After Tommy died, she found that she rather preferred the company of her roses to that of her old friends \u2013 or anybody else, really.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t that she was depressed as such.\u00a0 In fact, she secretly took pride in the moment she\u2019d told the doctor she wouldn\u2019t need any medication to help her sleep, or to help with the sadness of losing him.\u00a0 It was neither that she wasn\u2019t sad.\u00a0 Tommy was her other half, an extension of herself, and while he took a piece of her when he died, she had known he was not long for the world and that somehow prepared her for the greatest loss of her life. She wept, and she didn\u2019t clean for the first few weeks, hoping she\u2019d somehow keep him in the house so long as his scent, his shaving cream (which he hadn\u2019t used for months before he died), and his dirty clothes remained.\u00a0 One morning in early March, when the sun shone brightly, she simply felt it was time.\u00a0 She did the laundry and rang the local Salvation Army, placed it all into bags and carried it outside (where it would remain until the following Thursday, when they came to do pick-ups).\u00a0 She placed her hands on her hips, surveyed the world around her and realized the remainder of her journey would be solo, and though she continued to talk to him before bed every night, she no longer sobbed herself to sleep, and life went on.<\/p>\n
Her friends came at first, bringing food and good whiskey and stories about old times.\u00a0 But she found she was no longer much of a conversationalist, and she had the most bizarre sensation that they expected her to be frailer, more vulnerable.\u00a0 And whether or not that was the case, or it was just her imagination, it put her off of socializing, and she found herself counting the minutes until her friends would make an excuse to leave and be on their way.<\/p>\n
She ate well mostly, but fancy food was Tommy\u2019s thing, and she found solace in her simple nightly ritual of a baked potato with butter and salt, an egg for breakfast and a simple salad for lunch.\u00a0 The house began to feel a bit crowded with all the old furniture and the sad memories they bore (a dent in this arm chair from where he used to fall asleep, a burn mark on the table from where he let his cigar burn all those years ago).\u00a0 Piece by piece the rooms became scarcer as she rang the Salvation Army to take it all away.\u00a0 She had no need for it anyway:\u00a0 her friends had stopped calling on her by now and it felt burdensome.\u00a0 The small breakfast table with its two chairs, her sofa and end table in the living room, the record player and the shelves with all their albums, and in their bedroom, their bed and chest of drawers remained.<\/p>\n
In the morning she would rise early, with or against her will, she never knew, because she simply woke at the same time without thinking about it.\u00a0 Most often she saw the sun rise as she sipped her coffee and fried her egg.\u00a0 Tommy had always wanted his scrambled.<\/p>\n
Once, the boorish wife of one of Tommy\u2019s more boorish friends said to her, \u201cI only wish you had children\u2026they\u2019re such a comfort in times like these.\u201d\u00a0 At the time she just smiled, wondering, if she was a louder woman, how she would have liked to react. But as the days and weeks wore on, she often reflected upon the idea, and found that she felt relief knowing that she had no one with whom to share her grief.\u00a0 She felt possessive over it: in much the same way young lovers feel no one could possibly know how deeply they love, she felt no one could miss him as she did \u2013 no one deserved to grieve as her equal.\u00a0 She was queen of her kingdom of mourning, and that meant no one could tell her how to do it properly.<\/p>\n
And in the spring that followed, as soon as the sun was up, she was dressed in her oldest, ugliest clothes, with a straw hat upon her head and tools in her hands.\u00a0 She started with fruit trees, giddy with the macabre thought that the first cherries and peaches and apples that would fall from their branches would be sweet in the mouths of children she would never meet.\u00a0 She put rosemary at the gate, hoping that passers-by would sneak branches for romantic dinners when she wasn\u2019t looking, and honeysuckle and jasmine by the front door so that the living room smelled almost sickly sweet by late April.\u00a0 By early May, with the help of her neighbor\u2019s son, she had started a vegetable patch \u2013 the first she\u2019d had in more than a decade \u2013 and she found that the seeds were as familiar to her fingertips as the calluses on his hands once were.<\/p>\n
When night fell she was exhausted, and collapsed in her bed mumbling to Tommy about her day.\u00a0 She slept on her side, with one pillow tucked tightly behind her, her hands clasped lightly on her pillow by her face, and she breathed deeply the smell of soil and weeds that never seemed to go away, no matter how much she washed her hands, and she slept soundly, quite often with a gentle smile on her face.<\/p>\n
