Planted...part two

He stared at her in silence. He clenched his jaw and looked away.

“Nothing Grandma,” he told the refrigerator. “I don’t expect you to say anything about it… As usual.” He pushed his chair back. “I’m taking Gus out for a walk.”

He got up, grabbed the leash off the top of the duffle bag where he had thrown it and headed back out to the porch.

“Go ahead. Walk away…just like your mother!” he heard as he closed the front door behind him. As he slammed the door he heard her hacking her smoker’s cough.

He bounded down the porch stairs, dragging Gus behind him. Jacob was breathing rapidly, his eyes blindly looking straight ahead. At a whimper from Gus, he slowed, knelt down and petted the dog.

“Sorry, boy.” Gus licked Jacob’s face. He stood and continued at a slower pace. They walked through the dappled sunlight and the ringing of church bells. After several blocks of tidy homes, they came to the school Jacob attended from kindergarten to twelfth grade. He ran his fingers over the chain link fence that surrounded the vacant playground. The breeze whispered through a brightly colored play structure that Jacob didn’t recognize. Clangs came from the rope banging against the empty flagpole.

There was childish writing in chalk on the school’s brick wall. Writing on that wall. Was it still there? Jacob and Gus turned up an overgrown alley to where the fence abutted the school. In the shadows of the encroaching shrubs, there was a gap between the fence and the wall. He used to come through here when the gate was locked and he wanted to play catch with himself by bouncing a tennis ball of the school wall. Why am I alone in so many of my childhood memories?

He tied Gus to the fence, “Be right back, boy,” and squeezed through the space.

It was a much tighter fit than the last time he did this. Luckily his still lanky frame just barely fit. Once inside, he walked along the wall, past the stairs leading to metal school doors. He glanced up, half expecting one of his old teachers to fling open the doors and yell at him, Carsten! What are you up to now?! He looked closely at the brick wall next to the stairs. The morning sun, reflecting off the wall, warmed his face and made him squint. Yes, he could still make out traces of red paint in the grain of the brick -- just a faint reminder of the night he dragged Travis through the same gap and they spray painted their opinion of school administration on the wall. He smiled at the memory of that night. That was six years ago. Two weeks before graduation. Two months before they left together for the Big City, vowing never to return.

They almost weren’t allowed to graduate. When his grandmother got the call from the district office, she slammed down the phone, wobbled out to the garage and brought back a bottle of paint thinner and a scrub brush saying only, “If the brush wears out, use your fingernails.” He cleaned most of the wall himself on a Saturday, with little kids looking at him through the fence. Travis showed up and helped for the last half-hour. In a last act of defiance, Jacob had taken out his penknife and carved their initials in the soft brick at the base of the stairs. JCTH. Jacob Carsten Travis Hicks.

He crouched down. No, the brick was gone. The space had been covered over with cement. He ran his hand over the rough surface as if his fingers could see what his eyes could not. He closed his eyes. That roughness…it was like running his fingers over the stubble of Travis’s face. He jerked his hand away and his eyes flew open.

“Knock it off, Carsten!” he mumbled to his shadow. “This is what you wanted!” He quickly stood up, went back to the gap in the fence and forced his body through. His left hand caught on a piece of fencing on the way out, tearing the skin.

“Shit!” He dabbed at the trickle of blood with his already stained t-shirt. The events of the past months tumbled over him: the nights alone, waiting for Travis to come home, the yelling when he did, the final searing altercation that drove Jacob to stuff clothes in a bag, grab Gus and leave, not even taking their car. He’d wanted nothing that wasn’t his alone. Then to be greeted by his grandmother’s warm reception.

“Why did we come back, Gus? Why did I think anything would be different?”

Gus looked up at him, his head cocked.

“C’mon! Let’s get out of here.” He grabbed the end of the leash and walked briskly back to the small house.

He came through the front door without knocking.

“Grandma! I’m leaving!” No response. “Grandma?” There was no one in the kitchen. No one in the bathroom where he paused to put a band-aid on his cut. He looked through the kitchen window to the backyard garden. Deserted. The radio was now off, as was the television. There was not a sound in the house.

Fine. Makes it that much easier. He almost left a note, but didn’t know what to write. So he picked up the duffle bag, flipped the bird to no one in particular and headed back to the porch. With his hand on the knob, a thought occurred to him. What if…? His breaths came rapid and shallow. He turned back and dropped the bag again.

“Grandma?” he called again. He stepped into the bedroom off of the living room and looked to her bed, then on the floor. Nobody. Just piles of dog-eared books, Beowulf, Great Expectations…, left from when she taught English Literature at the community college.

Maybe she fell upstairs. He went back towards the kitchen and ran up the steep narrow stairs to the second floor. He looked first in the guest room and then stepped into his old bedroom. A wall of memories slammed him. His National Honor Society certificate was still on the wall, as were his rock band posters. The bookshelves held his old schoolbooks and even the quilt on the bed was still the same. That bed. He remembered sobbing in it when he was five, being held by his grandmother, refusing to go to school because he had to invite his parents to a school show. His parents.

Where is she, Grandma? When is she coming back to get me?
Shhh, Jacob. Shhh. Maybe she’ll surprise us both one day.

It was also on this same bed years later that his and Travis’ teenage friendship became something much more. Jacob pushed that memory away and turned to look at the CD rack facing the bed. It still contained the CD’s he didn’t take with him: the soundtrack to Men in Black and Disney on Ice among others. He chuckled when he caught himself humming one of the tunes.

