Restoring Harmony (6 page)

10

July 12th-Pray you now, forget and forgive.

-William Shakespeare

I SLEPT WELL PAST DAWN FOR THE FIRST TIME IN years. I found a dusty bunch of purple grapes in a bowl by the sink that was some sort of fancy soap, but once I was in the shower, I kept dropping it. The bunch broke apart into individual grapes, and I rubbed one purple ball awkwardly all over my head to wash my matted hair. The frigid water stung the open cuts on my feet, and I gulped in pain as I dug the soap into my wounds to get them clean.

I got out, shivering, and inspected the damage to my feet. Eleven blisters, one puncture wound on the ball of my right foot that looked red and inflamed, and a raw spot on each heel. I found a comb in my pack and pulled it through my hair. Then I quickly made one lumpy braid down my back.

Grandpa must’ve heard me coming because he was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. “Follow me,” he said.

I hobbled after him through a wide archway. He led me into a giant room that opened onto a black and white kitchen, towering ceilings, a huge dining area with an empty space where the table and chairs should’ve been, and a sitting area with a bunch of once-elegant furniture. Grandma sat on a worn settee staring off into space.

“Sit,” Grandpa ordered.

I chose one of the swivel chairs.

“What happened to your feet? Don’t they have shoes in Canada?”

“I lost them.”

“How do you lose shoes?”

“Long story.”

“Well, we can’t have you bleeding all over the hardwood floors,” he said. “Wait here.”

He returned a minute later carrying a bowl of water, a clean cloth, and a small bag. He also had a pair of old-lady sandals. “Probably too small for your big boats,” he said, tossing them at me.

“Ummm . . . thanks.” I wasn’t sure what to make of his gruff manners. Was he mad at me for something? I started to put them on, but he waved his hands at me.

“I better have a look first,” he said.

“I already washed them really well.”

He ignored me and dragged a chair over. He lifted one foot in his thin hands, and I saw the long piano fingers that my mother had told me about. His nails were rough, but his hands were smooth and soft. He examined my foot thoroughly and then set it gently back on the floor, picking up my right one and looking at it.

He wet the cloth and began to dab at the puncture wound. “What brings you to the U.S.?”

“It’s my mom. She’s pregnant and-”

“Again? How many kids is she planning to have?”

“Well . . . I don’t think this one was exactly planned. . . .”

“They have ways to control pregnancy these days,” he said. “But she probably wouldn’t know about that, since she dropped out of premed.”

I swallowed hard as he poked at my sore foot. Dad had warned me that the fact that Mom could’ve been a doctor was probably going to come up.

“Anyway,” I said, wincing from his examination, “she’s really stressed, mostly because we thought Grandma was dead, and she’s worried about you-”

“Why would she think Katharine was dead?”

I looked over at Grandma to see if she was listening, but she seemed to have dozed off on the couch. “That’s what the hospital said. Or at least what we thought they said.”

“Well, she’s clearly fine, so your mom can stop worrying.”

Grandma was not fine. She had spoken to me, and she seemed to know who I was, but there was that staring off into space and falling asleep right now when Grandpa and I were discussing important things. The stroke had obviously messed her up a little, if not a lot.

“Mom wants you two to come back up to live with us,” I explained. I hoped he couldn’t hear the nervousness in my voice.

“That’s just another one of your mother’s lamebrained ideas. Like marrying a Canadian in the first place.”

I knew my grandparents blamed my dad for Mom switching to agriculture, which was just stupid because they didn’t even meet until grad school. For some reason, Grandpa thought that if my dad was any kind of man at all, he would’ve convinced her to go back to medical school.

“My parents are very happy,” I said. “We all are.”

Grandpa shook his head at me, unconvinced. “Raising chickens and kids? Is that what I educated Brianna for? She was premed, for God’s sake!”

“Breee!” Grandma said, suddenly, startling us both.

I looked over at the couch where she was sitting wide awake and alert now. Grandpa was wiping my foot with the cloth, and the more we talked about my mother, the harder he rubbed. I gritted my teeth so he wouldn’t know it hurt so much.

“She uses her education,” I told him.

“Farming? Huh. She could’ve been a doctor,” he said. “Your mother was smarter than anyone in her class. Who knows what medical discoveries she might’ve made if she’d followed through?”

“Look,” I said in the voice I use when I’m trying to get Little Jackie to be reasonable about something, “I know you wish she was a doctor, but she’s not, and she needs your help. Her blood pressure is out of control. And the island doctor was killed last week.”

“Killed?”

I didn’t want to explain. I didn’t want Grandpa to know that it was my fault for not separating the calf from its mother. “There was an accident,” I said. “And he died.”

“So what? I thought your mom preferred a
midwife
.” You could hear the contempt in his voice for midwives everywhere.

