Notes from the Dog (8 page)

“What happened?”

“While we were away this weekend, the rabbits ate my garden. And Dylan must have just sat there and watched, like it was doggy TV or something. Doesn’t he have some kind of instinct about things like this?”

“I bet if a flock of
sheep
had wandered into the yard, he’d have done something.”

“Oh, well, fine, then. I don’t have to lie awake worrying about an infestation of sheep. Good to know.”

“Um, Finn?” Matthew asked. “How can you
tell
that the rabbits ate your garden? I don’t remember there being much there for them to eat.”

“Shoots. I had shoots, Matthew. Only about four of them, I know, but still. And look at all the bunny
footprints. It’s like they had a gang rumble or something in my garden.” I stomped out of the yard.

We had a quick breakfast with my dad and then he gave Matthew a ride to his job.

I didn’t do anything in the yard that day; instead, I copied my notes from the weekend into the binder. When I was done, the binder had bloated to 126 pages.

I had a moment of panic just holding the weight of it in my hands, but then I realized that the binder had become a book: Johanna and I had written a book about our garden.

Books make me feel safe. Books make me feel normal. And now, I guess, so did working in the garden.

I stood up, stretched and went to the kitchen to make pasta and brownies. We’d take them to Johanna’s house for dinner so Matthew and I could tell her about the weekend. I could show her our book.

Matthew appeared after work with a small tree in each hand, their roots wrapped in burlap. “They’re for the garden. Sven from the site took me to the nursery after work and then gave me and the trees a ride home.”

“You bought them?”

“Yeah.”

“How come?”

“’Cause.”

“Oh. That’s really nice. Where should we plant them?”

We decided on a spot in the front near the sidewalk.

When Johanna got home from a run with some friends, we showed her the trees. Then we ate and paged through our book together. She laughed until milk came out of her nose when Matthew tried to describe the twilight hike.

When we were cleaning up from dinner, she said, “Another round of chemo coming up this week.”

Matthew dropped the plate he was drying.

I stared stupidly at the pieces on the floor. Johanna stood frozen next to the sink. Matthew was breathing hard like he does after a track meet. Dylan tried to pick up a piece of the plate with his teeth and then swiped at the mess with his paw.

Johanna squatted and studied the pieces.

“Look—Dylan made a pink ribbon.”

She stood up, reached into the cupboard and pulled out the pile of pink plates. One by one, she dropped them on the floor in front of her. Dylan yelped and ran to the living room. Matthew and I watched her break seven plates, one after the other.

Johanna stood looking at the pile of shattered plates. Then she took a deep breath and spoke.

“Don’t worry. Those were
my
junky plates. Let’s go. Alice Johnson’s Antique Corner is open until eight or nine on weeknights.” She grabbed her purse and car keys and looked at us. “We’re moving out now.”

“Uh … Johanna?” I said. “Where are we going?”

“On a quest.”

“For what?”

“Art. Beauty. Truth. Pink plates.”

“You want to buy more pink plates?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to break those, too?”

“No.
We’re
going to break them. Are you in?”

“Yeah.” Matthew practically leapt across the room to follow her out to her car.

“Matthew?” I called. “What’s she talking about?”

“Art. Beauty. Truth. Pink plates.”

I rolled my eyes and followed.

We found half a dozen plates and bowls. They didn’t match, but they were pink. We picked up the pieces from Johanna’s floor and put them in a box. She didn’t seem to want to explain, and Matthew was acting all smug like he was in on what was going on or it didn’t bother him that he didn’t know, so I just kept my mouth shut.

The next morning when I was in the garden, Dylan dropped down in front of me and woofed, but the sound was muffled by the piece of paper he had clenched between his teeth. I pried it out of his mouth and read:
The truth always reveals itself, and usually in mysterious ways
.

“You’re getting pretty philosophical, Dylan.”

He yawned.

I petted his ears while I looked at the note. When the dog spit had dried enough, I folded it, slipped it into my pocket and went back to work.

Over the next week, Johanna bought more pink
plates. When she needed to rest after chemo, she had Grandpa and Auntie Bean take me and Matthew to a couple of flea markets. The boxes of plates on Johanna’s basement steps filled up.

One night when I was trying to fall asleep, I remembered a box in my own basement. I went downstairs and ripped open the top and saw a gift card:
To Kathy and Rich: Happy wedding, happy life. Love, Mom and Dad
.

Rich is my dad’s name.

I pulled the packing material aside and saw pink flowers on a platter. I nodded to myself.

Then I dragged the box up the steps and out to the garage. I unwrapped twelve big plates, twelve little plates, twelve cups and saucers, twelve bowls and a bunch of serving pieces.

I stood there looking at them lined up on the garage floor and then, one by one, I picked up each plate and dropped it.

My grandfather had said once that he worried I might have unresolved hostility about my mother’s abandonment. I guess he was right.

I swept up all the pieces, dumped them into the box, dragged it over to Johanna’s back porch and went to bed.

She didn’t say anything about the box the next day, just handed Matthew and me two pairs of safety goggles and two hammers and led us to a work table in the
basement where she had set out all the unbroken china.

“Smash ’em, boys,” she said.

And so we did.

