Broken Homes & Gardens Read online

  “But I like having them around.”

  “We should just be done with men. Don’t you think?”

  Tess yawned. “If you say so, Jo-Jo.”

  Joanna went back to bed. Her eyes stung and her entire body ached from attacking her backyard with that shovel. The air coming in through the window felt cooler now. She pulled the top sheet over herself and closed her eyes. She drifted into a formless dream. No people or images—only tapping, like fingers on a typewriter. The tapping grew louder and louder, forcing her into consciousness. Someone was knocking at the door. She considered staying in bed, but after a minute the tapping became so annoying that she jumped off the bed and walked to the front of the house to peek through the window. She pulled back the dusty, gauzy curtains and flicked on the porch light, revealing Malcolm standing at the door. She opened the door but didn’t let him in. “You’re the only one who invites himself over at all hours of the night.”

  “It’s midnight,” Malcolm responded, as if this were a very reasonable hour for an impromptu visit. “Can I come in?”

  She went out to join him on the porch, closing the door behind her. The night was still warm, but she shivered. She crossed her arms over herself, aware that she was wearing a sheer—most likely completely see-through—tank top and cotton pajama bottoms.

  “What do you want?” she asked, flashing with anger. “Why are you always hanging around?”

  “Because I want to see you.” He was leaning against the porch railing, bathed in streetlight. The yellowing light made the shadows under his eyes more pronounced. He turned away and looked out at the street below. A car passed by, its sound whooshing over them, then receding.

  She felt the sudden impulse to put a hand on his face, to touch his prickly cheek. Another shiver rushed through her; she kept her arms crossed tightly over her chest.

  “Joanna,” he said. “I don’t want you to hate me.”

  After a moment, she sighed. “I don’t hate you.”

  “Good.”

  “All right. Good. Well, thanks for stopping by. Next time, try the phone.” Joanna whirled around, prepared to march back in the house, but Malcolm grabbed her arm and pulled her back.

  He stared down at her. She looked into his eyes, then tilted her chin up. His grip tightened around her arm, and he drew her closer. She would let him kiss her; she wanted him to. She wanted him to grab her and kiss her so hard their bodies would go flying, hitting the side of the house with a thwack. She would let this happen, let herself enjoy it, even, biting his lips, sinking her fingers into his skin—and then she would push him away, both hands thumping hard against his chest. Push him so hard he’d go sailing over the porch railing, where he’d land in a bramble of blackberry thorns.

  But then he averted his gaze and it was over; the moment fluttered away, nothing more than a piece of dust floating around in her imagination.

  “What are you trying to do to me?” She wanted to sound angry, but the words came out soft, deflated.

  Malcolm took his hand from her arm and stepped back. He didn’t answer—just kept looking at her, his eyes dark and gloomy. He opened his mouth to say something and then closed it again.

  Joanna was horrified to find tears building up behind her eyes. She took in a sharp breath and shook her head. She could only hope she managed to appear annoyed rather than just … sad.

  After a moment he turned away from her.

  Joanna stood on the porch and watched him walk away. When she turned back toward the house, she noticed for the first time that the exterior paint was coming off in flakes larger than leaves.

  11

  in fact, she preferred it this way

  “So you’re a teacher?”

  “Freshman composition, mostly.”

  “Oh, a college professor!”

  “Just an adjunct.”

  “So, you like teaching?”

  “I do. I do.”

  Joanna couldn’t believe how badly this was going. The guy sitting across from her in the dimly-lit bar wasn’t bad looking—maybe even interesting looking, with black horn-rimmed glasses and curly straw-colored hair. And he wasn’t pompous or obnoxious; in fact, Joanna could see that he was kind—doing his best to draw her out. He would ask her a question, and she’d come up with an answer, but that was it. They weren’t really having a conversation so much as ticking off the boxes on some sort of “getting to know you” form.

