Alice Bliss (24 page)

“Glad I wore my boots.”

Uncle Eddie fires up the rototiller and takes off along the outer perimeter of the garden, chewing up and turning the soil. Alice walks behind him picking up and tossing aside any stones that get uncovered. The soil is still pretty heavy and wet, but Eddie and his machine are slicing through it like butter. Every now and then Alice misreads the angle or direction of the rototiller and bends down to grab a stone and gets a faceful or shirtful of dirt for her trouble. Even wearing boots she and Eddie are both getting soaked with water and caked with mud. Halfway through the job Alice is dirtier than she’s ever been in her life.

Uncle Eddie’s approach is a lot faster and definitely more slapdash than her dad’s. He’s driving the rototiller, rather than carefully guiding it. He’s finding out just what this machine can do, how fast it can turn, what happens when you give it maximum gas. These experiments keep plastering both of them with dirt. Alice has to jog sometimes to keep up. Uncle Eddie’s got this thing going top speed and he’s whooping and hollering as he slides through the corners, using all his body weight to turn the rototiller, skidding on his heels, and laughing.

This job, which Alice usually hates for its careful, dull, noisy slowness has been transformed into a road race and a mud-pie session all rolled into one. She had dreaded every plodding step as some sort of penitential slog through missing her dad. Instead, Uncle Eddie has turned this task into a game and released her by changing the unwritten rules.

He stops before their last pass around the perimeter and hollers at her over the engine noise:

“You want to drive it?”

“No.”

“You scared?”

“No!”

“Yes, you are!”

“I am not!”

“Then come on up here. We’ll do it together.”

She takes the handles, adjusting the speed. Uncle Eddie walks beside her in case she needs a hand. She’s taking it slow, really slow, slow enough to lift her face from looking down at the dirt and take in the whole gentle swath of the garden; the earth turned up, the wet mushroom-y smell of dirt in the spring, full of loam, and promise and possibility. She can do this; she
is
doing this.

Fifteen minutes later she’s helping Uncle Eddie drive the rototiller up two planks and into the bed of his truck.

“You want to come in for a beer or something?”

“Like this? Your mom would kill me. She’s already gonna kill you.”

“I could bring one out to you.”

“That’s okay, kiddo, I promised to get this baby back to the rental place before five.”

“Thanks, Uncle Eddie.”

“Anytime.”

“I wish I could get a picture of you.”

“Wait until you see your own dirty self. We should’ve made a video. I think it could be a big hit on YouTube. In the farm states.”

Uncle Eddie peels out and leans on the horn as Alice turns toward the house. She kicks her boots off outside and goes in the back door and directly down the basement stairs where she strips off all her clothes and throws everything into the washing machine. Every stitch is soaked, even her underwear. She grabs a towel out of the dryer and heads upstairs. Now she can see her dirty footprints on each step. And her path from the back door to the basement is muddy as well. Her big muddy handprints are all over the back door and the basement door. She can’t believe it. If it weren’t so cold outside she’d go wash down with the garden hose. Now she has to track and drip all the way up to the shower, too. Her mom is gonna kill her. She grabs paper towels and scrubs the bottom of her feet.

She sidesteps her way up the stairs so she won’t touch the walls. She turns on the shower and steps in. The water coming off her is black with dirt, her hair is gritty; there’s even mud down her back. She leans against the wall of the shower, letting the hot water wash over her. She’s feeling better than she’s felt in days. They got the job done. She’s going to have her garden no matter what her mother says, just the way she planned it with her dad. Exactly like last year. Sunday she’ll plant peas and radishes and the earliest lettuce and spinach. Sunday she’ll be in the garden, down on her knees with stakes and string and seeds.

“Alice!? Alice! Get down here right this minute!”

Oh, shit, here we go, she thinks, as she steps out of the shower, slips on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and heads downstairs.

Her mother has a bottle of Fantastik in one hand and a big pink sponge in the other. She shoves them both at Alice.

“Here. It’s your mess. You clean it up.”

Without a word, Alice sets to work.

“I thought we discussed this. I thought I made myself perfectly clear.”

No answer from Alice.

“Why are you insisting on—?”

“I promised Dad,” Alice mumbles into the floor.

“What? I can’t hear you.”

“I promised Dad,” Alice enunciates slowly and clearly.

“Well he’s not here now, is he?”

“That’s the point, Mom.”

“What did we agree on last night?”

“We didn’t agree on anything last night. You made some pronouncements, I kept my mouth shut.”

“We agreed that
if
you get your grades up where they belong
then
you can do the garden.”

“I didn’t agree to that.”

“That’s the deal.”

“I can’t accept that.”

“You’re going to have to learn how to accept it. If your father were here—”

“—We wouldn’t be having this discussion.”

“If your father were here—”

“—Don’t go there, Mom.”

Alice stands up, puts the Fantastik under the counter, rinses the sponge in the sink, and walks out of the kitchen.

“Just where do you think you’re going?”

“To do my homework.”

Alice hears a cabinet door slam as she crosses the yard to her dad’s workshop, where she will most likely not do her homework, where she will most likely sit there wishing she could write a letter to her dad about fat, fast Uncle Eddie and the garden and the muck and the mud, and the way the machine was roaring under her hands as she guided it through its last pass around the garden.

 

It’s the Red Wings’ home opener against Syracuse. Alice is sitting in the bleachers with John Kimball, his father, his kid brother, Joey, and Mrs. Minty. A very short and very chubby high school girl from Mendon with beautiful long, dark hair has just sung “The Star-Spangled Banner.” How is it possible to belt out notes that high? The team sprints out onto the field to take their positions as the announcer introduces them. They get a welcoming standing ovation. Rochester loves its Red Wings. Not that Frontier Field is full; but it’s a respectable crowd. Rowdy, too.

