Free Backyard by Norman Draper Page B

a lovely, suitable-for-framing photograph of a giant saguaro cactus with a watering can somehow attached to one of its spiky arms. Marta shook her head sadly at the thought of it.
    Maybe Dr. Sproot was scared of him. Maybe she needed someone to push her around the way she pushed others around. Whatever the psychology involved here, she had always been trying to please Mort. That had involved buying sheer undergarments decorated with lace merganser heads, and Dr. Sproot’s attendance at the monster truck rallies over at the St. Anthony Hippodrome. Not even that could smooth over the roughhewn, slovenly obnoxiousness that was Mort Sproot.
    It was on Mort’s sixtieth birthday that Dr. Sproot had made her startling discovery about him. She had decided to surprise him by coming home early from work with a couple six-packs of his favorite beer. She surprised him, all right. She found him cowering in their bedroom, his face all dolled up with makeup and lipstick, and wearing a pair of her pantyhose, her pink, perky, push-up bra, and a pair of frilly, light-blue panties that he must have bought or scrounged from somewhere because they certainly weren’t hers. Plus, he smelled all foo-fooey.
    Marta chuckled and felt her face flush. Jasmine Bell, a licensed family counselor who had worked with the Sproots and who had no business telling her such things had told her anyway because they were neighbors and friends, and had known Dr. Sproot since they were kids.
    Dr. Sproot and Mort mostly ignored each other after that. They dealt with their deteriorating domestic situation in their own self-destructive ways. Mort took to drink even more so than he had before.
    A self-righteously aggrieved Dr. Sproot no longer felt obligated to kowtow to Mort’s whims. On weekends, weekday nights, and saved-up vacation days, she threw herself into her gardening with a new, tireless zeal that put all of her colleagues to shame, but added a good ten years of strain to her face and thinned her hair. That was when she invented the coreopsis-salvia-hollyhock blend. Marta believed it to be a truly revolutionary step forward for gardening in Livia, though such a combination had never been quite her cup of tea. Dr. Sproot had dug up more than two-thirds of her existing gardens to make way for the new find. Marta marveled at how she could bring such an energy and breathless resolve to an act of sheer destruction. It was also then that she followed Dr. Sproot’s good advice to hire a couple of guys with a backhoe to dig up her deep-rooted Joe-Pye weed. She had planted it five years earlier and it had flourished. After listening to Dr. Sproot, she agreed that it was a hideous blot on her gardens.
    Two years after the ladies’ underwear incident, fate struck in the form of the stroke.
    Marta had been summoned by Dr. Sproot that day to witness the progress of the coreopsis-salvia-hollyhock blend, and arrived to find Mort downing one beer after another and playing with the propane tank attached to the backyard grill. The next thing they knew he was slurring his words and stumbling around in a semi-stupor. Typical Mort. He had taken to inhaling propane on top of his drinking, which, Dr. Sproot had to admit, made him act a little less like a brooding wannabe axe murderer. Besides, if he was willing to poison his organs and shrivel his brain, well, who was she to stand in the way of his cheap-thrill jollies, especially if they were to have the happy consequence of significantly shortening his life span. What you did was just ignore him when the fumes and alcohol took hold.
    A dull thud signaled that Mort had fallen onto the relatively soft carpet of thick rye and fescue. There was some writhing, a groan, then stillness.
    â€œWe’ll just let him sleep it off right there on the ground,” said Dr. Sproot, who, despite Marta’s protests, continued to direct her attention to a particularly impressive specimen of coreopsis. When Mort