Warped Tales: The Gardener – Part 4

Warped Tales – be warned. As a child I read piles of books filled with short stories – the complete works of Poe, stories from the Twilight Zone, collections from Hitchcock, etc. As an adult, thrillers rule. This is that kind of story, in six parts.

While John spent his time alone, fishing and hunting or sitting in front of the television, Anne shelved books at the library on Mondays, played cards with residents of the assisted living center on Wednesdays, and read with first graders on Fridays – not to mention the monthly book club. She was making a place for herself in the community.

As the air began to crisp in October, both of the Davenports missed the red of the sugar maples, so they took the Mustang up to the higher elevations where aspens shed their yellow leaves. The day was pleasant enough that Anne thought she might enjoy traveling with him, that there might be hope for the marriage if he stayed busy hunting the rest of the time and let her garden in peace. The thought cheered her, since it looked like she was stuck in the marriage whether or not it was tolerable. She had nosed around in his desk when he was out hunting and found some bank statements, but she still wasn’t sure if they could afford to live separately.

Then came winter.

John went for weeks without leaving the cabin. He looked at travel options and said they were too costly, they should wait a year. He complained about her activities – as if she should be sitting next to him as he sank into depression. It wasn’t her fault John’s life had revolved around his work or that his hunting buddies had been fellow detectives and officers from the Schenectady Police Department or that going hunting and fishing alone had quickly lost its appeal. He was the one who decided to buy this cabin and retire in a place where he didn’t know anyone. He’d made her give up everything that mattered to her to come here. He could complain all he wanted about her activities. She didn’t care. Volunteering, focusing on other people’s needs, had kept her from falling apart when John Jr. was blown to smithereens and it was helping her make this transition. She was adapting – he should try it.

Of course she didn’t say any of that. She just went about her business as she pleased.

While she missed her home and garden, John had been right about winter. In March they had one big snow that lasted just long enough to stop Anne’s pining for real winter. The rest of the time they got a light dusting that no one bothered to shovel. That was much nicer than winter in Schenectady. She had already planned out her raised beds and the rest of the yard

“Do you realize four out of the six houses on this stretch of road are empty?” John asked Anne one evening during the big snow. “The house down on the corner is the only other place with a plowed driveway, and there aren’t any cars parking on the road, so the others have to be empty.”

“They’re snowbirds or flatlanders,” Anne replied, automatically using the terms she’d picked up from her new friends.

“What?”

“Snowbirds are from up north. Flatlanders are people who live in The Valley – Tucson or Phoenix – and only come up on weekends or a week or two when it’s unbearably hot.”

John responded to the recognition that they lived in a largely vacant neighborhood by buying new deadbolts for the doors and insisting Anne take a gun safety course. She did fine in the class until the first night they had target practice. She had a little bursitis from years of gardening. When the backlash from firing John’s gun threw her arms up, the pain was so intense that she’d cried right there in front of everyone.

The instructor apologized. “That is way too much gun for you. I should never have let you try that your first time shooting.”

She’d gone straight home and handed John his .45 as if it were venomous.

“My shoulder’s killing me.” She glared at him.

“I should get you something smaller,” he’d acknowledged.

“No! I quit the class. I could never shoot a person anyway!” In twenty-some years, this was the first time she had yelled at him. She half expected him to get up and hit her. She was prepared to call the cops on him. Wouldn’t that be something!

He just shrugged, though. “Well, at least you’ve fired it. If you need to, you can do it.”

Anne walked away.

By the time April rolled around, an idiot could see John was severely depressed, and the taxes he had to pay on the sale of his ancestral home made it worse. One sunny Tuesday, Anne made his favorite breakfast, including the last of the elk sausage. As they finished eating, she started the conversation she’d been planning for months.

“There was this lady at the library yesterday, I couldn’t help overhearing her tell her friend how her husband had passed on and she was losing her home because she didn’t have enough for the inheritance taxes. I just couldn’t stop worrying about it last night.”

“That wouldn’t happen to you,” John reassured her. “I invested the money from the house to make up for using my retirement fund for this place. You’ll have enough to pay the taxes.”

“Even after all they took?” she asked in her most innocent voice.

He shrugged. “You don’t have to worry.” There was no strength in his voice as he said it.

“Good,” she said, as if that had alleviated all of her concerns. Then she added, as if it was an afterthought, “It is a shame, though, how they tax the same money over and over.”

John actually made the suggestion for her. “I should put your name on the cabin – and the Mustang. Then we’ll both have to be gone before they can take more taxes on those.”