It’s cool and windy but John and his father know where to sit to get some shelter from the wind and to take full advantage of whatever sun there is. They’ve got peanuts in the shell and, true to his promise, John has gotten Mrs. Minty a hot dog with all the trimmings.

Mrs. Minty is wearing her usual skirt, blouse, cardigan sweater, and tie shoes, but over this she has layered an extra sweater, her winter coat, and two scarves. She has also brought fuzzy mittens that look homemade, and to top it off she is sporting a well-worn Red Wings baseball cap. They are all wearing Red Wings baseball caps, which makes Alice feel slightly ridiculous.

Mrs. Minty has already purchased her season player roster and she has not one but two sharpened pencils in preparation for keeping up with the box scores. This is more baseball ephemera than Alice and her dad usually indulge in, though her dad reads the box scores every morning in the paper. Or used to.

She leans over to John.

“Do you understand box scores?”

“Yeah.”

“My dad explained it to me once, but honestly, I stopped listening after about two minutes.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it.”

Everybody’s a little stiff and formal, except for Joey who is happily dashing up and down the bleacher steps following one of the vendors around. Is this because none of them know one another well, or because Mrs. Minty is there and they’re all trying their hardest to be polite and not yell and swear, or is it because John is wishing he’d never invited this weird girl to a baseball game and John’s father is probably wondering what’s going on because he thought John already had a girlfriend? That Melissa Johnson who calls every night and wants to talk on the phone till all hours.

Joey is back, panting.

“Dad! Dad! I want to sell peanuts. Can I sell peanuts?”

“I think you have to be fifteen.”

He’s crushed. For a moment.

“Dad! Dad! Can I sell peanuts when I’m fifteen?”

“Sure.”

“How long ’til then?”

“Eight years.”

“You think I could be an assistant before then?”

“Ask him!”

“Ask who?”

“The kid you’ve been running after.”

“He wouldn’t have to pay me.”

“Don’t tell me, tell him.”

Joey sprints off, in pursuit of the fifteen-year-old demigod selling peanuts.

Mrs. Minty begins a discussion about the new shortstop, Rich Gelbart, and what the pitching coach is saying about him. John listens carefully but doesn’t say much as his dad and Mrs. Minty assess Gelbart and his strengths and weaknesses, until Mr. Kimball turns to John and says:

“You could be there, son. You work hard and you could be there. Right on that field.”

“Dad . . .”

“You’re quick, you can hit, and you’re not afraid to push yourself. Best shortstop Belknap High’s seen in fifteen years. Sounds like Peter, doesn’t it, Mrs. Minty?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, it does.”

There’s an awkward pause.

“Thank you for speaking about Peter, Jack. It’s a comfort to me to hear his name.”

“I know it is.”

John turns to Alice.

“Mrs. Minty was my dad’s high school English teacher.”

“She was not!”

“And she came to his games. Just like she comes to mine.”

“Mrs. Minty, I didn’t know you were a teacher,” Alice says.

“I gave it up for a while when Peter was young. But I went back to it after my husband died.”

“I heard you came back to teaching just so you could torture my dad,” John teases.

“I wouldn’t call it torture,” Mr. Kimball says.

“Were you hard on him?” John asks.

“I had high expectations for all my students.”

“Even the ones who didn’t give a . . . who didn’t care?”

“A climate of expectation fosters the possibility, even the near certainty, of achievement. If I believe in you, and I communicate that to you, you will find things in yourself you never knew were there.”

“Is this a theory, Mrs. Minty,” Alice asks, “or has it been proven?”

“Ask John’s father.”

“Mr. Kimball?”

“I wouldn’t have finished high school without Mrs. Minty. Well, Mrs. Minty and baseball.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a long story.”

Mrs. Minty gives him a look.

“Go ahead, Jack,” Mrs. Minty says.

He looks out across the baseball diamond as though he can see into the past and says:

“My father had a massive heart attack my sophomore year in high school.”

“He
died?”
bursts out of Alice’s mouth.

“At Gleason’s. On the factory floor. He was forty-five years old.”

Mrs. Minty is completely present; her attention is like a pair of strong hands resting on his shoulders.

“My mom was overwhelmed trying to take care of things and hold on to the house and find a job and feed four kids. I hardly went to school for the rest of sophomore year and barely passed my exams. That summer I worked on Gentle’s farm and played on the town baseball team. I was trying to help my mom, but I met older kids on the job and that wasn’t good for me.”

“Why not?” Alice can’t help asking.

“Older kids with licenses, and fake IDs, and money for beer, and nothing better to do.”

John and Alice look at each other, taking this in.

“It was a mistake they put me in Mrs. Minty’s class. She taught the honors section. I didn’t know any of the kids in that class—their parents were the doctors and the lawyers in town—and I was in way, way over my head.”

“I asked for you to be in my class,” Mrs. Minty says.

“Why would you—?”

“I knew your mother. I knew you were in trouble. And I thought I could reach you.”

“So you were my angel, Mrs. Minty,” Mr. Kimball smiles.

“Gloria’s your angel, Jack.”

John’s father nods and ducks his head blinking furiously for a moment, as he thinks about his wife.

There’s an uncomfortable pause.

“Lovely day to open the season, wouldn’t you say, Jack?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I predict that Gelbart is going to have such a good season we’re going to lose him to the majors.”

“You could be right, Mrs. Minty.”

“I might even wager a small sum on that supposition, if you were inclined to take a gamble.”