Chapter 10 - The Garden at Elmwood
The following August, the heat returned, but it was not the suffocating, chlorinated heat of Willow Ridge.
It was the clean, dry heat of an honest summer.
The backyard of the house on Elmwood Street was twenty feet wide and forty feet deep, enclosed by the old chain-link fence that Robert had stretched between cedar posts in the spring of seventy-nine.
At four o'clock on Sunday afternoon, the lawn was covered not with rented Egyptian linens or crystal flutes, but with three mismatched wooden card tables that Daniel had carried out of my basement and set end-to-end between the clothesline and the tomato patch.
The tablecloths were red-and-white oilcloth, wiped clean with a damp rag.
The food was not four-thousand-dollar lamb or imported reductions.
There was a large, chipped enamel bowl filled with potato salad that Vanessa had made that morning—the potatoes boiled with their skins on, mixed with yellow mustard, sweet relish, and hard-boiled eggs from the farm down by the freight depot. There was a platter of grilled chicken thighs, their skin charred black and crisp over charcoal in the five-dollar kettle grill by the garage. There was a pitcher of cold tap water with three lemons floating in the top, and two loaves of crusty sourdough that Leo had helped me knead on the kitchen cutting board on Saturday afternoon.
There were eight people at the table.
Daniel sat at the head. He was wearing an old grey cotton t-shirt that had faded around the collar, his forearms brown as walnut hulls from ten months of working in the open yard at the freight terminal.
To his right sat Vanessa, wearing a plain yellow sundress she had bought at the discount store for sixteen dollars, her hair swept up in a loose clip that let the curly wisps drift around her neck in the breeze.
Leo sat next to his father, his long legs tangled in the rungs of the wooden folding chair, a streak of charcoal across his cheek from helping Daniel light the mesquite. Maya was on the grass by the tomato vines, holding a large, lazy orange barn cat that Vanessa had brought home from the clinic after an old farmer couldn't keep him in the hayloft anymore.
Clara sat at the far end.
She had come.
She had arrived in her turquoise tunic, looking slightly bewildered by the absence of caterers and the presence of paper plates, but she had brought a cold peach cobbler in a Pyrex dish with her name taped to the bottom so she didn't lose the glass.
Greg was not there. Greg was in midtown, Daniel told me quietly while we were setting out the salt shakers, trying to find a lawyer to represent him after his insurance brokerage had been audited by the state licensing commission for over-leveraged surety bonds.
“The chicken is good, Dan,” Clara said, touching her paper napkin to her lip. Her voice was smaller than it had been a year ago, stripped of some of its brass. “The mesquite really gives it… well, it’s very authentic.”
“It’s four minutes a side over direct coals, Aunt Clara,” Daniel said, grinning around a forkful of potato salad. “Nothing fancy. Just don't walk away to check your phone or the fat catches and turns the skin to soot.”
“Vanessa made the salad,” I said from my seat between Maya’s empty chair and the bread basket.
Clara blinked, looking across the oilcloth at my daughter-in-law. “Did you, Vanessa? I didn't know you had a recipe for German style.”
Vanessa laughed.
It was a real laugh. A low, throaty sound that came from the stomach, without an edge on it, without any calculation of who was listening or what it cost to produce.
“It’s not German, Clara,” Vanessa said, passing the sourdough loaf across the table. “It’s just potatoes, mustard, and twenty minutes of not being too lazy to chop the celery fine. Evelyn taught me in June.”
The breeze came through the live oaks at the back of the lot, rustling the heavy green leaves of the tomato plants. The fruit was ripe—large, heavy, deep-red beefsteaks that smelled of earth, iron, and sun, hanging down so low they touched the straw mulch Robert had taught me to lay down fifty years ago.
Maya came over from the fence, carrying the orange cat like a sack of flour, his front paws dangling over her small wrist.
“Dad,” she said, leaning against Daniel’s bare shoulder. “Can we put the swing up in the tree after dinner?”
“The rope is in the garage, Maya,” Daniel said, resting his hand on her hair. “Soon as I finish this thigh, we’ll get the ladder out.”
Daniel caught my eye across the table.
He didn't make a speech. He didn't tap a knife against a glass flute. There was no champagne, no rented Edison bulbs, and no dry-vit walls rising behind him to prove to sixty strangers that he was a man of consequence.
He simply raised his heavy, chipped water glass three inches above the red oilcloth.
His eyes were clear. The dark, greasy shadows were gone from beneath them, replaced by the small, deep crow’s feet that come from squinting into the August sun and laughing at his daughter’s cat.
He looked at me.
Then he looked at Vanessa, who reached out beneath the table and laid her hand flat on his knee, her short, unpolished nails catching the late afternoon light.
“To the table,” Daniel said softly.
Vanessa smiled, her eyes crinkling at the corners. “To the table,” she repeated.
Clara nodded, her turquoise bracelets giving a small, muted clink as she lifted her paper cup. “To the table.”
I did not lift my glass immediately.
I looked around the small backyard—at the peeling paint on the garage, at the tomatoes heavy on their vines, at the worn diamond linoleum visible through the open screen door of the kitchen, and at the two children whose lives had been pulled back from the edge of a cliff by ninety thousand dollars of union pension and five days of refusal.
Robert’s gold band was warm against my finger, thin, oval, and true.
I took hold of my water glass.
“To the things that stay,” I said.
The water was cold, clear, and came from the city tap through forty feet of lead-free copper that Robert and I had sweated into place with a propane torch thirty summers ago.
May you like
It tasted better than any champagne that had ever been poured in Willow Ridge.
We sat together under the August sky until the sun dropped below the roofline of the duplexes on 14th Street, the fireflies rising out of the tomato vines like sparks from an anvil, each one glowing for a second in the dark before drifting up into the cool, quiet night.