“Is there anything else we should have in both names?” She again played innocent.

“Everything,” he said, slapping his hand on the table. “I should put your name on everything so they can’t take a cent.”

“I can do these dishes later,” she offered.

He nodded. “Let’s get it done.”

She went with him to the Motor Vehicle Department to change the title and registration on the Mustang and then the county recorder to add her name to the deed of the cabin. John took her out for lunch then. She was worried he’d lose interest in this project, but he seemed happier than he’d been in ages.

“All that’s left is the bank,” he said as they left the restaurant. “You don’t have to go anywhere else this afternoon?”

“No, I’m all yours.” She smiled brightly.

At the bank he added her name to all of his accounts, including his investment account and the safety deposit box. The banker even convinced him to set up online access for Anne, so she could take care of bills if John was not able to do so.

“You’re wise to be doing this. It makes everything so much easier for a surviving partner,” said the banker. She tucked a gray lock of hair behind her ear. “Have you done this with all your investments and belongings?”

Anne could have kissed the woman.

“Nope,” he said. “We’ve taken care of it all now, except my pension. Can’t put that in her name, but it’s set up with her as beneficiary.”

At last, Anne could assess their financial condition. While it looked like a lot of money to her at first, when she did more research, she realized it really wasn’t enough for two separate households.

Divorce was not a good plan.

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Warped Tales: The Gardener – Part 3

Warped Tales – be warned. As a child I read piles of books filled with short stories – the complete works of Poe, stories from the Twilight Zone, collections from Hitchcock, etc. As an adult, thrillers rule. This is that kind of story, in six parts.

Anne Davenport’s home was going to be put on the market in June.

John started fixing things before his March retirement, then they had to “de-clutter” to satisfy the realtor and down-size dramatically because the Arizona cabin he’d bought without consulting Anne was a quarter the size of their house in New York. By the end of May, they’d had four garage sales and donated $17,000 of unsold items to charity. Some were family heirlooms that had been sitting in the attic since his mother passed away. Anne had never dared get rid of them before, but John was ready to get rid of everything now. He was ready to move on to a new life.

Anne Davenport, however, did not want to leave the garden that defined her after more than two decades of work, the garden where she could still feel the presence of their deceased son.

When she realized John’s decision was final, she considered filing for divorce. Carefully vague questions led her to volunteer at a woman’s shelter where there were books she could read without any record of her borrowing them. Her problem was that John had done nothing that qualified as “fault” and would never agree to a “no-fault” divorce. She knew this without asking. He’d spoken scornfully of workmates who divorced.

And even if he did agree, everything she read and heard indicated that divorce was a financially disastrous move for both parties. Since John had always handled everything to do with finances, she’d have no clue if he hid assets, either. Her only hope was that the house would not sell and John would let her continue to live in it while he went off to Arizona.

Unfortunately, the realtor caught on to Anne’s subtle attempts to scare off potential buyers and refused to show the house in her presence anymore. So Anne was depending on prayer and a slump in the real estate market to keep her in her home. As a show of faith, she went ahead and planted a blueberry bush on John Jr.’s birthday – blueberries had been his favorite, and were small enough for her to plant on her own. When Memorial Day Weekend arrived with no offers in sight, she went ahead and planted her vegetable garden, even though that annoyed John.

Ironically, it was her established garden and the prospect of fresh tomatoes that made the buyers choose Anne’s home from dozens of houses they’d seen.

The deal closed in late July, so Anne got to harvest her early crops – asparagus, strawberries, rhubarb, peas, a few tomatoes and summer squash, and greens, of course. The best sweet corn was Silver Queen, though; it didn’t ripen until fall. Hopefully the new owners appreciated it. There was no way of knowing, really; those people would think she was odd if she wrote to ask about the corn. She’d left detailed instructions on the garden’s care. She hoped they maintained it as religiously as she had.

John sold his Toyota and wanted to sell her battered little pickup before they moved. “All we’ll need is the Mustang. There won’t be that much driving to do, and there’s a small local airport where we can park it safely and fly into Phoenix international whenever we travel.”

“You won’t want to carry plants and fertilizer in your car.” That ‘64 Mustang was his real baby.

“There’s no garden,” he countered. “I told you that. It’s tall pines and clay soil.”

“That’s all the more reason to have the truck. I’ll probably have to bring in some good dirt as well as fertilizer.”

“You’re not listening!” he shouted. “Since when did you get so stubborn and unreasonable? It’s not the least bit attractive.”

