Jan Allen
I told my mother I’d be here at 7:30. I’m planting her garden today, and the forecast calls for a record high of 105. My goal is to finish before the temperature hits three digits. It’s 7:30 on the dot, but I expect to ring Mom’s doorbell five or six times. She likes keeping people in suspense. I’m surprised when the front door opens before I’ve pulled my finger away from the button.
“Your father’s dead,” Mom says. “Aunt Celia just called.”
None of us—Mom or my brother or me—have had contact with my father in close to three decades, (28 years, but who’s counting?), so I don’t know why Mom and I let an unjustifiable amount of AC escape out the screen door while we stand mute and motionless.
Finally, she opens it, and I walk past her into the kitchen. I sit down and say, “How’d he die?”
Mom leans against the stove. “Massive heart attack. Never knew what hit him. Good way to go, don’t you think?”
“I don’t think about that stuff,” I say, although I spend more time thinking about that stuff than any normal 46-year-old man should.
“You have to call your brother to tell him.”
“Mom, come on. You know we don’t speak. You tell him.”
“No, you.”
We’ve been known to execute the “no, you” back and forth like five-year-olds, and I’m not in the mood. I have an audit I need to work on later.
I search my contacts for my brother’s number. Mom programmed it into my phone years ago. I’m sure she’s programmed my number into Justin’s phone too, so naturally, I get his voicemail. Mom’s been trying to mend fences between us for twelve years, but estrangement is what we know. And, by god, we’re good at it!
“Hi Justin, it’s Neil,” I say to his mailbox. “Wanted to let you know Dad died. Heart attack. I don’t have any more details than that.” I put my phone back in my pocket, then look at Mom for approval.
“You could’ve said ‘how’ve you been?’ or ‘what’s new with you?’”
“Why? You give me an update on his life every other day.” Just as I’m sure she tells Justin about me. I’d rather stick a needle in my eye than hear the tales she must weave for him, to make my life seem like less of a failure. No beautiful wife for me; no kids for me, with another one on the way. My story is a demanding job and a draining divorce. Justin flies back with his family once or twice a year, but I always make it a point to dodge his visits.
By 8:00 Mom and I are driving to the garden store to buy everything for the task ahead. To my exasperation, she scrutinizes the tomatoes, bell peppers, radishes and carrots for 25 minutes, making sure she’s purchasing the plants that are off to the best start. I know from experience that if I say something to hurry her along, this inspection will drag out even longer.
When we get back, I till the garden while Mom hides in the house. When I’m ready to start planting, I get a lawn chair from the garage, set it up under a shade tree, go into the kitchen, and tell Mom to come outside.
“You don’t need me out there, Neil. I’m going to bake those chocolate-chip cookies you love.”
“Oh, no you don’t. I’m not planting the entire garden, only to have to dig everything up like last year because tomatoes don’t get along with peppers. You’re going to be out there with me, supervising every hole. Besides, I don’t like your chocolate-chip cookies. I can taste the peanut butter. You know that.”
My phone pings in my pocket that a text has come in, but I’m walking behind Mom, guiding her shoulders to get her out of the house.
She dips away from me. “Let me at least put my garden shoes on first.”
“You’d better be sitting in that lawn chair in five minutes. Or else.”
“I’ll be there.” She won’t be. My “or else’s” are as meaningless to my mother as “roll over” commands are to a cat. She drives me so crazy that sometimes I want to pull out the remaining hair on my head. But I mean that in a loving way.
I walk back to the garden, look at my phone. The text is from Justin, the first message I’ve ever gotten from him: Where’s my hammer?
I smile because now I remember that about Dad—how he never looked for anything; he yelled for it. “Where’s my hammer?” (Before he bothered to look in his toolbox.) “Where’s Rover?” (The dachshund always parked herself within yards of Dad’s feet.) “Where’s the Boombox?” (All he would’ve had to do was walk toward the music blaring from it.)
I scrape mud off the tiller, wipe my T-shirt sleeves across my burning eyes. Justin was 16 when our father left town. I had just started college and lived in a dorm a few hours’ drive away. I look around to make sure that Mom is nowhere in sight. Then I type a message to my brother: Remember plonking Mom’s ring onto the interstate through a rust hole of the Ford Falcon?
Justin and I were on the floor in the back seat, dropping pebbles from our pockets onto the interstate. Mom was in the front passenger seat, yelling at Dad about the speed limit and his terrible driving in general. Everything was as per usual until Mom pulled a ring off her pinky and said, “Throw this away, boys!”
Justin was maybe five, but he was quick. Like a Kirby vacuum, he sucked it out of Mom’s outstretched hand. Onto the freeway it vanished. She went nuts, screaming at Dad to turn the car around—until he confessed that the ring was worthless.
At least twenty minutes go by before Mom saunters outside. She’s wearing a wide-brim straw hat, and her “garden shoes” are Birkenstocks. Mom’s not opposed to getting her feet muddy, but she’s happy to let somebody else get theirs muddy for her. And I’m here to tell you that even though she’s 71, her pink-painted toenails don’t have a chip. There are plenty of people willing to sink more than their feet in muck for her.
As she walks toward the lawn chair I’d set up, I ask her if she remembers Justin dropping her pinky ring onto I-75.
“No,” she says, as in subject closed. Then she inspects the chair I’ve set up, as if I’m the type of son who rigs things she sits on to collapse. Once settled, she decides the topic is open to conversation. “What I remember is wanting to buy a new purse—or maybe something for you or Justin—and the guy at the pawnshop telling me that ring was a piece of crap.”
I know there’s information I should process here, something that will underscore my mother’s cunning nature, but I don’t bother. This personality trait has been established long ago.
