Despite having the red brick house at the top of 19th Street all to herself for nearly seven years, Katherine Gresham still hid her soft pack of Carlton 100’s in the writer’s desk. It was a strange habit, given there was no one to hide her smoking from. All four children were grown and moved. Her husband, Walt, had passed years ago of a heart attack.
“Gone too soon,” said every decent man in town, as they shook her manicured hand at the wake.
The women had played their part, too. One by one, they had come to the house with their casseroles and condolences. Green bean with Campbell’s cream of mushroom and fried onions on top. Or chicken and broccoli with wild rice in little aluminum pans.
Katherine’s memory of the months after Walt’s death was a leaden vacuum, a hole left in the earth of her where life, or at least some fossil record of it, should have been. After the flurry of funeral arrangements was out of the way, the world had seemed to denature around her. The individual bodies of friends and family, always coming and going to check in, clotted into one well-meaning presence. Indistinct and constant.
Time too refused to work correctly in those early months of bereavement. Days lost their edges like pads of butter melted in the skillet. Where there should have been night and day, Tuesdays and Fridays, there was instead a feeling of one, scowling continuance. Neither day nor night but some psychic drawing room that existed right outside of time. It seemed to hover invisibly just above the rest of life. A ghostly limbo that only she could reach, a place where she would decide whether to go on.
Walt’s death set a fire that tore through the once-fertile woods of Katherine Gresham. Every last feeling in her reduced to smoldering coal. She supposed the reason the town heaped casserole on a widow was to help put the fire out, to help her not quit life right there on the spot. As if having to do the dishes herself would’ve been the final straw. And maybe it would’ve been.
Somehow, despite herself, Katherine had survived it all. His death. The blitzkrieg of over-salted casserole. The hellish fire of her grieving mind. Now, it was just her and an old Siamese cat, Noël, who had golden almond-shaped eyes like a spider. Katherine found her to be much more like a tarantula than a feline but nonetheless companionable.
Life passed quietly on her little corner of 19th Street, but she rather liked it that way she thought as she slowly walked to the mahogany desk. Walt had made it for her and the kids one Christmas. He’d carved “W.G. 1962” in the middle drawer with his father’s pocket knife.
She opened the bottom left drawer and took out the forest green tin box that used to hold gingersnap cookies for the children. She took the pack of 100’s and a lighter in hand, and lit her first cigarette of the day. It was barely sun-up. There in the pre-dawn silence, draped in her ivory chiffon robe and house slippers, she relished her first few inhales. That was the best part she thought. How it felt when she got the thing squarely lit. How that moment seemed to merge with all the other times she’d enjoyed the ritual of lighting a cigarette. Or, better yet, when one had been lit for her. There was nothing like a man lighting a woman’s cigarette, she thought with a slight smile.
She remembered how her and Walt would steal away to have a smoke together when the children were properly occupied. She’d let him offer her one even though they both knew she’d say yes. How he’d always light hers before his own.
How, even with a house full of children, a beagle and two cats, he knew how to make her feel like it was just the two of them. He’d lean down with his Zippo – a relic from his Airforce days- and never once look at the cigarette. His eyes were on her. Or they were on some place in her that only he knew. And under the pretense of a tiny thing like lighting a cigarette, they eloped into this secret world of theirs. The place in her that she kept just for him.
Right before he’d take his last drag, he’d lean in close with one hand boyishly in his pocket – he never did lose that fighter pilot charm – and he’d kiss the small of her neck with such presence that all the gravity in her body seemed suddenly to reverse. Certain of the effect he had on her, Walt felt Katherine go someplace else. It was a tiny miracle familiar to them both. Something in him sent her swimming through the headwaters of a great serpentine river, to a place that churned heavy and invisible between them.
After he’d had his fill of the headwaters, made certain they were still there in her, Walt skillfully tamed the electricity between them and gave her one civilized kiss on the cheek – a husband’s kiss – as he went off on whatever other business called to him in the house. But for just a moment, over a tiny thing like a cigarette, they’d been more than parents or spouses. Or householders. Underneath the burdensome mechanizations of home economy, they were still lovers. Undomesticated as the Ganges. They were made of electricity, element and two combustible human bodies still mad about each other.