Would that qualify as verbal abuse? Maybe all she had to do is show some backbone and he’d give her grounds for divorce – even if that meant moving to Arizona. She’d checked. Their laws were similar. But she needed to know how much money there was, whether it was enough to make divorce an option.

At least the truck was hers. The title was in her name; he couldn’t make her sell it. She’d still have the freedom to come and go as she pleased, without having to beg permission to take his car.

The calendar turned to August as she drove her pickup to the White Mountains of Arizona, following John as he drove a small rental truck with the few pieces of furniture they’d kept, towing his vintage Mustang on a trailer. Anne had never been west of the Mississippi. She’d wanted to stop in St. Louis, to go up into the great arch there and get closer to the mighty river, but John had no interest in wasting time sightseeing.

As they got farther west, the vast empty spaces loved depressed her.

But she cheered up when they got to the cabin. It was actually a small house with a deck that made it look like a cabin, and it was on the edge of town, not in the middle of nowhere as she’d expected. It looked cozy and it was on a large lot with Ponderosa pines and scrubby little trees that had to be some kind of oak, based on the shape of their leaves. There was no lawn, just dirt, rocks, and weeds.

She envisioned transforming it as she had their huge yard back home.

The first full day there, she discovered she could walk downtown to the Safeway supermarket, the library, the movie theater, and the chamber of commerce. She got a library card and borrowed the book the reading club was reading. She asked for directions to a nursery and found there were two close by – she visited both and asked a million questions.

John had never been a joiner. He spent much of his time fishing or hunting, and he made a short list of minor repairs and maintenance the cabin required. The lack of a lawn under the tall pines was one of the features John had found most attractive. The small oaks created piles of leaves to burn, but that was something they did together. Anne roped him into helping her build her raised beds – the timbers were too large for her to handle alone, but he certainly didn’t want her wasting money hiring someone when he was right there.

She’d rather hoped he’d be loudly abusive about it where neighbors could hear, but he just grumbled, “Anything you plant will die when we travel.”

“I won’t be planting anything in these until spring, but it’s easier to build the raised beds now, while the ground is dry and firm. The only things I’ll plant this fall are roses and berries along the front fence.”

“Why do you want to mess with all that?” he’d complained. “As soon as I get this place patched up, we’re going to do some traveling. That stuff won’t survive if we’re gone half the time.”

“They should get plenty of water from winter snows, even when we travel. That’s when you want to travel, right?” she asked sweetly, but tuned out whatever he said next.

She waited patiently for the right time for her next step.

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Warped Tales: The Gardener – Part 2

Warped Tales – be warned. As a child I read piles of books filled with short stories – the complete works of Poe, stories from the Twilight Zone, collections from Hitchcock, etc. As an adult, thrillers rule. This is that kind of story, in six parts.

Anne Davenport sat in her son’s bedroom. John had removed every piece of John Jr. after the first year, except the ornately carved box that held the boy’s ashes. If John had had his way, those would have been scattered to the wind, up in the Adirondacks where he and his son had hunted together, but Anne refused. She couldn’t remember another time she’d ever asserted her wishes over her husband’s, at least not about anything important. Little things, she generally capitulated or let him think he was having his own way, while she did as she pleased.

But tell him no? She’d never argued with him. She followed her mother’s example in that.

John Davenport was at work. She could talk out loud without him thinking she was losing her mind. “I don’t want to leave. This room and the garden are the only places I feel you anymore.” She spoke to her son, but of course there was no response; she didn’t expect one.

Anne sighed and stood up, crossing the room to look out the window. John Jr.’s room was on the back of the house, overlooking the garden where he’d grown up helping his mother while his father worked. He was so excited when John decided he was old enough to go hunting. The two had bonded over guns and blood.

John Jr. went into the military to be like his father, headed off to war and died at nineteen, blown to bits so cremation was the only option, nothing left for a casket.

Now John wanted to uproot her, take her to some cabin in Arizona, a place she’d never been, that he bought on a whim without talking to her, where he could retire and hunt all the time.

Hunting and his Mustang, the only things he really cared about. Nurse to his mother, mother of his child – those roles were done – all she was now was his cook and housekeeper, and on rare occasions he needed her body for his physical relief. She’d read enough now to know she’d never had a man make love to her.

She was so young when they met – just eighteen and so inexperienced in love, in life, so vulnerable. John was the kind and concerned responding officer when her father put a gun under his jaw and pulled the trigger. When her mother told him how they’d been nursing her husband after a pancreatic cancer diagnosis, John shared that his own widowed mother had just been told she had cancer, he wasn’t sure what type.

