CHAPTER 4
Excerpt from Petra Polly: Chapter 1—Maintain Fighting Weight at All Times
When a company is carrying a spare tire around the middle, it sinks to the bottom of the pool, becomes depressed, earthbound, slow moving. To avoid this, exercise your employees regularly—host competitions and contests, keep their creative muscles taut, promote competition that is friendly and fierce. Burn the fat away with mental interval training—tear those muscles down, and build them back stronger and more resilient!
The vegan flourless cake—dense, chocolaty, delicious—was a marvelous surprise. I didn’t care if it was created from tree sludge and sawdust—it tasted amazing. I’d scarfed nearly half of it as I read Petra’s book. Take that, Petra, and your fighting weight, I thought, bending to search our pantry for a bottle of wine, my knees protesting. I found one slightly covered in dust, by the cans of tuna fish Trey had taken to eating every day after school until someone warned him about the evils of mercury poisoning, and he’d sworn never to touch them again. A stack of them formed a mini skyscraper in my pantry, and behind it, treasure. A nice Bordeaux given to Jesse by a client. I’d been saving it, but for what? Jesse would never be back to share it with me. I heard his voice so clearly, though, telling me I’d better get drinking before it turned to vinegar. I popped the cork from the bottle and didn’t pause to let it breathe. My need to breathe was stronger.
I poured the wine and took a sip. Heavenly.
Odd choice of word, I thought. Did I believe Jesse was somewhere in the clouds, looking down at what had become of his wife? I wasn’t sure. I kind of hoped not. When Jesse died (I’d stopped using the euphemistic “passed away” after about a year), there were two things people said to me with regularity—he’s always with you and he’s in a better place. Try as I might, I couldn’t see how both of those could be true at the same time. When I was honest with myself, I hoped neither was accurate. If he were with me, then he could see my tears, my depression, my zombielike inability to engage with the life we’d built together. And how could anyone think there was a better place for Jesse than with his wife and child? That thought, meant to comfort, seemed unnecessarily cruel.
I forced my thoughts to shift—what would Jesse’s version of heaven be? Probably a glorified Container Store. Jesse was seriously organized—we both were. Every single thing in our house had a place. We both took great pleasure in our community, a gated, private subdivision on the outskirts of Willow Falls, with its own rules and bylaws. Jesse and I loved rules and bylaws. We loved order. For us, the best day could be described as one that ran “smoothly.”
I glanced at the wineglass, and there was only a swallow left, as my grandmother used to say. Jesse and I used to open a bottle every Friday night. We’d each have two glasses, then two glasses on Saturday, with dinner we ordered from our favorite Italian restaurant. I held up the bottle and poured myself another generous drink.
The second glass was going down way too easily when I remembered that Trey was staying at Colin’s place, and I hadn’t yet spoken to his mother. Jesse and I tried hard to avoid helicoptering Trey, but our rough childhoods made it difficult to avoid making automatic assumptions about others. Trust was not given readily; it was earned only after careful observation and analysis of actions. I’d never met this woman, and Trey would be sleeping under her roof. The prevailing attitude around here seemed to be if you could afford to live in Willow Falls, you at least checked some of the boxes on the list of “good person” attributes. But Jesse and I knew we could never buy into that kind of naïveté. We’d seen too many folks from places like Willow Falls cruising our old neighborhood, looking for drugs and trouble. They usually bought the first and caused a great deal of the latter.
I found my cell phone after much fishing around in my purse and checked to see if Trey texted me her number. He had, and I smiled to myself like I always did when Trey did something he should be doing, like keeping a promise.
Her name was Charlene.
She answered just before it switched over to voice mail with a clipped, “Yes.”
I introduced myself and thanked her for hosting Trey.
Silence. I thought my phone had gone out when she said, “Trey says you have no running water in your home.”
“We have water!” I said defensively. “Just not hot. I meant to call the guy, but today’s been craz—”
“Trey devoured his dinner. He said there’s often not any food in your house.”
I took a deep breath. Wasn’t this the woman who was supposed to be a hands-off, you-guys-are-now-adults kind of mother? What had Trey been telling her?
“I’m doing the best I can since my husband died.” I didn’t often play the widow card, but if there was a situation that called for it, this was it.
“Trey said that was two years ago.” It was a statement, but also an accusation.
She waited for my response—did she want an apology? I thought of something Big Frank said to me after Jesse died: You’re gonna have to deal with people who’ve never had to grieve before. “I’m doing the best I can,” I said, struggling to keep my voice even.
“I’m sure you are,” she responded, her tone softening a smidge. “And I can . . . sympathize. I’ve been married for twenty years, and I can’t imagine.”
No, I thought. You can’t.
“Perhaps you need to be a little more open to help,” Charlene said. “Have you tried therapy?”
“Thank you for hosting Trey,” I choked out. “I’m going to go now.”
Charlene paused, and then said, “He’s having a wonderful time. It’s our pleasure.”
After I hung up with Charlene, I put the rest of the beetroot cake on a plate, refreshed my wineglass, and took both out onto our patio.
