The Reading Lessons (41 page)

“He’s just being lazy,” Grandma said.

“I’ve never seen him lazy,” Meg said. She buried her nose in the sweet pink flower he’d plucked off the princess tree. “He gave me this.” 

“Why?” Grandma said. “Is it your birthday?”

“No.”

“Hmm,” Grandma said.

The funny thing about Old Hadley and birthdays was that he had been at every single one of Meg’s birthday parties for her entire life. Grandma was so formal, she drank pop from a champagne flute, but her gardener got a piece of cake every year on Meg’s birthday. And on Stephen and Henry’s birthdays, too. He was even there when they all got baptized. Grandma threw lavish birthday parties. She had that much going for her. It seemed ordinary to Meg that Old Hadley should attend them until the year she was allowed to invite Nancy Youngerman to her Sleeping Beauty birthday party, and Nancy wondered why the dark-skinned man in the gardening clothes was eating an Maleficent cupcake at the table with the white grownups. 

“Who is that guy?” Nancy asked. 

“Old Hadley,” Meg said. 

“What’s an Old Hadley?” Nancy asked. 

“He cuts the grass and plants the flowers,” Meg said, as though this made him good as an uncle. 

When you went to Grandma’s house for a party, there was always Grandma, Grandpa, and Old Hadley, and after Grandpa had the heart attack—Grandma and Old Hadley. Patti Carol didn’t come to birthday parties unless they were during the week. Weekends were for Patti Carol’s own kids. 

The week after he gave her the pink flower, Meg drove up the driveway and Old Hadley was nowhere to be seen. 

“Shhh . . . ” Grandma said when Meg walked in the door. “Hadley’s feeling poorly.”

“Has he got that bad bronchitis Stephen is just getting over?” Meg asked. 

Bronchitis was going around, and Old Hadley had long suffered from a poor immune system. It didn’t normally slow the man down.

This being the second Thursday of the month, it was Library Committee day, but Grandma wasn’t wearing one of her Jacques Fath designer dresses, much less her fruit hat. Grandma never missed a committee meeting. 

“The doctor came this morning, and he isn’t sure what it is. I’m supposed to take him for tests tomorrow.” 

Meg held up the McDonalds bag. “Hungry?”

“Christ, Meg. How can you even think of eating at a time like this?” Grandma scolded.

That was the last day Meg brought Big Macs because, after that, Old Hadley was always worse. “Go and sit with him for awhile, will you, Meg?” Grandma said the fourth week he was in bed. Grandma never looked so tired. 

It had been a month since the man was up and around, and Meg was worried what she would see when she went in his bedroom. Before he’d taken sick, she’d never even set foot inside his house. Now she spent every visit there. 

Grandma’s house was an old house and everything in it was old-fashioned and smelled like yellowed books. The oldness of the place made Meg sneeze every time she walked through the front door. Old Hadley’s house was worse, a peculiar blend of bleach and stale air. There had been a cold snap recently so you couldn’t open a window. Thankfully, on this particular visit, it was a beautiful day, and the first thing Meg did was crank open the window above his bed. Old Hadley opened his eyes and took a great breath. “The lilacs are blooming.” 

“Yes they are,” Meg said, even though the only thing she smelled was sickness and Borateem. 

There was a chair pulled up to the bed with a blanket and pillow on it, and this surprised Meg. Grandma was the last person you wanted around when you were sick. She got put out if you asked for an aspirin. She was deathly afraid of “germies”. 

“Your wisteria is looking a little wild these days,” Meg told Old Hadley. “When do you think you’ll get back to it?” 

There was sunshine lighting up his face now, and Meg was amazed how much he’d shriveled. He’d always been a bony geezer, but his poor little head looked like a raisin on a toothpick now, and his thick dark hair was going gray. 

“I wonder if you could water them until I’m back on my feet?” he said. “I’m worried about my wild flowers, too. Fairy spuds need lots of moisture.”

Worry about your own moisture!
Meg thought. He was looking more dried up than the dried up fairy spuds she’d passed on her way in. “I’ll water everything before I go.”

He seemed to rest easier after that. “I’d ask Lucinda to do it, but she’s got her hands full with me.”

“What does the doctor say?” Meg asked. It surprised her to realize how much his diminished state upset her. She’d always liked Old Hadley, of course. She liked him more than Grandma, actually.