How they’d managed it all those years, she couldn’t say. All she knew was Walt had some kind of magic about him. He was entirely lovable. The whole town had thought so. He knew it too. And the most intoxicating thing about Walt Gresham was that he dared to use all that self-conscious charm right on his own wife. This was what made him a family kind of man.
When they’d figured out that Walt had heart trouble and that smoking could be the cause, Dr. Monnagan at the General had asked him to give up the habit. He followed the doctor’s orders without hesitation and took to chewing Wintergreen when the urge struck him. That was that.
But his course was already set; heart disease took his life not even a year later. Before he’d gone, he’d asked Katherine to quit too.
“We need you to be well for all of us now,” he’d said, kissing the palm of her hand.
She’d fought back the tears and told him she’d do her best but had taken to keeping a pack in the little green tin. That had to have been almost eight years ago now, and yet it seemed as fresh as last week. When Walt finally did pass, she just kept the secret up. Through the forest fire, through the disbelief. And now through the numbness.
Katherine traced the winding veins of the wooden desk with her fingers while she took in the morning sounds. One by one the birds woke up and each began their song, adding to the concert of early spring gathering around the house. Slow and subtle, she felt a cumulus mood ride in on the daylight and fill her kitchen. It was a feeling familiar enough, out of place as it was. The cooking tide was coming in again on her. It was the only sort of mood that struck her these days: the sudden urge to bake. Though it was hard to say if the mood was her own or a whim of the long-running kitchen to which she was in the habit of acquiescing. That’s the thing about a woman’s kitchen. It’s as alive as the family it feeds, and especially so when its mistress – as in Katherine Gresham’s case – has outsourced all her own living.
The truth was Katherine had pushed all the feeling out of that burnt-up heart of hers and into the kitchen. Heartaches lay next to the ramekins and muffin tins in the cabinets. Longings and affections, some faint as a whisper, some thundering howls, were nestled neatly into the blue and white porcelain pot of wooden spoons and whisks. Melancholy, in threads of smoky rose and a slate blue-black, wrapped itself dramatically along the rolling pin. Hope sunned in the quiet warmth of the oven, grief rattled next to the star anise and cinnamon in the spice cabinet. Sorrow, strength, frustration, peace. All the aches and pleasures a woman could hope to feel: they were all there quietly inhabiting the cupboards. Feelings are strange creatures like that. They often go on living their lives even when exiled. In the end though, try as we may to throw them out, they find a way to have their say.
Katherine went to the brick-red cookbook that sat on a stand near the stove, the one her mother had given her when she’d first married. She flipped through the worn pages of the dessert and pastry section. Custard. Lemon chess pie. Croissant from scratch. Her mother was always such a talent with croissant pastry. Chocolate soufflé. Cheesecake. She stopped there and thought a minute. That was it: the modesty of a cheesecake was exactly what the kitchen was summoning that early spring morning. The perfect simplicity that only squares of softened cloud-white cheese and glimmering sugar crystals could provide. A classic, guileless cake. It was just the kind of thing around which a woman could build the rest of her day, a signal to life that her world was full of easiness and delight. It was technically a pie, she thought to herself, not a cake at all. But who cared what anyone called it when it tasted that good.
Next, Katherine put the coffee on to brew and walked with Noël back to her bedroom closet to dress for the day. She decided on her new plaid sundress from the department store. She liked it for its heavy blue linen and side pockets. Next to her walk-in closet, the bathroom vanity smelled clean like hot salt-water and Ponds cold cream. In front of the large tri-paneled mirror, she brushed out her soft, blonde-white curls and put them up neatly in hair combs lined with fresh-water pearls.
Back in the kitchen, she went to the pantry and put on her clean apron. She remembered what her mother had said when she handed down the red cookbook.
“Don’t over-complicate marriage, Kitty. Let it be simple. A lot of the problems that come up between husband and wife can be solved with a proper dinner,” her mother had counseled.
And she was right. One evening at a time, Katherine and Walt created a sacred rite of supper. Their nightly vigil in the kitchen had produced a deep resounding tone that equalized the inevitable ups and downs that the outside world could and did bring. When her eldest son got in trouble at school for insubordination of his homeroom teacher, Mrs. Nightingale, they’d explained they expected more of him, grounded him for the month and served leg of lamb. Rosemary and lemon roasted chicken with potatoes tended to sooth Walt on days when being in business was tough-going. When their only daughter, Charlotte, made senior homecoming court, they’d celebrated with a porchetta and tiramisu for dessert. That little red cookbook of hers, more than anything, had bound Katherine, Walt and the children together all those years. Every night around the dinner table, the careful provisions of her kitchen reknit their connections. Held them together by invisible but powerful cords of kinship. What Katherine’s mother had known was that she and Walt would build their home by that little red book.
