Dad's Garden

She hadn’t known it then, but it would be her last conversation Dad. He wasn’t old or unhealthy, there was no reason to believe he’d be gone so quickly, so permanently. There were brief moments where she almost felt lucky. Lucky because their last conversation hadn’t been some dramatic fight, like in the movies, with infamous last words that would hang in the air forever, like forgotten laundry on a clothesline. But most of the time, she just felt heartbroken and lost inside herself.

It seems silly, but when she got the call, the first thing she did was write down everything she could remember about their last conversation. She began frantically looking for scrap paper and a pen, and when she ran out of room to write, she screamed into the bellows of her house, looking for more. She wrote on the back of credit card bills and in the margins of her kids’ report cards that had been displayed proudly to the fridge.

Her kids hid around the corner, watching her wide eyed. They had never seen mom act like this. She couldn’t form words, she just kept wailing and screaming for more paper. Their dad ran around the house looking for notebooks and cursing the digital age for the lack of them. He finally brought her loose-leaf paper, trying desperately to find the right thing when there were seemingly only wrong things to say.

She ignored his back rub and gentle words. Instead, she muttered to herself, debating with her memory out loud, replaying the previous weekend’s conversation in her mind. She couldn’t remember if Dad had said “That’s a nice breeze” or “That is a nice breeze.”

Dad had told her he loved her. Had she replied with “Love you too dad” or “I love you too Dad?” She hoped to the God she didn’t quite believe in that it had been the latter. He wasn’t a picky man; it probably didn’t make a difference to him. But it did to her.

They strolled through his garden in the hazy afternoon, their footsteps heavy and slow, like the humid August breeze that begrudgingly blew through the neighborhood. His garden was different than most. It wasn’t too pristinely pruned or weeded; it didn’t make her nervous to step in the wrong place. The slight overgrowth made it whimsical, right out of a fairytale. The kids were in the front yard, playing whiffle ball with their cousins. The other adults were standing on the porch, bragging about their kids, and sipping cold beers and wine with ice in it. She was happy to escape for a minute with Dad.

They used to joke that Dad loved his garden more than his kids. He would laugh and agree, saying that’s why he named his daughters after flowers, and not his garden after his daughters. She had always been jealous of Violet and Iris because their names were modern and chic. Her mother wasn’t fond of the name Marigold either, but Dad insisted because of her full head of golden curls. At dinner parties they always finished the story with how, after Marigold, Violet came and shocked them all with purple hair.

“How are you?” Dad asked her. The three words sounded like foreign language. She didn’t get asked that very often. Usually people asked about the kids, her work, her husband’s company. It was strange to think about how she was, sans all those layers.

“I’m not sure,” she answered honestly. Dad stopped by the marigolds and knelt in the soil to give them a sniff.

She thought about all the times women complimented her mom on the garden. He never corrected anyone, always replying with a polite thank you. It drove her mom nuts.

“You don’t know how you are?”

She shrugged, “Not really, no. I know all the things I have to do, I know where the kids have to be when, I know what the newspapers are saying about the housing market and the new iPhone.” She inhaled slowly through her nose and muttered softly, “But I don’t have a goddamn clue about how I am.”

He didn’t chide her for her language. That was Mom’s job. “You sound busy,” he replied, sitting back on his heels in the dirt. He gestured for her to smell the marigolds too, fluffy and yellow, like her hair used to be before the grays and stress. Humoring him, she bent over and sniffed. She never liked the smell of them much, but today she appreciated pausing the world around her to just smell a flower.

“When you have children of your own, it’s tough to remember that you are a full person, with a life and feelings and desires,” Dad said. “Maybe you should start a garden.”

She smiled at him, rolling her eyes.

He laughed, “I mean it! It’ll give you something to do with your hands and you can let your mind wander. It might help you get back in touch with yourself.”

“Alright,” she laughed, though she found herself seriously considering the idea, “I’ll start a garden. What flower should I plant first?”

She offered a hand to him as he stood up and he graciously accepted, smiling at her with a knowing look in his eye. “I thought that’d be obvious.”

By the time she got to this part in her memory, her heart rate subdued, its’ tired beating against her chest mellowing like the end of a song. Her husband’s voice flowed steadily into her ear. She couldn’t make out the words, but they lapped against her like water against the riverbank. The pen fell from her hand as she slid her back against the kitchen cabinets, sinking to the floor, cradling her head in her hands, as if they could ward away the grief that penetrated deep into the gallows of her chest.

After the funeral, she made her husband pull over at Lowes. In her black dress and sensible heels, she wandered out to the gardening department. She hoisted bags of soil into a cart, refusing help from her husband and store clerks and allowing dirt to coat her ashen skin. She meandered past the blossoming pinks and blues until she found the marigolds.

That afternoon, she carried Dad’s gardening tools out to her front lawn and got to work. As she dug into the earth, her mind meandered down the lanes of memory. She picked up a clump of soil in her hands and let it softly slip between the cracks of her fingers.

‘I love you too, Dad.’

It came to her just like that. She knew it in her bones, she had said ‘I love you too, Dad.’ Not some throw away ‘love you too.’

She sat back on her heels, like Dad had a few days prior in his own garden. She squinted up at the sky, “I’m ok Dad. I love you too.”