  She should have come prepared. Why oh why didn’t she have Allison or Laura—or even Ted!—quiz her on hot conversation starters? They could have done some role-playing to hone her dating skills. Reading those women’s fashion and lifestyle magazines as a teenager had been a complete waste of time. All of those tips for flirting, satisfying a man in bed, finding a man in the first place—

  “So what about you?” she asked her bespectacled companion. A magazine tip floated up from the recesses of her brain: let him talk about himself. Men like to talk about themselves. Ask him questions. Compliment him.

  And so the date was salvaged. They even made plans to go out for dinner and a movie later in the week. But she went home and flopped onto her bed; one date had sucked all the life out of her. Still, she picked up the phone. She had promised to call Allison and tell her every excruciating detail.

  “How did it go?” her friend asked, not bothering to say hello.

  “It was awful. I really don’t know how you can go on more than one date a month. It’s just so … draining.”

  “It gets easier. So this guy—which one was he again?” Allison had been thrilled when Joanna told her she was considering activating her online dating account. She had even combed through all of the eligible bachelors in Portland, trying to find the perfect man for Joanna. Avoid this one, she would warn, pointing to someone’s tiny picture on the computer screen. What if they ended up dating all the same people? Joanna had asked. That’s how it goes, Allison had replied.

  “The blond guy with the glasses.”

  “Oh yeah. ‘PDX Journalist.’ His username is somewhat uninspired.”

  “It was painful, sitting there, quizzing each other on the banalities of our lives.”

  “Okay, well, move on! Line up the next date.”

  “I’m going out with him again on Friday.”

  “Friday? Really? Well, he must like you.”

  “I’m already dreading it.”

  Joanna told herself she was too busy to be dating right now. She canceled her date for Friday with the excuse that she just wasn’t “cut out for online dating.” She imagined he must be relieved that he didn’t need to suffer another boring Q&A session over glasses of wine and baskets of bread.

  Anyway, she was busy. She had an entire backyard to attend to. What she had initially thought of as a blank slate, open with possibility, now stood before her as a vast, unknowable field. The grass—what there was of it—had turned brown. The weeds flourished. Foot-high dandelions! She hadn’t seen the likes of these before moving to Oregon. And of course they kept shooting up, higher and higher, then blossoming, drying into soft gray puffballs, and then finally falling apart and sprinkling all over the ground and sprouting into a brand new, more persistent generation of weeds.

  She stood out by the vegetable patch, pulling out any errant growths. At the very least, she could keep this small section of the yard tamed. The starts were doing well—nothing had withered up and died. The pepper plants hadn’t grown even one centimeter, and some of their lower leaves had turned pale yellow and fallen off. How could she possibly go out on dates with strangers when, in her very own backyard, seeds were struggling to burst from their shells, shoots were yearning to break through the crust of earth, reaching for a scrap of sunlight? Only to spend the rest of their lives kicking earwigs off their roots and aphids from their tender buds, begging for water, for worms to loosen the soil around them….

  “I can handle this,” she said out loud, her hands on her hips. She surveyed the yard, this time with determination. She woul
d take control, turn this weed garden into a lush lawn with winding flagstone paths, bordered by tall ornamental grasses and flowers. And she would start now.

  At the garden store, she stood in a warehouse with a tin roof, just as overwhelmed as she had been at home. Bag after bag of fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, soils, soil amendments—if only she could only find the right combination and sprinkle it all over her grass like fairy dust, it would magically transform her landscape. “Can I help you find something?”

  She turned around to face a guy about her age wearing a green apron. She looked at his nametag. Charlie Wu. “I have this huge backyard,” she said. “It’s just a field of weeds. I need to get rid of all the weeds and make it nice and green again.”

  Charlie shook his head. “No you don’t.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You don’t want to do that. What do you need a lush lawn for? You plan to host croquet tournaments back there?”