The temperature had dropped to somewhere in the low sixties. Shivering, I sat at the edge of the concrete and pulled my cardigan close around my middle. Our backyard, a healthy size for even a suburban plot, stretched out before me, velvety in the darkness.
Charlene’s comments weighed heavy, but I tried to shake them off, focusing my attention on an effective ad campaign for beetroot cake. It was fudgy, gooey, and delicious, but it resembled something you’d scoop up after your dog. I thought about what Dandelion Girl said. Alchemy, magic . . . though I could use a little of both in my life, my brain couldn’t figure out how to make them work for the slab of gelatinous goo on my lap. I shrugged and shoved a big scoop of it into my mouth. Maybe the skinny hipster know-it-all was right, and I had to train my brain.
I raised my second (third?) glass. “Here’s to you, Petra Polly.” It went down the way a good Bordeaux should—smooth and easy but grounded enough to bring you back to earth. I cut another slice of the cake, and that went down handily as well.
“You’ve got dandelions coming up,” said a masculine voice.
I started. “What?”
Mr. Eckhardt, my grumpy neighbor, bent over our low fence. Given the hour and our weak porch light, I couldn’t see much but his crew cut–topped head and condescending expression. “You haven’t had the service come in well over a year, and your son barely does a passable job mowing. If you don’t take care of the weeds right away, the problem will continue to worsen. Next year, your backyard will look like a vacant lot in a crack neighborhood.”
“Maybe I like dandelions,” I said, hearing the slur in my words.
Mr. Eckhardt gave me a surprised look. He’d heard it, too. His mouth flattened into a line of disapproval. “No one likes dandelions. They’re a nuisance. A predatory nuisance.” He looked at me again, hard. “If you can’t pay for it, I will.”
“Don’t,” I said, waving my glass at him to bolster my point. “Dandelions aren’t the enemy. We can eat them—did you know that? They clean out your organs. All the toxins come right out.”
“I’ll call the service tomorrow,” Mr. Eckhardt said, pretending I hadn’t responded. He pushed himself from the fence, and I could only see the tip of his pointy nose. “At this point in the conversation, I believe you should be thanking me.”
“I don’t want you touching my lawn.”
“I won’t be touching anything of yours. The service will spray, and the problem will be eradicated.”
“Maybe I don’t want my problems . . . eradicated.”
“Oh, now I don’t think that’s the truth, Mrs. Moresco. Though no fault of my own, I’ve been privy to your problems over the past few years. If you could call a service to spray away your problems, I think you’d do it in a heartbeat. I’m doing you a favor. I’d appreciate if you remember that.”
His nose disappeared, and I heard the sharp crack of a door being slammed. I poured myself the last of the bottle and sipped thoughtfully, remembering all the times Jesse and I had giggled at old Mr. Eckhardt while he devoted entire Saturdays to landscaping his yard, even to the point of edging the difficult-to-reach spots with nail scissors. We were neatniks but not entirely rigid. Our neighbor’s obsession with perfection meant everyone else fell short in some way, including us. He was obsessive and unfriendly and had disliked us since the day we moved in.
But . . . he was right.
If I could spray Grief-Be-Gone all over my life, I would, toxins be damned.
Disheartened, I kicked off my shoes and dug my toes into the cool grass. Once upon a time, our backyard resembled a stretch at Augusta National Golf Club—smooth and flawless, not a weed to blight its green perfection. Like most artificially beautiful things, our lawn required constant maintenance. I pictured Jesse, T-shirt dotted with sweat, pushing the lawn mower every Saturday, with Trey carefully working the edger around the perimeter. I watched from the kitchen window as I made lunch, bringing lemonade and sandwiches when they took a break. Jesse and Trey didn’t talk much while they worked, but they didn’t need to—completing a task that had tangible, measurable results appealed to both of their personalities, and bonded them in a way I could understand but couldn’t replicate.
I shook off the memory and took a hard look at what had become of our lawn. Mr. Eckhardt wasn’t exaggerating—weeds had sprung up all over, dotting the green, pushing up along the fence dividing our property, skirting the edge of the patio I sat on. The old me would have been mortified. The new me? Well . . . I nudged at one healthy dandelion head with my big toe and popped it right off the stem.
The casual destruction felt good. Really good.
Grabbing my spoon, I licked off the remaining beetroot cake and dug out the root of the weed. Then I proceeded to toss it over the fence. I did it again, and again, and again, until the small patch of lawn surrounding me was covered in little craters. It looked like the surface of the moon, and I howled. It felt good in a way I hadn’t felt in years.
I wanted more.
The earth, still cool and hard, nearly bent the spoon in half. Woozy, I stumbled my way to the garage. We had a garden spade somewhere, or maybe a shovel? I knocked down half of Jesse’s tools, but I found a rusty old digger behind a pile of rakes.
My normally boring suburban yard appeared dark and mysterious in the moonlight. I pushed the shovel into the ground, flipping up a chunk of sod, and then another and another, continuing on, stopping only once, to open up another bottle of wine.