As the weeks pressed more deeply into summer, the weather became unbearably hot by noon, and so her afternoons were spent sitting on her porch, sometimes with an iced tea, others with an iced Dewar\u2019s, surveying the products of her labor.\u00a0 Her front lawn, once covered in grass that certainly wasn\u2019t terrible to look at, was now a bouquet of deepest reds and purples, brightest greens and yellows, and the rich darkness of soil, spotted with saplings that stood as proudly as they might on their thin trunks, stationary, but somehow reminiscent of colts finding their feet.\u00a0 When the sun set she would don her gloves and gently kneel alongside her petunias or her strawberries or her zucchini, weeding until it was too dark to see.<\/p>\n
The days passed like this until they became weeks, and then months, with one or two visits from a friend or neighbor, or one of their children, because they happened to be in the neighborhood, because they were just passing through, and they would stay, sometimes, for a drink before leaving.\u00a0 Apart from the mailman, though, she saw no one regularly and no one saw her, except her plants, to whom she\u2019d begun to talk because she read somewhere that they liked that, and she liked being able to talk as and when she pleased about what she liked, without all the furrowed brows and consoling tones to contend with.<\/p>\n
One day, late in August, she had to stop weeding not because the sun had set, but because it began to rain quite suddenly and quite fiercely, and she made her way as quickly as she could to get inside.\u00a0 Over the next several days the rain didn\u2019t let up, and though it was warm she could not go outdoors, and so sat by the window with her drink, willing her trees to avoid the lightning that struck several times a day.\u00a0 The mailman told her it was to be an Indian summer, and so she waited patiently until the rain stopped, and when it did she made her way out to her garden, elated to find it swamped but not destroyed, every last tree standing in triumph.<\/p>\n
But before long the days began to get shorter, and cooler.\u00a0 She harvested her squash and jarred her tomatoes in the evenings but found that she grew tired far earlier, and her nights were more fitful.\u00a0 Getting up in the morning was never a problem, but by mid-morning she was exhausted, and she began taking catnaps on the sofa.\u00a0 At first she sat upright: just resting my eyes, she\u2019d think.\u00a0 But before long she began to lie down and sleep more deeply. \u00a0And, as the days became colder she slept longer in the mornings, until she was waking up just in time for lunch, which she didn\u2019t really care for anymore and so she often ate only at dinner.\u00a0 In the evenings she would play a record \u2013 usually one of Tommy\u2019s \u2013 and sit by the window, dreaming about what the garden would look like come spring.\u00a0 But sometimes she would find herself drifting off there, by the window, and would wake up in the middle of the night wondering where she was.<\/p>\n
The nights became so much more difficult, too, tossing and turning because she wasn\u2019t really tired, and in fact she was hungry.\u00a0 Warm milk in the wee hours of the morning was increasingly accompanied by a slice of bread, and quite often she would simply feel too awake to go back to bed.\u00a0 So she decided to follow her body\u2019s rhythm, and while she dressed and showered and breakfasted in the morning, she generally slept throughout the day, and spent her nights listening to Tommy\u2019s records, sipping whiskey or hot tea, and flipping through the old copies of his favorite magazines she\u2019d decided to keep at the last minute once when the Salvation Army came for a pick up.\u00a0 She also decided to take up smoking again.<\/p>\n
Of course, sleeping all day meant she had to do her shopping at night, and she counted herself quite lucky that the small grocery two blocks away was open all night.\u00a0 Apart from a neighborhood drunk or an occasional police officer, her shopping went uninterrupted, until she ran into the son of that boorish woman one night, who drunkenly greeted her and asked what she was doing out at this ungodly hour, to which she refrained from asking what he was doing driving in that ungodly condition, and simply replied that she was doing the shopping and smiled.<\/p>\n
The next day, just as she was lying down on the couch, her half-full glass of whisky beside her on the floor, his mother came knocking at her front door, peering in through the window before she could sit upright.\u00a0 She came to the door and invited her in for a drink, but as usual conversation was lilted and broken and her guest thankfully made her way not long thereafter.<\/p>\n
