Chapter 10 - The Garden in November
The hall clock in my front entry did not chime at half past six; it merely clicked.
It was three weeks later. The middle of November.
The first hard frost had hit the valley the night before, turning the grass on the lawn into stiff, silver needles that crunched beneath the soles of my boots as I walked out to the compost bin behind the garage.
The garden was dead. The tomato vines were black and shriveled, hanging from their wire cages like old twine; the geraniums had been pulled and their tubers stored in sawdust in the cellar; the hydrangeas had dried into papery, rust-colored globes that rattled in the north wind.
Charles had always loved the garden best in November.
"A garden in June is easy, Myrna," he used to say, standing by the shed with his hands in his pockets, his breath rising in white plumes against the gray barn boards. "Any fool can grow something when the sun is doing eighty percent of the work. November is when you find out if the dirt has any character."
I dumped the potato peelings and coffee grounds into the bin, turned the black plastic crank twice, and leaned against the wooden rail of the fence.
Down at the end of the asphalt drive, the school bus was pulling away, its red taillights flashing through the morning mist as it shifted gears for the climb up Maple Hill.
Eli and Finn had caught it at seven-fifteen. Finn had both socks on—matched ones, gray with red toes—and Eli had carried his brother’s lunchbox in his backpack so Finn could run through the leaf piles on the curb without dropping his sandwich.
From the kitchen window of my house, smoke was rising from the small chimney of the woodstove Caleb had helped me install in the den the previous Saturday.
Caleb’s truck—an eight-year-old Ford he had bought from the county road department with four hundred dollars of his own savings—was parked in the drive where Tori’s white SUV used to sit. He had left for the public defender’s office in Morristown at seven. He had kissed me on the forehead before he went. His face smelled of soap, cold air, and the pine resin he had gotten on his palms while splitting kindling before breakfast.
The side door of the kitchen opened.
Tori came down the back porch steps.
She wasn't wearing her four-hundred-dollar boots. She was wearing a pair of Charles’s old rubber garden muckers that were four sizes too large for her, her feet swimming inside them so she had to walk with a strange, flat-footed shuffle across the frozen gravel. She had on a thick gray wool sweater that Eli had outgrown two winters ago, its sleeves rolled back three times to clear her wrists.
In her hands, she carried two mugs of Earl Grey, the steam rising between her knuckles like thin white ribbons.
She didn't speak until she reached the fence. She handed me one of the mugs.
Her hands were bare. They were dry, slightly red around the knuckles from washing dishes in hard well water, but the chestnut calfskin gloves were tucked neatly into the front pocket of her sweater, the small brass snaps visible above the wool.
"The frost got the parsley," she said.
"It always does," I replied, blowing on the tea. "Parsley has no stamina. It acts like it’s hardy all through October, and then the first twenty-eight-degree night turns it to grease."
She leaned her elbows on the top rail of the fence, looking out over the brown, empty beds where Charles’s pole beans had been.
"Caleb found an apartment on High Street," she said. "Three bedrooms. An old brick building over the bakery."
"I know it," I said. "The radiators clang when the pressure drops, but the hot water is reliable."
"We move in on the first."
"I see."
She took a sip of her tea, her gaze fixed on the small wooden bird feeder Charles had nailed to the post of the grape arbor thirty years ago. A black-capped chickadee was clinging to the suet cage, its small head darting back and forth with nervous, fierce energy before darting away into the hemlocks.
"I resigned from the executive committee," she said. Her voice didn't have the iron in it now; it was quiet, flat, and soft, like the gravel beneath our feet. "I took a senior counsel role. Non-equity. No billable minimums."
I looked at her sideways. Her face was pale, scrubbed clean of the heavy foundation she used to wear, showing the faint blue veins beneath the skin at her temples and three small freckles on the bridge of her nose that I had never noticed in thirteen years.
"Will that be enough for you, Victoria?"
She looked down into her mug, watching the tea leaves swirl against the white porcelain.
"Eli helped me pack my office yesterday," she whispered. "He found my first-year associate award from the firm. It was a block of lucite with an engraved brass plate: *Excellence in Production – Nineteen-Hundred Hours*."
"What did he do with it?"
"He asked me if it was heavy enough to use as a boat anchor for his model skiff," she said. A small, strange sound came from her mouth—halfway between a sob and a chuckle that had been caught behind her ribs for ten years. "I told him it was. I told him it was the heaviest thing I’d ever owned."
We stood together by the fence for five minutes, the cold air biting at our cheeks, while the valley below us slowly turned from gray to pale, winter gold under the rising sun.
"Myrna?"
"Yes, Victoria?"
"Did Charles really leave that suitcase by the back door for three days?"
I looked down at the mug in my hands—the one Charles had bought at a garage sale in nineteen-seventy-two for fifteen cents, its glaze spider-webbed with fine, brown cracks that had survived fifty winters of boiling water and careless dishwashers.
"He did," I said.
"What made you unpack it?"
I turned toward the house. Through the kitchen window, I could see Maggie standing on a chair by the counter, systematically buttering a piece of toast with a plastic knife, her tongue caught between her teeth in ferocious, solitary concentration. Chloe was sitting on the rug behind her, her long legs wrapped around the cello, her bow drawing a slow, wobbly, beautiful C-major scale out of the low strings, filling the cold house with a sound that was deep, heavy, and very hard to break.
"I didn't unpack it, Victoria," I told her, turning back to the dead garden. "Charles did. One shirt at a time, until he realized that the drawer was where they belonged."
Tori didn't say anything more.
May you like
She reached into her pocket, pulled out the chestnut gloves, and slid them onto her hands. They fit perfectly—tight, smooth, unlined, covering the dry skin of her knuckles like a second, more patient skin.
She laid her gloved hand on the top rail of the fence, next to mine, and together we stood in the November frost, watching the dirt wait for spring.
