiting for them. “Ready or not,” I finally tell them, and I head down the front steps and walk the path to the—
ohmygod
—driveway.
I scream, “This is for me?” It’s a beautiful car with a big red bow on top. I’m jumping around it, looking at it from the front and back and sides. It’s silver and shiny, and I shout, “Come on, we’re going for a ride!”
Hope comes running over, yelling, “Isn’t it beautiful? Don’t you like it? Mr. Pignoli—I mean Jack—said he couldn’t stand the thought of you driving your old junk heap another day. He said he’s been wanting to do this for years.”
Sara Lynn is helping Mamie down the walk, and Mamie gives a low whistle. “My, she’s a beauty,” she says, patting the side of the car.
“Hop in,” I say. “We’ve got to take this for a spin.”
Sara Lynn helps Mamie into the backseat, where Hope is already sitting, then slides into the passenger seat. “Come on, Ruth,” she says, tapping her watch. “We do have a schedule to keep today.”
I take a deep breath and open the driver’s door. The car smells new and fresh, and I turn the key that’s sitting in the ignition. The engine purrs quietly, and I look at the odometer. “Ten miles,” I say. “This car is brand-new.” I back it out of the driveway and say, “Watch this, ladies.” I crank up the air conditioner as high as it will go, and we all sigh as we take in the cold air.
I drive past downtown and head south until I reach Jack’s neighborhood. “Oh, Ruth, no,” says Sara Lynn. “You can’t let Jack see you before the wedding.”
“I won’t, I won’t,” I tell her. “Just watch.” I drive my new car past his house, honking and beeping but not slowing down or stopping. I know he hears me, and I’m laughing and laughing as I careen around the corner with Sara Lynn riding shotgun and Hope and Mamie sitting in the back.
Bobby used to take me driving at night. We’d be at home, just sitting around watching TV or something, and he’d stand up all of a sudden. “I’m bored,” he’d say. “Come on, Ruth. Let’s go for a drive.”
“At this hour?” Ma would carp, looking up from the TV.
“Come on,” Bobby would urge me. “Let’s go.”
We’d talk on those drives. Something about the darkness and the motion made us surrender the sarcastic, joking tone we usually took with each other. We told each other the truth the gentlest way we knew how.
Once, we drove up into the mountains, taking our chances on the narrow, winding roads that twisted and turned as they took us up, up, and up. This was when Bobby was seeing Sara Lynn. I was furious with him even for looking at her, never mind sleeping with her, and he’d had to strong-arm me into going along with him that night.
“Ruth,” he said, his eyes on the road, “don’t be mad.”
“Who’s mad?” I snorted, but then I sighed and said, “I just don’t get why you’re wasting your time with Miss Smarty Pants.”
He was silent for a minute, and then he said softly, “I’m in love with her.”
My God. My heart clenched up like a fist ready to hit. “At least call a spade a spade,” I snapped. “You’re not in love with her; you just lust after her.”
“No,” he said, still looking straight ahead. “It’s not just that. She’s . . . I don’t know . . .” He drummed his fingers on the wheel and shook his head. “I can’t explain. It’s just . . . she’s different.”
“She’s different all right,” I said with a snort.
He looked at me then, and I saw a light in his eyes I hadn’t seen since we were kids. “Different in a special way is what I mean,” he said, turning his eyes back to the road. Then he smiled, and I could tell he was thinking about her.
I wanted to be happy for him, I really did. But instead I just felt hollowed out inside. I was losing him to something I didn’t understand, and it felt as if I’d never get him back. I turned to look out the window, so he wouldn’t be able to see my set jaw and my angry, hurt eyes.
“Ruth?” he finally said.
I took a deep breath. “My ears are clogged. You’re driving too far up.”
He paused, and I could feel the air between us change, almost as if I had thrown up a sign that said, “We didn’t just talk about you and your snotty girlfriend. Everything’s just the way it always is between us.”
“So swallow. Pretend like you’re chewing gum.”
My shoulders relaxed when I heard his tone. He had read my sign, and he wasn’t going to say any more about how that stupid Sara Lynn Hoffman was changing his life. But inside my relief was sorrow, too, because he’d tried to give me something of himself and I had turned it away. I leaned my cheek against the coolness of the car window and watched the headlights sweep over the patch of road ahead.
“Do you remember Dad?” I asked, because the door between Bobby and me was still ajar and because there was something about the pitch black of the night that brought my father to mind.