Volunteers
Bernadette’s husband stands over a mound of dark, wet dirt. In one hand, a trowel, in the other, a weathered copy of Gardening West of the Cascades they had found at the bins last winter. It’s bloated with water, the plastic edge of the cover curling away from the paper backing.
Bernadette sees him out the kitchen window while she washes up from supper, unevenly spiced and eaten in near silence. She lets the water run so hot it turns her fingers red, then white.
Under her shirt, a nebula of needle-tipped bruises smarts every time soft cotton brushes against it. She is careful to avoid the lip of the counter as she watches him, his spine straight as a plumb bob. In a few minutes he will come in, tell her the tomatoes are looking good this season. Yes, she will say, mustering enthusiasm from the root cellar of her patience, they really are.
In their bathroom, there is an empty plastic jar labeled Fresh Semen. Her husband’s bit only comes in at the end, four pumps and he’s done. She had told him this once, the injections sweeping the dust off her temper. He’d frowned. In fairness, he’d replied, I think it’s more than four. Bernadette had put her hand against her mouth and screamed.
She slips easily outside and into the wet maw of night. Her husband’s sleep is close enough to death that most nights she feels like a widow. What she doesn’t like to admit is that what she really feels is free. A street cat twists between the legs of three girls smoking roll-ups on their stoop. The cat’s wiry frame and dandruff-freckled fur catches on the grommets of their boots. Bernadette and the girls exchange a nod. There is a kinship between women who are out later than common sense recommends. They see each other almost once a week, the girls’ house being the last of the faded, lush Victorians on the street—the rest replaced by skinny railroad homes painted an infernal matte gray. Like the one Bernadette lives in. She envies the girls. More and more, Bernadette feels she’s losing the plot she had carefully outlined. She wishes she could be back on a porch with nothing to do but wake up in the morning.
The community garden gate is supposedly secure with a borrowed bike lock, but Bernadette can hoist herself over it effortlessly. Twice a week, she pays a woman with magenta camel toe and an impossibly high ponytail to scream at her over techno music to engage her glutes. It pays off. Bernadette loathes her, and so has seen every Instagram post she’s ever made, as well as that of a man she believes to be the woman’s ex-boyfriend. He’s a gardener too. Bernadette secretly hopes one of the plots belongs to him.
The best plot, in her opinion, is the one in the far left corner. Its vines seethe up the trellis, strangling the wood with green. She crouches beside it, takes out her phone, and flips through until she gets to the most recent photo of her husband’s tomato plant. Bernadette matches the fruit from the photo to that on the vine, twisting the spikey crown until she has the perfect handful, plus a few extra just in case. She’s a careful woman, thorough. What if one falls and is crushed under her heel? What if a coyote driven out of the cradle of trees around Springwater wants her to be the reason its teeth are sharp? Bernadette supposes in that situation a tomato won’t help her much. It feels good to imagine, anyway. Competence will win out, won’t it? After all this time, she still believes good people will get what they deserve, although she’s old enough to suspect she isn’t one.
Once she has enough, she climbs back over the fence and starts towards home. The moon clings to the sheet of the sky even as the sun bullies it away, everything awash in lilac. The girls are gone from their stoop, but the cat remains. Bernadette can see every knob of his spine, skin and fur pulled loosely over it. She would offer him one of her tomatoes, but she doesn’t trust luck enough to spare one. Bernadette has a lot of questions about the future. She just wants to be prepared.
All the lights are still off at her house when she arrives back. She always worries what would happen if he woke up while she was gone. It would be so much easier if she were just having an affair. Maybe, she thinks as she unhooks the back gate, she will do that next year.
There’s a hot glue gun she keeps stashed in the wooden shed the house came with. Its sign says The Playhouse! in a childish loopy scrawl that knots itself around Bernadette’s heart every time she sees it. She and her husband have an unspoken agreement not to acknowledge it.
Bernadette kneels in the dirt and rubs a tomato leaf between two fingers. Its soapy, green smell rises to meet her. The tomatoes resist her as she pulls them off the vine but eventually relent. Even glue can’t withstand Bernadette’s will. Gingerly, she dabs a small dot of glue onto the crown of each of her pilfered tomatoes, attaching them back to their vine. His coriander dried and went to seed, the kale pockmarked with aphid teeth, but the tomatoes look good this season.
Bernadette pinches a fingerful of soil and sprinkles it into her mouth. She read that when tomatoes drop seeds, some fertilize and sprout a whole new plant. Gardening West of the Cascades calls them “volunteers.”
Emily Myles (@egmyles) is a writer, mother, and Scorpio moon living in Portland, OR. Their work can be found elsewhere at Fatal Flaw and Peatsmoke.