  “Well, I mean, now there are just a bunch of dandelions. I just thought if I could get it back the way it was…” she trailed off. Charlie had his arms crossed. He was upset with her; she could tell by the way he was scrutinizing her. “Do I know you from somewhere?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Joanna said. “I mean, I’ve been coming in here a lot. I bought a house. With a yard.”

  “That’s not it. You just look really familiar to me.”

  “Well … I’m pretty sure I don’t recognize you.” Joanna could be certain of this, because she would have remembered him. He didn’t look like the other employees at the nursery, who tended towards soft, worn jeans, tattered wool sweaters, and scraggly facial hair. Charlie, in spite of the green apron, managed to come off as stylish in crisp, dark jeans, an ironed cotton button-down shirt, and brand new striped athletic shoes.

  “I’ll figure it out in a minute,” Charlie said. He led her out of the warehouse area and into the main part of the store where they sold gardening tools, books, and seeds. In the corner was an unattended customer help desk. Charlie went over to the desk and started sketching something on a piece of paper. “Okay, look. What you want to do is get rid of most of that lawn. Put in a border around the edges—like this. Plant trees, bushes, whatever. You could even turn some of that grass into an edible landscape, make it useful—”

  “I do have a vegetable garden,” Joanna interrupted. “It was all kind of slapdash, but—”

  Charlie smiled and pointed at Joanna. “I know who you are! You’re ‘The Gardener.’” He emitted a short laugh. “Am I right?”

  Joanna felt her face turn hot. “The Gardener” was the ridiculous user name she had chosen for herself on the online dating site. Allison had suggested going with something catchier—“Calendula” or “Marigold,” maybe—but Joanna had stayed firm. “The Gardener” conjured up images of an eighty-year-old man, white legs sticking out of shorts, pruning hedges. Because Joanna hadn’t really planned on activating her account, she enjoyed playing around with Allison, who had eventually muttered, “Okay, The Gardener it is.”

  Now, in the garden shop, Joanna just stammered at Charlie: “But I’ve never seen you before!”

  “You only date tall dudes. I get it.”

  Joanna’s blush turned an even deeper shade of red.

  “Hey, no worries. I remember looking at your profile, thinking you were pretty cute, but you don’t date guys under five foot eight, so I figured—”

  “My friend filled that out for me!” This came out sounding so false and ridiculous she couldn’t help but laugh. “I’m serious.”

  “Right,” said Charlie, amused. “Hey, I’ll take a look at your yard sometime. If you want.”

  As soon as Joanna got home, she logged on to her dating account, curious to find out why she had never seen Charlie’s profile. Allison had combed through the prospects for her—perhaps she had narrowed the search criteria too much? She opened up the search to include men of any height, race, age, religion, transportation preference, dietary lifestyle, and so on. He popped up on the thirty-third page of results.

  She sent him a message right away. Then she called Allison to tell her how online dating had, in a roundabout way, paid off.

  “So have you ever dated an older woman before?” Joanna asked Charlie when he came over to redesign her lawn. She immediately wished she could take it back; she didn’t mean to imply that this was a date. He was just giving her some landscaping advice. Maybe he was even here on a professional capacity—Joanna hadn’t considered that. Should she offer to pay him?

  “What are you—twenty-six?” Charlie asked.

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “That’s just three years’ difference.” Charlie looked up from his sketch of her backyard to smile at her. “Yeah, I’ve dated plenty of older women.”

  Joanna didn’t reply, not sure if he was joking or not. They stood in silence for several minutes as he sketched out a plan, scribbling furious notes.

  “Okay,” he said in an official voice. “Here’s what you need to do. See this? Where we’re standing now?” They were at the back of the house perching on a patch of weedy grass. “You could make a patio or a deck here. Then group some plantings around it. You could do raised beds next year, make some brick pathways between them. And that leaves just a manageable patch of grass here.” With a flourish, Charlie made a circle in the middle of the sketch.

  “Wow.” Joanna was truly impressed. “Okay, so what do I do first?” She looked at him eagerly, as if she expected him to hand her a checklist, a detailed list of step-by-step instructions she could then follow by the letter.