But the same afternoon she had a visit from a local social worker.\u00a0 He was very short but still somehow seemed to loom over her as he asked if he could come in, and while she deeply wished she had the strength to turn him away, she\u2019d never done anything like that in her life, and so opened her door and smiled.\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019m sorry \u2013 I seem to have interrupted your nap,\u201d he said to her, eyeing her sofa in a way she didn\u2019t quite like, and she told him it was fine, and would he like a cup of tea?\u00a0 \u201cNo thank you \u2013 I can\u2019t stay long.\u00a0 If you don\u2019t mind though \u2013 is this all of your furniture?\u201d\u00a0 And she explained to him that she had donated it to charity \u2013 that this was all she needed.\u00a0 \u201cI see,\u201d he mumbled as he scribbled down notes on a worn pad of paper.\u00a0 \u201cI have to be honest, I have concerns about your living arrangements,\u201d he said, and she found herself speechless, because she couldn\u2019t understand why he should have anything to say about her living arrangements, and she also wondered if he had perhaps not seen her garden as he came in.\u00a0 \u201cMa\u2019am?\u00a0 Do you understand?\u201d\u00a0 And she suddenly felt quite nervous and anxious, and she told him about her garden, and all the trees she had planted, and the vegetables she\u2019d harvested, and asked him if he wouldn\u2019t like to take some tomatoes with him when he left.\u00a0 Instead he said he would like to come see her the next day.<\/p>\n
After he left she paced the house.\u00a0 She had no appetite, and while she felt too exhausted to prepare a meal, she couldn\u2019t seem to sit still for a moment.\u00a0 She hadn\u2019t slept at all that day, and night was nearing.\u00a0 She couldn\u2019t go for a walk outside as autumn had settled in and the wind made her bones ache terribly.\u00a0 She looked out the window several times each hour, not knowing what she expected to see.\u00a0 She tried to soothe her nerves with a glass of whisky, but it tasted rancid and made her stomach turn.\u00a0 As the sun rose she began to feel nauseous \u2013 she knew she needed to eat and so went to the kitchen, intending to force herself to make an egg and coffee.\u00a0 But her hand shook when she picked up the cast iron skillet her mother-in-law had bought them 40 years before, and she dropped it on the tiles, narrowly missing her toe and smashing four tiles to bits.\u00a0 And for the first time in several months, she began to cry, but not for Tommy.\u00a0 It was 8:00.<\/p>\n
She walked to the hall closet, intending to get the broom and dustpan, but was stopped in her tracks by the knock at the door.\u00a0 Before she could feign being asleep, the social worker had peered into her window, where he saw her standing, weeping, shaking, in the same clothes she\u2019d worn the day before.\u00a0 She opened the door and with her head hanging she tried to explain, feeling like a criminal or a naughty child, that she\u2019d just felt quite nervous since he came, and she had the tiniest accident, but she could tell by the look in his eyes that he didn\u2019t hear her \u2013 not really \u2013 and only heard the story he\u2019d already told himself about her.<\/p>\n
She remembered him asking her to sit down, but could not remember later what they had said.\u00a0 She remembered that he had taken out his cell phone, but couldn\u2019t remember who he\u2019d called or why.\u00a0 And then she remembered him walking with her to her room, and finding her suitcase (she had kept that?) tucked neatly behind her chest of drawers, and she remembered watching him reach into her drawers, removing her things to fill it up, and although she remembered that he spoke to her the whole time, and that she nodded her head as the tears rolled freely down her cheeks, she couldn\u2019t remember what he talked about.<\/p>\n
Everything else seemed so far away, now that she sat in this white room, with a couple of pieces of her furniture \u2013 the breakfast table, the shelves with their records \u2013 crowding the tiny space she had left.\u00a0 Her precious silence was now broken continually by beeping and rolling and chatting and laughing and shouting and other people\u2019s footsteps.<\/p>\n
Sometimes, though, when she was left to sit for a couple of hours, as the white snow fell over the grounds outside her window, she imagined that the ground beneath it was covered in petunias, daffodils and tulips, that the vegetable patch was just over there, and all those big trees were hers, grown now and ready to blossom as soon as the snow melted in February or March.<\/p>\n
But she was tired.\u00a0 She was tired of being made to eat when she wasn\u2019t hungry, to take pills that upset her stomach and \u2013 she thought \u2013 that made her forget too many details about her home, about her Tommy. And it was on one of those precious mornings, when the nursing home staff left her to stare out her window into the snow that held so much potential, she decided she didn\u2019t want to be around to see if those flowers would replace the snow in spring.\u00a0 She closed her eyes and opened them, and spoke to Tommy for the first time since arriving at the nursing home.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m coming, Tommy.\u00a0 I\u2019ll see you soon.\u201d\u00a0 And she closed her eyes again.<\/p>\n
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