He waved a skeletal hand. “He charged me twenty-five dollars to tell me I’m old. I should rest, he said, as though that’ll make me young again.”

Meg laughed. Was Old Hadley ever young? This seemed doubtful. “Do you want anything? Are you thirsty? I could read you a book?”

Old Hadley’s room was full of books. That was practically all there was. He had a nice large walnut shelf for books, but the contents had long since spilled down into piles on the floor. The dresser and nightstand were stacked with books, too. One dresser drawer was half-open, and the red corner of a book poked out. He was like one of those crazy old lady’s with too many cat only his cats were all books. 

She picked up the book next to his bed. “You’re quite a reader, aren’t you?” 

“I reckon I am.” 

Meg opened to the beginning of the book and started to read: 

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish...

“What do you think you’re doing?” Grandma barked. She stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips, looking fit to be tied. 

“I was just reading,” Meg said.

“Give me that,” Grandma said, and she snatched the book away. “Go home, Meg. I can take it from here.”

Meg shrugged and climbed to her feet. “I’ll run the hose before I go,” she told Old Hadley.

###

Outside, the pansies looked up at her with sad little purple faces. Meg couldn’t shake the feeling that the flowers missed Old Hadley as much as he missed them. She got a whiff of something tasty and sweet and knew it must be the moth orchids. Moth orchids smelled like vanilla ice cream. You could smell Lily of the Valley, too, because there were a lot of those around. They looked as lonely as the pansies.

Thanks to Old Hadley, Grandma’s wisteria was the envy of the county. It had been featured once in Southern Living magazine. Every year, during the first week of April, the Dispatch came out and took pictures of it. The front page would be spread corner to corner with pearly clusters of Grandma’s wisteria. SPRING IS HERE! If you ordered a pizza from Pizza Hut, you didn’t even have to give an address. You just had to say it was for the house with the wisteria. And when relatives visited Beattie’s Bluff, seeing the sites almost always included a ride out to the Beattie’s Bluff bluff, one complimentary game at Turner’s Mini Golf, and a long, slow coast past Wisteria Walk. It broke Meg’s heart to realize that Old Hadley was missing the blooming season this year. She thought of him tucked in that dark stuffy room. 

“This will never do,” she told the orchids.

Grandma all but slammed into Meg as she rushed past with the first armful. “What on earth are you doing?” Grandma asked.

Meg took the tin pitcher off the windowsill. “I’m going to need as many of these as you can find, Grandma.” 

Grandma watched her fill the pitcher and dump the orchids in. “Smells like ice cream,” Grandma said. She went over to her own kitchen after that and returned with a silver platter loaded with hoity toity vases. The hoity toity vases were used up before they made it through the orchids. 

The crystal supply having been exhausted, Grandma started pouring pickles down the drain. “Get the ketchup, Meg.” 

Bottles and jars were working out nicely for the flowers until the sink backed up. They switched to drinking glasses then. Wisteria tumbled across the kitchen table like lavender caterpillars. Poppy petals trailed the floor. Meg carried in magnolias, pink bush honeysuckle, and orhids. Grandma seemed especially partial to the orchids. She even rattled off a peculiar little poem about them: “A rose will prick my finger, and a bluebell makes me blue, but the soft mouth of an orchid makes me dream of kissing you.”

Meg stared at her grandmother. 

“Hand me a juice cup,” Grandma said. 

It took them nearly half an hour to carry all the flowers into Old Hadley’s room and find a place to put them. Stacks of books became pedestals, and lamps were unplugged and cleared out of the way. Old Hadley watched blue stars and bead lilies cross the room and never said a word. By the time they were done, the outside gardens were choppy and bald, and Old Hadley’s room was a messy explosion of purples, oranges, and reds. Even Meg could smell the lilacs now. 

“But your Garden Girls are coming tomorrow,” he finally said.

Grandma had been named Queen of the Roses more years than not and never tired of reminding you that she was royalty. “Don’t worry about that. It’s still prettier out there than Mercy Levine’s pathetic little excuse for a flower bed.” Grandma sniffed. Mercy Levine was usually crowned Queen of the Roses during the
not
years.

In truth, the garden was all stems now, yet Grandma was actually humming as she rearranged a bucket full of snowball lobelias. 

