Free The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato by Kathy Giuffre

leaving me standing surrounded by one pea pod and a sea of tomatoes. I felt protective of them, like a mother with rowdy children, the beauty of whom no one else can see.

    In the late afternoons when the shadows were long and the air had turned blue, Danny would wake up and stretch and light a cigarette, sitting up naked in bed, running one hand through his hair until it stood up all on end. I would leave him rummaging around for coffee in the kitchen and go out back to water the tomato plants. When the coffee was ready, he would bring me out a cup and then sit on the beat-up lawn chair and watch me and we would talk.
    â€œWhy did you come to Waterville?” he asked me once.
    â€œNo special reason. It was a town I had heard of and that the bus went to. My uncle Joe thought that maybe someday I might be able to go to the college, or at least sign up for some courses or something. He wants that for me. I didn’t really mind too much where it was that I went.”
    â€œJust somewhere else?”
    â€œJust somewhere new.”

    Despite apparently having done everything wrong, by August I was drowning in my sea of tomatoes, going under like the bandleader on the Titanic. I gave a dozen tomatoes to Orla, who accepted them but told me that store-bought were just as good. I brought some to Commie Tom, who praised their valiant redness and ate them like apples, sitting with Rosalita on the porch of the bookstore. Vera and Rafi and Pancho all took some home with them. I took a bag of ripe tomatoes to Blossom every afternoon until finally she became suspicious.
    â€œHow many tomato plants do you have?” she asked.
    â€œForty-seven,” I said.
    â€œOh, honey,” she said, and patted my hand, “you’re going to need help.”
    â€œI tell her that,” Danny said, not very paternally. “ Professional help.”
    â€œYou hush,” Blossom said to him. And then to me: “I’ll be at your house tomorrow after the breakfast rush is done. Do you have any canning jars?”
    So Blossom and I canned tomatoes all the next day and the day after that.
    In the mornings, my kitchen was green and cool, a quivering liquid light filtering through the leaves outside the windows. At night, it was yellow and still, a soft oasis of warmth with moths fluttering against the screen door. But in the August afternoons when Blossom and I slopped around in it, streaming with sweat over the boiling kettle of tomatoes, it was vivid red and far too small, hotter than outside even when outside was an oven. We propped a fan on a chair and pointed it right at us, but it didn’t matter. There were dishtowels in the corners that we had used to wipe our sweaty faces until the towels were too wet, and then we dropped them on the floor and used them with our feet to mop up splashed tomato juice and spilled spices. Danny went down to the corner gas station for us and brought back grape popsicles. We ate them sitting in the living room because theymelted too fast in the kitchen.
    After we canned all the ripe tomatoes, we pickled the green ones in a preemptive strike designed to hold the plants’ promiscuous fertility at bay at least until we recovered from the first wave.
    â€œIt won’t seem so much in September,” Blossom said, but Danny looked skeptical.
    The jars of tomatoes were beautiful, gleaming in shiny rows on the kitchen table. We finished the last batch of pickles late the second night, and Danny and I went to bed, taking the fan with us into the bedroom. Danny felt only hot, but I felt both hot and content. I felt I had made something worth making.
    Blossom took some of the jars with her, and for a long while after that, special customers got a little dish of green tomato pickles on their table at lunch. We had to do it all over again two more times before we were done. But my garden was a strange success—my dirt had redeemed itself and me somehow. Orla avoided talking to me for a