“She does, and Mrs. Rosetree is looking after her as best as she can, but this time Mom’s health is really bad. She needs a real doctor.”

He didn’t say anything.

“And Mom misses you both,” I continued. “When she thought Grandma had died and you hadn’t made up . . . well, she almost went crazy with grief. She really needs you.”

He studied my punctured foot, not meeting my eye.

“They need my help on the farm,” I said. “And I want to go back right away. Will you both please come?”

He shook his head. “Nope. Your mom made her own bed, she has to lie in it.”

“But she won’t,” I said. “Dr. Robinson ordered her to nap two hours a day, but she’s being stubborn. My dad thinks you’re the only one she’ll listen to.”

He laughed then, a big, rolling, bitter version of my mother’s usually joyful one. And then his face softened. “Molly, I’m sorry that circumstances have made it so we haven’t gotten to know our grandkids, and you’re welcome to stay for a short visit, but I think you should head back pretty soon so you can help your mom.”

“I can’t help her,” I said. “Only you can. Besides, I can’t just go home anyway.”

He pressed the bottom of my foot and I flinched. “Why not? What’s stopping you?”

“I don’t have any money,” I admitted. “At least not enough for train fare.”

He looked up at me, his eyes wide behind his glasses. “You came all the way down here to take us back and you don’t have any money?”

“Mom said-”

“Mom said,”
he mimicked me, suddenly bitter. “
Mom said
we have all the money in the world, did she? What do you eat up there in Canada without any money? Stone soup?”

He had let go of my foot so he could root around in his bag, and I jumped up in indignation.

“Sit down,” he said, his voice gentle. “You’ve got something deep in your foot.”

I sat back in the chair, but only because it hurt so much to stand.

“This is going to be painful,” he said, “but I’ll be as quick as I can.” He used sharp tweezers to dig into the tenderest part of my foot. A little yelp escaped in spite of my efforts to hold it in.

He leaned in close, squinting. “Don’t move. I’ve almost got it.”

White-hot pain burned through my whole body, and wooziness washed over me, making me sink back into the chair.

“There,” he said, holding up a piece of green glass with the tweezers.

I let out a long, slow breath. “Thanks,” I gulped. “Listen, all we need is train fare-”

“You don’t get it, do you? There isn’t any money.”

“There has to be enough for train fare,” I argued. “We can sell something.”

“Do you think we’d be sitting here without electricity if we had anything left to sell?”

“But Mom said you’re rich. And whenever we talked to Grandma on CyberSpeak, she said you were fine.”

His tone had softened, but his eyes flashed with anger. “We were getting by until a couple of months ago, but a few weeks in the hospital wiped out our entire savings and the pension fund dried up last year. I had to sell everything I could just to buy food.”

He’d sold his possessions to buy food and he had the nerve to be mad at Mom for becoming a farmer? I didn’t understand him at all. I took a hard look at the room and saw that it really was much shabbier than I would’ve expected from my mom’s descriptions. The chairs were threadbare, and the china cabinet was empty and covered in a layer of dust. They’d obviously been hard up for a lot longer than he was even willing to admit. Grandma saw me looking around and gave me a lopsided smile. Had she followed the conversation or not?

“None of us are going to Canada,” Grandpa said. “If you don’t have any money, then you’re stuck here, too.”

11

A HALF HOUR LATER, AFTER GRANDPA HAD USED THE supplies from my emergency kit to bandage up my feet, we were all sitting there absorbed in our own thoughts. I knew I should be concentrating on ways to raise some money, but honestly, all I could think about was food. I’d finished all of Poppy’s snacks the night before, and my stomach was growling.

“Ummm, Grandpa?” I asked.

He looked over at me.

“Is there . . . I mean . . .” This was hard. I’d been raised to wait for someone to offer food.

“What?” he asked.

“Did I . . . ummm . . . did I miss breakfast?”

“You’re hungry?” he asked.

“Starving!”

He stood up. “Come on. I’ll see what we have.”

I hobbled after him to the kitchen counter and climbed up on a bar stool. I wasn’t expecting much, nothing like home, but when he took out a cutting board and knife and chose two battered tomatoes out of a ceramic bowl, I got a little worried. Tomatoes for breakfast? He sliced them nice and thick, just like my mother always did. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that if there’s one thing I hated, it was tomatoes. I figured I’d just force them down.

“We’re out of pepper,” he said, sprinkling the slices with salt.

He handed me three on a saucer. On another plate he placed one slice, and on the third, he put two slices, which he cut into tiny pieces and took out to Grandma. I limped behind him, back to the chair, and sat with my food balanced on my knees.

“Three is too many,” I said to him. “Have one of mine. I’m not that hungry.”

“You said you were starving.”

“Figure of speech.”

“I’m not a charity case,” he said, but he didn’t stop me when I slid a tomato onto his plate.