 “Stephen and Henry are going to stop by tomorrow,” Meg told Old Hadley. He was happy about the flowers and even happier to hear about the boys coming for a visit, but she could read the unspoken question in his eyes. “Mom still has a cold and says she better stay away.”

Mom and Grandma didn’t get along. They probably hadn’t spoken two words to each other in all Meg’s years. Mom felt responsible for the old woman, certainly, but that didn’t mean they were friendly. At family gatherings, they ignored one another with the exception of what Meg and her brothers called
The Nod
. “Mother,” Mom would say, and then she would do this quick stiff nod. “Nina,” Grandma would say, and she’d give a quick stiff nod, too. Then they’d be so busy taking lids off Jell-O molds or setting the table that they couldn’t be bothered to look at each other again. It was creepy. 

One of the things they disagreed about the most was Old Hadley. Mom had a housekeeper, too, and she gave Tilda an extra twenty-five dollars at Christmas, and that was that. Tilda did not come to birthday parties and baby christenings. Mom said it would have been stupid to even ask her. 

“Do you want to spend five minutes more at the bank than you absolutely have to?” she asked Meg. 

Mom wasn’t as snooty as Grandma when it came to most stuff, but she did not like to see Old Hadley eating birthday cake next to her at the dining room table. “Father should never have let that get started,” she complained.

When Meg suggested that her mother ought to go visit Old Hadley, Mom had asked, “Why would I visit the gardener?” 

Mom visited orphans and brought tater tot casseroles to shut-ins, but she would not visit Old Hadley. Dad had dropped by with the boys twice, and Mom had ridiculed him for it. 

“Mother has always given that man too much attention and now you’re doing it, too. What next? Shall we offer him a kidney?”

“That’s pretty heartless, Nina,” Dad said, so Mom threw a piece of buttered toast at him, and he had to go change his pants before work. 

Mom acted furious whenever the subject of Old Hadley came up, yet she asked after him one day completely out of the blue. “Any improvement?” she asked. 

“Maybe you should go and see for yourself?” 

“No thank you,” Mom said, and she wrinkled her nose like Meg had just asked her to root through the trash. “I was simply wondering how much longer we can expect to be waiting on him.”

Meg clenched her fists. “Oh, probably just another month or so, and then we can bury him and be done with it.”

Mom was doing Jane Fonda at the moment, but she stopped mid-lunge, and all the blood drained from her face. “You really think he’s dying?”

This was the first time Meg had actually admitted the truth to herself. “He’s worse every week, Mom. He can’t get out of bed anymore.”

“Well,” she mumbled. She gave her falling legwarmer a tug and straightened the sweatband on her left wrist. “I had no idea this was so serious.”

“That’s because you’re too high and mighty to pay him a visit,” Meg said. She hurried and left before the woman could throw a barbell at her.

The most startling thing about Old Hadley’s decline was the way Grandma declined along with him. She was not a small woman by any stretch, and yet she shriveled up, too, matching his pathetic portions at mealtime as if to show support for his poor appetite. Grandma was busy with her committees normally and the hours of sitting in a chair beside Old Hadley were robbing her of zest. Every hour she spent in that chair next to him looked to age her another year. Her poofy hair drooped and fell out of place after so many missed beauty parlor appointments. Her clothes got too big. She creaked when she walked. 

“We need to get you out of the house, Grandma,” Meg said. “You’re as pasty as Old Hadley.” But Grandma was not easily budged from his house. 

“Will you help me get these dead carnations out of here?” Grandma asked. 

The carnations were done, that much was true, and so was the vase of daisies with bright blue baby’s breath. Grandma slid the kitchen wastebasket around behind her, tossing in soggy clumps as she moved around the room. Meg did the same with the bathroom can. 

“These gardenias sure lasted long, didn’t they?” Meg whispered, so as not to wake the snoring man. 

And then it hit her. 

Old Hadley grew dahlias and daffodils and delphinium. He had every kind of wildflower a Mississippian could hope to coax from the earth, and there was a rose garden and a lily garden to boot. But Old Hadley did not grow carnations. She stared at the gardenia in her hand. Old Hadley didn’t grow gardenias either. “Grandma?”

Grandma motioned her into the hall. “It turns out that Orville Brix from the Good Samaritans is having a slow time with his flower shop. I used Hadley as an excuse to help him out. Don’t let that get around, dear. Orv Brix might be a Samaritan, but he won’t have anyone pitying him.”