Free Fortunate Lives by Robb Forman Dew Page A

“Anyway, I may need you to operate Moonflower’s pulley,” she
     said with an old note of authority. “Ellen called this morningwith a terrible cold. I don’t know if she and Vic are coming.”
    “Okay… Well… you takes what you can, and you deals with what you gets,” he said, clearly mimicking someone clever, someone
     black, someone he admired, and someone she had never heard of.
    She cast her eye over the rigorously organized rows of vegetables and flowers that defied inherent grace. She viewed it as
     a slight to any natural aesthetic sense. She didn’t really like to give parties, she thought, and she only repeated this one
     summer after summer because she knew, even if they didn’t, that it was a custom her children would miss. But she put the thought
     aside and tried to calculate how many heads of lettuce she would need, how much parsley; would there be enough dill flowers
     for decoration or should she not bother with them?
    “You know,” she said mildly, while she bent to unearth another head of curly Winter Density lettuce, “you didn’t have to plant
     these flowers in
rows
like this, sweetie.” It seemed to her a waste that David took such care with a garden that was not in itself very pretty
     at all. “But these carnations are lovely, aren’t they?” He didn’t answer because she wasn’t asking a question as much as commenting
     to herself. “For years I wondered what the British meant—in all those books—always talking about ‘pinks,’ and I finally found
     out that they were just carnations. If I had only known sooner I would have called them pinks myself, and I would have liked
     them better. Like all those lime trees in Chekhov. Well, one of the Russians, anyway. Whenever I thought about limes I felt
     languorous… it probably isn’t Chekhov…. But it was years before I ever saw any carnations
growing
! When they come from the florist they look as if someone has made them out of crepe paper. Really, I still hate them in arrangements.
     But big masses of them together… You’ve had good luck,” she went on. “I’m awfully glad you’re so interested in gardening.”
    She spoke to her son with such hearty encouragement that he was suddenly alert. He heard the false cheer that often obscured
     a dangerous edge, and he paused to glance at her where she bent to her chore with efficiency and a determined smile which
     she turned toward him. “This is so good for you, I think. Most people start a garden when they’re already too old. It’s always
     seemed to me that gardening is a hobby that should be for the young. It’s such a good way to learn about life!” She was emphatic,
     her words tumbling into the day with blocklike certainty.
    Dinah had no idea how she looked squatting on her haunches in the flowerbeds, with her hands slightly chapped and her clothes
     and hair in early-morning disarray. She used a trowel to dislodge a clump of bishop’s-weed, and she tightened her lips in
     a little moue of concentration. She was pleased that she had managed not to betray her irritation at David, and she attacked
     the weeds with vigor, but David had stopped his work and turned to look at her when she spoke.
    All at once she seemed monstrous to him. He was almost light-headed with sudden loathing as he watched her bend her head with
     the effort of prying loose the root system. She stood up slowly to stretch, grasping herself at the waist, elbows cocked at
     an angle to lean backward. Her mouth went round in an exaggerated exhalation, and she smiled toward him as though she were
     innocent. He could scarcely bear to continue looking at her.
    In one moment she had destroyed the pleasure of his garden. He had planned it all so carefully during the last long months
     of high school, and over the past month it had begun to seem to him that the balance between the effort he made and the actual
     result was a perfect thing. Just as she was forming the words she had tossed out into