When we were done, we found her in another part of the basement, mixing up a big bucket of gray glop.

I saw twenty-four wooden frames, about eighteen inches square and two or three inches deep.

“What’s all this?” I asked.

“Stepping stones for the garden. That’s what the concrete and frames are for. I ordered the frames from a catalog. We’re going to make mosaic designs in them with the broken dishes. The pattern is pink ribbons.” We looked blank. “Because that’s the symbol for breast cancer awareness.”

“Oh.” I looked away and felt a little sick. Aware. Right. I wished there was a symbol for ignoring. Breast cancer avoidance. I wondered what color that ribbon would be.

Matthew took the stir stick from her hand and began mixing. Then we went from one frame to the next, lifting the bucket together and carefully filling each frame with the concrete. We taught Dylan how to walk behind us and quickly press his paw into each corner. Then Matthew held him still while I picked gooey concrete from between his toes before it dried.

The night Johanna decided the concrete had “cured,” we crawled along the floor using stinking
adhesive to secure the broken china on the hardened concrete in a pattern of pink ribbons.

A day later, we grouted the pieces of china. A week after that, we pulled the stones out of the frames and scrubbed the excess grout off.

One by one, Matthew and I carried the stones to the backyard, and then we argued about where to set them in the grass.

I studied the yard. “If we make a curve from the front sidewalk to the back walkway, it might look like a
J
.”

“Let’s spell out
HELP,”
Matthew said. “Then maybe a garden fairy will read the message and fix everything. I don’t mean to be bustin’ you, buddy, but that’s probably your best bet for this place shaping up.”

In the end, though, it was Matthew who measured the space and laid the stones and made the giant
J
for
Johanna
.

Mornings had become my favorite part of the day. I’d get up before Dad and stand on the back steps looking at my garden coming to life as the sun rose.

Today I scratched my arm as I looked over the yard.

I scratched my thigh and squinted at the vegetable patch.

I scratched my shoulder and glanced at Johanna’s house.

I suddenly realized that I was scratching my
whole entire body
. And that I couldn’t stop.

I ran upstairs to the mirror. I was covered in angry red blotches. I looked down, gingerly,
everywhere
. I grabbed the bag of cotton balls and the bottle of calamine lotion and got to work.

Dad and Fernanda were sitting together at the
kitchen table sharing the newspaper when I came back downstairs. She’d brought fresh rolls for breakfast.

“You look concerned, son.”

“I think I’ve been watering poison ivy.”

“You’re joking.”

“Uh, no, and if you’d look at the calamine lotion on every square inch of my body, you’d realize that.”

“How did this happen?”

“A couple of days ago I was cutting through the empty lot on the way to Grandpa’s and I saw this clump of leafy stuff that looked really healthy, and
nothing
in our yard looks that good. I felt bad about how much this whole thing is costing Johanna and this was free, so I dug it up and planted it over near the corner of the house and now I think I’m dying of itch.”

Dad led me back upstairs to the bathroom. “Let’s check for rash and blisters in places you can’t see.”

Fernanda got online to look for cures and then came upstairs and stood outside the door as Dad dotted calamine lotion on my butt.

“You’ll be crusty and oozy for two or three weeks, and you might try applying the gel from an aloe vera plant to the affected areas,” she called through the door.

Dad and I looked at each other and shook our heads. No more plants.

Dad and Fernanda left for work and I went to sit on the front steps. Trying not to scratch.

“You look glum. And, um, polka-dotty.” Johanna stood at the bottom of the steps.

“You know our book?”

She nodded.

“Well, we might have to title it
The Hopeless Gardener: How to Turn a Perfectly Fine Backyard into Smelly Mud, Food for Wildlife, and Toxic Greenery.”

“Fernanda called me from the car. I’m sorry about the poison ivy.”

“Johanna?”

“Yes?”

“I have a black thumb.”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you noticed that the backyard, um, still kind of stinks a little if the wind is right and that nothing is really growing, except, of course, for the worm and mosquito and wasp and rabbit populations and, of course, the itchy blisters on me? And I swear the rocks are reproducing behind the garage in the alley.”

“And?”

“Well, I mean, it’s not exactly what you had in mind, is it?”

“Not at all.”

“You look … happy about it.”

“It’s turning out so much more interesting than the original plan, Finn.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s a relief.” Then I remembered. “Speaking of the plan, I meant to tell you that we collected about three hundred dollars yesterday.”

“How’d that happen?”

“I was in the front yard and two girls from school, Sophia and Lydia, showed up. Sophia’s mom works at Dad’s clinic and Dad got the staff and patients to start dropping loose change in an old water cooler bottle. When it was filled, they took it to the bank and had it converted to bills.”

Johanna laughed. “You may not be a natural gardener, but you’ve got a real knack in terms of inspiring others to raise the
money
kind of green.”

I stopped to think. Really? Maybe so. Matthew and Johanna and I had been finding envelopes of cash and checks, a couple of bucks here, five or ten dollars there, slipped under our front doors, in our mailboxes and under the windshield wipers of Johanna’s car.

Somehow I itched a little less and the yard didn’t look so hopeless.

Late one afternoon a week later, Johanna called from her backyard as she headed into mine. “You have a date tonight!”