Unburying Hope (31 page)

“Decided to have a dance with some tools, eh?”
she said, warily.
 
She’d never
lived near a yard of any kind and the heft of the equipment intimidated her.

He smirked, “I thought I’d clear some of the
brush so you can grow vegetables, but some half-brain junked all the tools in
the doorway.”

She was surprised at his short temper.
 
He waved her off, trying to keep her
away from a pile he’d made with his sweatshirt on the path.
 

“What’s in the shed?” she asked, looking
sideways through the door, her years of watching horror movies made her leery
of small dark spaces.

“Come see,” he motioned her directly to the
shed, “the tools are amazing, they’ve got enough for us to start a farm of our
own.”

“What?”

“You and Frank said you wanted to grow a
garden,” he said, confused.

“Yeah, but at a house I own.”
 
She noticed a darkness over his eyes,
her snappy return was an apparent slap to him.
 
“I mean, if we ever buy a house.
 
You can’t grow a garden at a rental house, can you?”

“You’d better ask Malia.”
 
He carried a shovel over to overgrown
elephant leaf bushes.
 
“Didn’t she
tell you to be careful in case we hit those jars of vinegary cabbage?”

“Kim Chee.”
 
Celeste thought about Malia’s easygoing garden introduction
and she wondered how she would feel about Eddie digging up around her beloved
plants.
 
“What are you going to do?”
she asked with an edge in her voice.

“I’m going to dig up an area for some new
plants. “

“You’re going to clear out her plants?”
 
Celeste thought she’d better get on the
phone quickly before Eddie massacred the garden.

“No, you rube,” he said, teasingly.
 
“I’ve done this before.
  
You find places in between plants
where you can put in a couple of new ones.
 
You find plants that like to be together and then they help
each other grow.
 
Some of these
could use flowering bushes, that’s all I’m saying.
 
Malia told you to watch out for Kim Chee, that means she
wants us to care for her garden.”

Rosalinda rounded the corner and stood with
her arms crossed.
 
“What are you
doing with that shovel, Daddy?
 
My
guinea pig died at Grandma’s house.
 
She buried it there.”

Celeste’s mouth dropped open and Eddie looked
at his daughter, then at Celeste.

“Neither of you have ever done yard work?”

“Nope,” Rosalinda shook her head.
 
“Grandma said she buried it while I was
asleep.”

Celeste shook her head, too.
 
“I’ve never had any land.”
 
She was distracted by the very real
possibility that the guinea pig had been trashed instead of buried, because
Rosalinda’s grandmother’s trailer park had no open ground around it.
 
It was a concrete living place, just
like all the pavemented apartment complexes Celeste had looked through before
finding her own place in Detroit.
  
She didn’t let her thoughts show on her face, but she saw Eddie’s
eyebrows rise at her and a small smile escaped her lips.
 
Thank God Rosalinda hadn’t kept the
dead animal in a shoebox and brought it with her.

“Well, I grew up ranching, had to pull out
acres of invasive weeds with my bare hands until my uncle could buy a tractor.”

“But Malia put all these plants in herself,
she might not want us to kill them.”

He dug the shovel in a few inches into the
ground and stood tall, leaning on it.
 
“Celeste, you’re such a city girl.
 
I am not going to kill or move her plants.
 
I’m going to dig some holes.”
 
He looked around the side yard.
 
“There are lots of places in between her plants and I figure
if we can find some of those vinegar pots and pull them out for her, she’ll be
happy.
 
So go on, get out of
here.”
 
He shooed her back towards
the porch.
 
“You too,
Rosalinda.
 
Go do some homework.”

“I don’t have any homework.
 
I’m not in school yet.”
 
Rosalinda stood fast, “What if you find
buried treasure?”

His eyes flashed for a second, then hooded
over and he looked away.
 
“No
treasure.
 
Get back in the house.”

Celeste moved gingerly up the pebbled path
towards Rosalinda.

“Hey,” he said, “why don’t you two drive into
town and get a couple of new plants?”
 
He motioned to Rosalinda to run over to him and Celeste watched as the
little girl loped towards him, encouraged by his interest.

He patted down several of his filled pants
pockets, reaching into one to pull out a wad of money.
 
“Here’s 200 bucks.” He pulled off two
bills.
 
“Get a couple of big
plants, blue hydrangeas and ask the nursery worker about the kim chee.
 
Malia wants blue hydrangeas around the
kim chee, because the acid in the vinegar makes pink or purple turn blue.
 
Blue is rare, so let’s help her out.
 
Maybe also get some lavender, so bees
will come.”

Celeste stared at the wad of cash, wondering
if they were all $100 bills but she looked away when she saw that he noticed
her stare.
 
Maybe he was crazy
enough to carry his business investment money on him?

“Go on, get out of here,” his voice was a
mixture of kindness and vehemence and she sensed it would be best to drive to
the nursery with Rosalinda to do a little investigative shopping.
 
She knew nothing about plants, having
killed every houseplant she’d ever brought home.
 
A plant lost its newness and invariably faded in her
consciousness, she’d forget its needs for water and sunlight and a larger pot
and all the attention that was part of keeping one alive.
  

But in just the few days that they had been in
this house, she had a new morning tea habit.
 
She boiled water in the silver tea kettle, made a pot of
green tea, brought it out to the porch table and would wander the yard with a
cup of tea, looking at and under the plants, returning to the porch to refill
her cup.
 