He was about to leave, satisfied that his grandmother was really just gone, not gone, when he spied something different on his bed. There was a scrapbook he didn’t recognize sitting in the shadows on the pillow. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked more closely. No, he had seen this book once before. He recognized the faux leather embossed cover and the yellowed pages. When he was ten, he dug this scrapbook out from under his grandmother’s bed and furtively examined it.

In its opening pages, he remembered seeing a shining, smiling girl in pin curls and gingham. The captions read Clara. His grandmother. Where did that sparkling girl go? Further on in the album there were pictures of a sturdy young man, then pictures of the two of them together, his arms around her, their beaming faces captured in the flash. This was his grandfather, he guessed. As he paged on, he came to photos of his grandmother obviously pregnant, then holding an infant, then the child blowing out birthday candles, then his grandfather holding the toddler girl on his knee. He saw his own face in this girl.

Looking through the album now, smelling the musty paper, he realized that aside from the first few pages, there was no writing on any of the pages. No dates, no names. It was as if this album was to be viewed by one person only – a person who had no need to be told who or when. Turning the pages, Jacob watched his mother grow up. Watched her smile turn to a glare. He came to several pages where the pictures had been removed, leaving only the small, white cardstock photo holders to mark their existence. A large part of his mother’s life had been removed.

The next photos he came to were of him: snippets of his life from infancy to his high school graduation. There was even a copy of his birth certificate. Mother: Marie Carsten, Father: Unknown. When he turned to the last filled page, he stopped and stared. There was a clipping from the Minneapolis Tribune showing his name on a list of a softball league from three years ago and the program of a community theatre play he had been in last year. I never told her about these. How did she get them?

He heard the door close downstairs. The sound of Satie’s Gymnopédie 3 drifted up the stairs from the stereo. Jacob closed the album and sat listening. Hisses and pops came from the often-played record. After a bit, he heard a door open and close again. A rustling came from the backyard. He stood looked through the curtains. His grandmother had a shovel and was digging a hole in her garden. He turned and made his way downstairs, the album in his hand.
He dropped the album on the kitchen table next to a receipt from the Garden Center and went out the back door.

Where the house was modest, the garden was anything but. There was a large vegetable garden with a whole produce section of various plants just beginning to sprout. Lilacs and honeysuckle grew along the kitchen wall next to a large patch of lilies and gladiolas. The hole Grandma was digging was in the middle of the expansive rose garden. She used to spend hours and hours out here. After any one of their many arguments during his teenage years he could find her here, puttering on something and muttering under her breath. Puttering and muttering.

She had changed into tan stretch pants, a blue flannel shirt untucked and men’s work boots. As Jacob came up to her, she was leaning her considerable weight into the shovel. A cigarette dangled from her lips.

She turned her head as he came up, then turned back and continued digging. “I thought you’d be gone by now,” she said to the ground.

He stopped next to her. “You shouldn’t smoke so much, Grandma.”

She turned and leaned on the shovel, “I only smoke because it makes me feel like a bad girl. I was good for way too long. Way too long.” She dropped the shovel and picked up a potted rose bush at her feet. “At least you’re no goody-goody. Gotta say that for you. You run away. You don’t use your brains. But you didn’t turn out to be a goody two shoes.” She dropped the plant in the hole, got on her knees and began patting dirt back in place.

“I didn’t think you cared how I turned out.”

She looked up at him. Then with some effort, stood and faced him.

“Why did you come back here?”

“I… I…” Yeah, why did I? “I don’t know…I wasn’t thinking too clearly. I just had to get out and I could only think of going…home.”

Grandma smiled, almost to herself. “I thought it was the smartest thing you did. Getting out of this town. It’s not right for you. That’s the only thing I liked about that boy. That Travis. He got you out of here.”

“You never liked Travis.”

“No. No, I didn’t.”

Jacob looked around. Kicked the ground a bit. “What’ll you name this one?” Grandma named all of her rose bushes.

“Oh, I don’t know.” She scratched her hip. “Maybe ‘Gus’?”

“Not Jacob?”

“Naw, that’s Jacob over there.” She pointed to a large bush with red-edged white blooms. “Planted him six years ago. The first weekend I was alone in the house.”

Jacob looked at the rose bush, then back at his grandmother. She looked away.

“You should let Gus run around back here, instead of keeping him cooped on the porch.”

“Yeah, I think I will.” He turned back when he got to the gate and called, “By the way, it was my idea to leave. Not Travis’.”

Jacob left her there staring at him and went around to the front. He got Gus and then let him into the enclosed backyard. His grandmother was no longer there. When he came back into the kitchen, she was seated at her usual place playing solitaire.

“I see you found the scrapbook. I left it out for you.”

“Yeah.” He sat back down at the table. “How did you find out about the softball team? And the play?”

“We have the Internet up here, you know.” She shuffled the deck. “I just did a search for your name from time to time.”

“Oh.” That explains it. Kind of. The newspaper article he could understand. But the play program? How’d she get that? He started paging through the book again.

“You’re not a bad actor,” she laid down a card and looked at him. “I mean, you’re no Laurence Olivier or anything, but you’re not bad.”

“You were there?” His head snapped up from the book. “Why didn’t you say anything? Come down and talk?”

“Oh, you didn’t need a old lady bothering you.” She stood and filled a glass with water at the sink.

Grandma leaned back against the counter. “Travis called while you were out.”

Jacob collapsed back against the chair and looked over at her. “Did you tell him I was here?”

“No, I lied. I told him you weren’t.” Jacob smiled and started breathing again. “But he didn’t believe me.” She paused. “He’s driving up.”

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End of part two