  “Well, it’s up to you. This is like a multi-year plan.”

  “Multi-year?” Joanna frowned and surveyed her plot of land. It gaped open, a huge, hungry mouth. She’d fill it. Fill it with dirt, with seeds, with plants, with water. And it would swallow everything whole.

  At the end of August, Joanna and Charlie lay sprawled out on her bed, on top of the covers, in their underwear. An electric fan whirred at the end of the bed. They had to lie with deathlike stillness to keep it from dropping off the edge. Every once in a while it would crash down to the floor, and one of them would have to position it again. It was ninety degrees inside the house and 103 outside. She had shut all the windows and curtains, trying to trap the heat outdoors. Now the air inside was stale and hot. They took turns spraying each other with water from a spray bottle. The mist and the air from the fan made the heat almost bearable.

  “We should go to a movie,” Charlie said.

  “It’s too hot to walk to the car.” They didn’t talk for ten more minutes. “It’s supposed to cool down for the weekend,” she said after spraying herself in the face with the spray bottle. She opened her mouth, letting the mist land on her tongue. “It better, or my party will be ruined.”

  “Yeah, it’s supposed to be ninety-five by Friday,” Charlie said. “On Saturday it will be in the high eighties, low nineties.” They had been obsessively checking the weather forecast ever since the heat wave rolled in at the beginning of the week.

  Joanna was too hot to respond.

  Charlie turned toward Joanna on the bed. “Listen, Joanna, something came up. So I’m not going to make it to the party after all. Sorry.”

  Joanna propped herself up and tried to focus on Charlie’s face. “But you were going to meet my sister, my friends.” She had been throwing herself into party planning for weeks, even though (as her sister pointed out) the backyard now featured a four-foot cardboard border along the fence. She and Charlie had spent hours—in coffee shops, in fancy restaurants and bars, in bed—dreaming up plans for her garden. By now they had envisioned a wonderland of bamboo, water features (a pond and a fountain), a raspberry patch, fig and pear and blossoming cherry trees, ferns and fuchsias. It all started with cardboard weighted down by bricks.

  “I’m sure I’ll get another chance to meet everybody.”

  “Do you have to work?”

  “Ah … well, actually,
I got the chance to go camping.”

  “Camping?”

  Charlie swung his legs over the side of the bed, pulled on his jeans, and buttoned up his shirt. Even in 100-plus weather, he would not wear shorts. “Yeah. Normally I would turn it down—because of your party—but it’s in the Gorge with views of this lake….”

  “But … what about the party?”

  “I’m sure I’ll really be missing out. It’s just, this opportunity—”

  “Whoever heard of an ‘opportunity’ to go camping? You can go camping whenever you want! Have you ever even been camping before?”

  “Not since I was a kid. Once,” he said.

  “Who are you going with?”

  Charlie paused. “You don’t know her.”

  “Is she like … a date?”

  “Well, I guess you could say we’re dating. It’s nothing serious.”

  She reached for her clothes, too, suddenly aware that he was fully clothed, standing over her bed, and she was wearing an old bra and underwear that didn’t match and squirting water all over herself. The fan crashed to the floor. Its blades spun around uselessly, blowing air up to the ceiling. Charlie picked it up and set it on the bed again, pointing it at Joanna.

  “Listen, Joanna. We’re just having fun, right? I mean, neither of us ever took down our profiles.”

  It took Joanna a second to figure out that Charlie was talking about their online dating profiles. She hadn’t given it a second thought. She would get a message from someone on the site every now and then, but she just ignored them. It hadn’t occurred to her that taking down the profile was the next logical progression in their relationship. They hadn’t even met online!

  Charlie walked over to Joanna’s side of the bed and took her chin in his hand. She suppressed an overwhelming desire to flinch, to scramble across the bed—anything to free her face from his grasp. “I’ll call you next week?”