The food situation was clearly worse than I thought. They both looked skinny, but because I didn’t really know them, I wasn’t sure if that was just how they normally were or not. If he was willing to accept my food, though, things must be pretty bad. I slipped a bite into my mouth and swallowed it whole.

“Did you grow these?” I asked.

“They come over the fence.”

“What do you mean?”

“Most days the neighbor throws vegetables over the fence,” he explained. “Not just tomatoes, though. Sometimes there’s zucchini. We used to get a few strawberries, but not anymore. I guess strawberries are done for the year. And once we got a couple of onions and some pretty small carrots.”

Was that all they had to eat? Grandma inhaled her tomatoes and stared ravenously at mine, so I cut them into small pieces and when Grandpa got up to take his plate to the sink I slipped them to her. She stuffed the bits into her mouth all at once with her fingers, and I hoped she wouldn’t choke. The last thing I wanted to have to do was tell Mom I’d killed her mother.

“Show me this fence,” I said, when Grandpa returned.

He led me out through French doors onto a huge covered deck and down some steps into an overgrown yard. “Wow. You’ve got more land than I expected,” I said.

“Goes all the way down to the creek,” he said. “Half an acre.”

“You’d never know it from the front.”

He shrugged. “Hey, look.” He pointed to where half a dozen tomatoes lay on the ground along the bottom of the fence. “Lettuce too!” he shouted, grabbing up a small head of romaine with brown edges.

I handed him a couple of bruised tomatoes. “Have you ever tried to talk to the neighbor?”

Grandpa’s smile vanished. “Leave well enough alone, Molly.”

“I don’t have enough money to get us back to Canada,” I said, “but I have a little left over from busking. Maybe if I offered to pay him, he’d give us more.” And better quality, I thought.

“Just forget it, okay? He might think you’re one of the squatters and shoot you.”

“What? Are you serious? With a gun?”

“Of course with a gun. Listen, I’m not saying he’s a bad guy, and he probably wouldn’t shoot you, but you can’t be too careful. If he wanted to be friendly, he would’ve come over. He knows we’re here. Come inside.”

“I’m just going to walk down to the creek,” I said.

“Stubborn like your mother,” Grandpa said, but he didn’t sound angry, or even worried, so I didn’t think he was too scared of whoever lived next door.

“I just want to see what the garden looks like,” I said.

Shaking his head, Grandpa took his cache inside, and I waded through the tall, dry grass. My mom always says gardens are like a magnet to me. Every time we visit friends, I have to check out theirs to see if I can learn anything. I had to see this one too.

When I got to the end of the yard, I was met with a solid wall of blackberry bushes. I found a place near the fence where they were a bit thinner and peeked around the end into the neighbor’s yard. The man had cleared the entire lawn and turned it into a huge vegetable garden, but he was obviously not a serious farmer because the place was overrun with weeds. He’d be lucky if he didn’t lose his whole crop.

Bracing myself for scratches, I pushed through the briars to get a better look. Green corn rustled in the light breeze, and weeds choked the stalks, but the plants looked like they could be saved with some care. The tomatoes stood tall and bent to the ground under their own weight. Someone should stake them up to keep the slugs from getting them.

Carrots, potatoes, and other root vegetables grew helterskelter, and I could barely figure out what was what because of the weeds suffocating everything. Pumpkin and zucchini vines had taken over at least 20 percent of the garden and needed to be cut back.

The place actually looked abandoned. Whoever the gardener was, it had to be someone totally overwhelmed, completely clueless, or very lazy. As I stared at the overgrown vegetable patch, my hands itched to get in there and go to work. I could see dozens of healthy green weeds, just a foot away, that I longed to pluck from the ground and toss onto the compost heap. I wanted to feel the soil against my palms and under my nails, just to remind myself that home still existed. I was hungrier than ever, and it was all I could do not to rip the young corn from the stalk and eat it right then.

I stood in the garden, leaning against the fence for a really long time, breathing in the fresh scents of plants and dirt, thinking. There were a lot of things in life I didn’t know, but the raging hole in my stomach made me absolutely certain of one thing: We needed more food, and we needed it today. I could try to buy it from the neighbor, or I could just take it at night and . . . and what? Leave the money I had to pay the owner back? No, that was stupid. I needed a better idea.

What would my dad do in this situation? I laughed to myself. Knowing Dad, he’d get his farmer’s almanac out and open it randomly, looking for advice. Maybe I should do that. But suddenly I didn’t need to because I remembered Dad’s favorite quote from the book.

A competent farmer rarely goes hungry.

Of course! Whoever had planted this garden didn’t know the first thing about keeping it under control, but I did! Not only could I show my competence, but I could make myself totally indispensable. And I knew exactly how to do it. Assuming I didn’t get shot in the process.