She rearranges her hat. “Start digging, Sweetie.”
As soon as my trowel touches the dirt, she screeches, “Not there!” That’s when I know I’m not going to get any job-related work accomplished today. That’s when I suspect I’ll be finishing up this garden with a flashlight. And I could kick myself, because as soon as “planting Mom’s garden” went onto my schedule for today, I should’ve known to take everything else off of it.
Turns out Mom’s done some research over the winter. Turns out it’s not only peppers that tomatoes don’t get along with. Turns out they don’t get along with other tomatoes, and she’s bought Big Daddys, Early Girls and Large Red Cherrys. So the garden needs to get bigger. So the cleaned-off tiller needs to get stuck back in the mud.
I get another ping and pull my phone out of my pocket.
“From a coworker,” I say, because Mom’s the nosiest person I’ve ever met.
I read Justin’s text: I don’t remember that. But remember Dad’s guy-sticking-his-finger-up-his-nose T-shirt?
Mom loathed that shirt. So she folded it carefully to look like it was part of the bottom of the clothes hamper. Whenever Dad accused her of throwing it away, she’d say, “It’s right where you left it.”
Now she says, “You must be liking your job better. You’re smiling.”
After I finally have the bell peppers planted to Mom’s liking, I tell her I need a rake from the garage. Once I’m hidden in there, I type: Dad making us sled ride down Lombardy Hill with him. He belly-laughed all the way. Me?—scared out of my mind.
That hill was the steepest in the county. It was long too. Luckily, this was in a raging snowstorm, so nobody was out driving on the intersecting streets we barreled through.
When I get back to the half-planted garden, Mom is gone.
Justin replies: I think I pooped my pants, but I was young enough to get away with it.
Dad came to see me at college after Mom kicked him out. I already knew from Justin how Dad was the talk of the town, along with Mrs. Knox, how they’d been spotted together a few feet off Ego Slaying Trail at dusk. It was never clear to me exactly what they’d been caught doing, but that’s just as well. Like Mom and Justin, I was mad, wanted nothing to do with Dad when he showed up, but I didn’t know I was making a lifetime decision. I don’t think Justin did either.
I move the lawn chair, recouping shade, but by now it’s triple digits everywhere. I sit down in my soaking wet clothes and type: Waiting for dad to fall asleep watching wrestling so we could change the channel with locking pliers.
The broken knob on the TV was one of many things Dad never figured out how to fix. The poor guy had trouble replacing a washer on a leaking faucet.
I might be about to nod off because the ping of my phone startles me: Remember the bike he got me?—two flat tires and a broken chain?
When Mom comes back outside after an hour, I stand up, and she sits down. She doesn’t say anything about the wet chair.
I sigh, as loud a sigh as I can muster.
“I had to let Janie know about your dad.”
“I’m out here waiting for your instructions, and you talk to your sister for an hour?”
“We only talked forty minutes. I was baking your cookies.”
“I bet Dad’s name hasn’t come up in conversation for the last five years. Couldn’t you have waited until I’ve finished to tell Aunt Jane that Dad kicked the bucket?”
“You aren’t listening to me. I was baking the chocolate-chip cookies you like.”
Another ping: He promised me he’d fix it up like new. I never did ride that bike.
“What are you reading on your phone now?” Mom asks.
“None of your beeswax.”
“Is it from that cute girl who was sitting in the car when you dropped off my watermelon?”
“Mom, that ‘cute girl’ is my age. She’s almost fifty.”
“So why didn’t you bring her in to meet me?”
I don’t answer, but an introduction would’ve led to excruciating conversational suffering on my part, like Mom badgering us about tying the knot, when I’m not sure if Shelly and I are even in a relationship.
Mom’s voice gets higher. “Is she Catholic?”
I have to turn the laugh that escapes into a cough. I can usually get into the neighborhood of predicting what Mom will say, but once in a while she catches me by surprise. Mom’s ignoring the fact that I haven’t been to church in decades.
I walk a few yards away and dictate into the text box: Smuggling Rover under his jacket into your sixth-grade play.
Did Dad honestly think she wouldn’t start barking?
Mom asks, “Who are you talking to?”
I ignore her.
“She believes in God, doesn’t she?”
I pick up the trowel. “Where do you want the next carrot?”
I don’t end up needing a flashlight to finish, but only because it’s a month away from the longest day of the year.
Finally, I drive away with a bag full of chocolate-chip cookies and a promise to stop by Thursday after work. I pull into our city park, where Dad got caught on Ego Slaying Trail, and I polish off the cookies while I try to recall why my brother and I don’t speak.
I remember the last time I saw him. Justin and I were smoking in Aunt Jane and Uncle Rand’s front yard. There was a birthday party going on inside for our younger cousin Wesley. Wes had terminal cancer and had lost even more weight than when we’d seen him just two weeks earlier.
When I mentioned that, Justin changed the subject, and I said, “How long do you think ignoring all the bad shit is going to keep working out for you, Justin?”
Not even a slight hesitation. “About as long as wallowing in it is going to keep working out for you, Neil.”
With that, Justin sauntered off, yelling over his shoulder, “Tell everybody I said bye.”
There certainly had to be more to our falling out. I know there was jealousy on my part—still is. But for the life of me, I can’t remember why we haven’t spoken for twelve years. I wonder if my brother remembers.
When I call Justin this time, he answers.
“How’ve you been?” I ask.
#
Jan Allen’s short stories have appeared in The MacGuffin, Every Day Fiction, Flash Fiction Magazine, Apple in the Dark, and fellow-writer-voted Sixfold.