He came back on his own time the next day and offered to help fix some things around the house that had fallen into disrepair. Anne’s mother was so grateful, so impressed, and so glad when he wanted to marry her daughter – despite the fact he was ten years older than Anne, who’d never had a real boyfriend. She’d never gone past a closed-mouth kiss at the end of a date. John courted Anne in his 1964 Mustang, wooing her with talk of all the exotic places they would see together, respecting her, never pushing for intimacy before marriage.

After the wedding, they moved into his mother’s home – John was an only child, so they were the only ones available to help her through her illness. John worked all the time, so that meant Anne became nurse and companion to his mother. Anne’s own mother, convinced that her daughter was taken care of for life, sold her house and took off on a trip around the world. Her last letter came from Australia, where she’d met a most interesting man. That was while Anne was pregnant with John Jr. Her mother knew where they lived; if she was alive and wanted to stay in touch, she could. Anne let go of the uncertainty and hurt and focused on her baby.

She gave up on hearing from her mother a lifetime ago. A lifetime of losing herself in caregiving, her garden, and volunteerism, keeping herself busy so her marriage wouldn’t become another statistic as her husband centered his life on his job as a detective with the Schenectady Police Department, hunting, and his car.

They never had traveled, other than a weekend drive to a car show.

The Mustang was Anne’s one hope to dissuade John from selling the house – the house he had inherited. Anne had never thought to lobby for her name on the deed, so she had no say in the sale now. But John belonged to the Mustang Club of America and the Adirondack Shelby-Mustang Regional Club. He hadn’t been able to be very active, because he worked such long and irregular hours. Retired, he would be able to attend all their events.

Unfortunately, there was a club in Tucson and the mountains where he’d purchased this cabin were a favored spot for summer gatherings of car lovers in the southwest. The altitude provided relief from the heat.

Anne leaned her head against her son’s window, took a deep breath, held it, and then exhaled. She spoke to her absent son again.

“Your father’s been with the force thirty years. He brought home the retirement papers last night; he’s turning them in today to retire in March. He’ll be using some vacation time between now and then to freshen up the house with new paint and repairs. He already talked to a realtor who came and told us everything that’s wrong with it.”

A violent urge to strangle the woman, to stop her from talking, had poured through Anne. That wasn’t something she’d say to her son, though, even if he wasn’t really present to hear, even though she’d politely smiled and nodded instead of throttling the woman.

It felt as if John Jr.’s spirit was in the room, and she wasn’t about to tell her son’s spirit, or anyone, how angry she was with John. For years he’d neglected maintenance of their home; now he’d decided to sell it, he was eager to do it all. She had to let go of that anger if she was going to make him see the foolishness of this move.

Anne turned from the window. “I’ll try to reason with him.” She brushed her hand along her son’s container on her way out of the room. It was a mahogany box, with a pretty garden-like scene carved into it. She had broken into tears when she first saw it. John would have been happy with a plain metal box.

When her husband got home that night, she had elk roast with potatoes and carrots waiting for him. She of course let him talk first.

“They were razzing me all day about being an old man. I told them early retirement’s my way of assuring I’ll have a chance to be an old man.”

“I’m glad you’re retiring,” said Anne, though it wasn’t really true – even if they didn’t move, he was sure to upset her routines. “But why rush into selling our home? You were only in Arizona a couple weeks. What if you don’t like it as much as you expect to?”

“I don’t want to keep up two places, and even if I did, this house is too big.  I’d want to move into something smaller, maybe a condo.”

Did condos have any space for a garden? “But you grew up in this house,” Anne started.

He cut her off. “And so did our son, and you’ll never let go of him as long as we live here. It’s not healthy. You need to move on.”

“And there’s my garden.”  I’m a gardener, that’s who I am. She heard the panic in her voice and tried to put it in terms he might understand. “That’s over two decades of effort.”

“And it’s way too much for the two of us.” He pointed his fork at her. “I know, I know, you give the surplus to that place that gives food away. Someone else can do that. Our income’s not going to cover that kind of charity anymore.”

Anne started to speak but was instructed to stop by an abrupt wave of his hand.

“Instead of spending all your time gardening, we can finally do some of that traveling we always wanted to do,” he said.

As if it was her fault they hadn’t traveled, and had nothing to do with his using vacation time for hunting. Truthfully, Anne didn’t really care about traveling anymore, hadn’t since her mother dropped off the face of the earth, but she would have gone along with him. She was still trying to compose a response when he spoke again.

“We’re moving to Arizona.”

She could hear in his tone that his decision was final.

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