Then she’d pace again,
along the winding paths looking at the effusively growing greenery on either
side of her.

So maybe someone at the nursery could teach
her a few things about the life of a plant, so she could grow a new side of
herself, a side that could actually caretake the soil around her instead of
fearfully glancing at it to see if its bushes were browning because of
neglect.
 

When they returned, she let Rosalinda pull the
three large hydrangea shrubs and two smaller lavender plants from the trunk of
the car and she smiled a little when Rosalinda squealed in delight and called
out to her father in a sing song voice, “We’re back, Daddy, and you’d better
dig us five big holes!”

Celeste wandered to the corner near the shed,
but Eddie was nowhere in sight.

“Back here, babycakes,” his voice came from a
far corner of the property, near a circle of purple jacaranda trees.
 
Rosalinda had one plant in her arms and
she ran towards her father’s voice, so Celeste turned back around and retrieved
two of the remaining three largest plants from the car trunk into her arms,
then headed towards the redwoods.

Rosalinda skipped back towards her, empty
handed, then stopped.
 
Her little
arms crooked onto her hips, her face awash with shock and sorrow, and she admonished,
“You said I could carry them all.”

“But it’s so far back in the yard,” Celeste
answered defensively.
 
“I thought
I’d help.”

“But you said!”

“Alright.
 
You take them from here,” Celeste put her hands out,
offering the large pots.

“I can’t hold two.”
 
Tears formed at Rosalinda’s eyes.

Celeste stuttered, not knowing what to
do.
 
She put one hydrangea plant on
the ground and walked the other one to Rosalinda, whom she could tell was more
heartbroken than petulant.
 
She
stood with the one plant in her outstretched hand.

Rosalinda reached forward sadly and took the
plant, then plodded back to where Eddie stood, again leaning on a shovel.

Celeste lifted the plant from where she’d
placed it against the large quartz rocks that lined the pebbled path.
 
She thought about either standing still
with it or walking it to the back yard, but she suddenly changed her mind and
walked it back to the car, placing it into the trunk right next to the
remaining two plants.
 
She stood
for a moment or two, crushing a lavender flower in her fingers to release its
oily fragrance.
 
As she rubbed the
oil onto her neck as perfume, she was joined by the tearful little girl who was
now wiping her eyes, a big smile of hope rising across her face.

It’s the little gestures, Celeste
thought.
 
The ones she didn’t understand,
the ones that felt like backing down but were instead acts of healing trust to
Rosalinda.
 
She smiled and pointed
to the plants, saying, “you can do it, just go one at a time.”
 

Rosalinda reached in and grabbed one of the
pots, put it onto her head for a second and tried to balance it.

Celeste laughed out loud, rolled her eyes and
walked close to Rosalinda, her right arm ready to grasp the pot in case it fell.

Rosalinda pulled the pot back down into her
arms, smiled a big smile and skipped back to the redwood trees, then back past
Celeste and back again with the two smaller lavender pots as Celeste meandered
to where Eddie was choosing the spots for holes for the new plants.
 
She went slowly, looking at each plant
and bush and tree that she passed, trying to distinguish each one’s scent.
 
The smell of the freshly dug earth was
dank but sweet, it carried the oils of the redwood trees that stood tall around
them, shedding their bark onto the property on windswept days.
 

Eddie’s face was sweaty and had dirt streaks
across his forehead, as though he’d been working since they left for the
nursery.
 
His earlier short temper
had faded and he was digging the third hole, with Rosalinda standing next to
him directing him to dig deeper, deeper, deep enough so that each hydrangea
bush could be placed into the hole and the top of its root ball, where the
woody stalks left its dirt, would sit at the dirt line in the ground.
 
Rosalinda had been listening at the
nursery, Celeste realized, and was delighting in this new form of
entertainment, digging into the ground with the hope of bringing life to
bear.
 
Working with her father,
being able to contribute, Rosalinda’s face opened up into a softness, a
happiness that Celeste was relieved to witness.

Chapter
Thirty-Three

“What’s your plan for how to occupy Rosalinda
during the day?” Celeste asked gingerly, choosing the least controversial
wording from all the phrases she’d practiced while he was gone.

Eddie was chopping onions and mushrooms and
spinach for an omelet he wanted to make for her.
 
“She’s going to go to school.”

“How do you choose a school?”

“You find out what district you live in and
you go enroll her.”
 
He stopped
chopping and looked at her.
 
“Do
you feel like tomatoes?”

Celeste nodded.
 
“Malia wants us to send her to the little private school
down the road, it’s where her daughter and grandson went.”

He looked up, startled.

“She says the local public school is all the
way down the mountain, but this little school would be good for Rosalinda, give
her a strong education with local kids.
 
She’d have friends in town.”

“How much does private school cost?”

“Malia said it’s worth it, it’s small classrooms
and the kids do a lot of outside learning and computer learning, something
called ‘project based’.”
 
She
quoted a few figures Malia had told her, paying the tuition monthly or
semi-annually.

“Okay, we can see if she likes it there,
then.
 
Maybe they’ll be easier on
us than a public school that has to have all the legal documents.”

“What do you need to bring?
 
Her birth certificate?”

“Probably.
 
I don’t really know.
 
I’ve never enrolled her.”

“Do you know what school she just came from?”