As Katherine reviewed her notes on graham cracker crust, she heard the screen door in the breakfast room open and close. “Lettie, is that you?” she called out. “Sure is.” Lettie had been Katherine’s housekeeper since the children were in diapers. She was a slight woman in her old-age now, but she still looked after Katherine and the house as best she could. Katherine kept her on for the companionship more than anything. She walked in the kitchen with her white work dress and orthopedic shoes.
“What you got cooking up in this kitchen? It’s barely sun-up and you baking?” Lettie asked.
“One of those kitchen moods hit me again. First thing. I figured I’d make use of it at least and get a cake going,” she responded.
Lettie nodded and shot Katherine a knowing smirk. No good reason for that woman to be cooking a whole cake for herself, especially not Katherine Gresham who ate less than a hummingbird. She was missing Walt, Lettie figured. But she let Katherine go on about her cookbook business.
“I reckon I’ll tidy up a bit today. The floors and the linens if that’s alright. Shouldn’t be past eleven,” Lettie said.
“Of course, I leave those matters to you entirely. Here. Cup of coffee?” Katherine responded, and she poured the woman a cup of the hot chicory elixir that she’d ordered all the way from New Orleans.
“Woman, you drink it too strong. No wonder you whipping up a whole day’s work first thing. Probably got more energy than Samson in those veins.”
Lettie added two lumps of brown sugar that Katherine kept by the coffee pot and still made a crumpled-up face against the motor-oil black drink.
“Can I ask you a question?” Lettie ventured.
“Let’s have it.”
“Well, what you planning on for that cake?” she asked with a glimmer of sass in her eye.
“I usually send my desserts down to Martha Honeycutt. She’s got the biggest sweet tooth for miles around, and besides her house is teaming with growing grandkids who stay hungry.”
“I see. You Martha Honeycutt’s volunteer baker now. Mighty neighborly of you,” Lettie teased.
“Now that I’m thinking of it, Martha is visiting her eldest daughter over in Wilson county. Has been for the past two weeks. Who else is there?” Katherine thought aloud.
She paused a minute and scanned her short list of current acquaintances.
“Lettie, what about you and Bill? You should take the cake with you.”
Lettie made a sucking sound with her teeth.
“You know better than that. Don’t do cheesecake.”
Katherine exhaled audibly to clear her head. She peaked out the kitchen window to scan the houses down 19th Street. There was Anne and Rick, but they’d insist on a full visit if she stopped by with dessert. Cynthia next door was a diabetic. Poor thing had taken to eating only sugar-free sweets, which tasted dreadful. She couldn’t feel too sorry for her though, as she’d become nearly obsessive about the no-sugar life that her dietician prescribed and insisted on anyone in eye-shot try her terrible, overly-sweet abominations. She’d become pushier than a televangelist about those sugar-free chocolates and was to be avoided. There was Frank Sanders across the street, but it had been ages since they’d had a proper exchange. They were much too estranged for her to be turning up with baked goods. Katherine got the sudden feeling that she was over-thinking things.
“Now, Lettie, look what you’ve done. Haven’t been here even five minutes and already you’ve spoiled my fun. Now I’ve to figure out who this cake is for,” Katherine scolded.
“You are a real puzzle of a woman, Katerina Gresham. Stop tryin’ to make sense of your ways long ago. I’ll tell you what, better figure out whose volunteer cook you are today or that cheesecake is going to waste. Would be a shame too. I’ll tell you another thing, you holed up in this house not having anyone you can call on with a cake is a shame all its own,” the maid admonished.
“Lettie, dear, I’m going to have to miss the second half of this fascinating lecture, but I assure you Noël is a most attentive listener,” Katherine teased as she went out the front door.
Katherine’s morning ritual was to look over the flowers with her coffee on her way to pick up the morning paper. The air smelled of pine from the woods behind her house and of sweet citrus from her heirloom gardenia hedge. She inhaled its intoxicating fragrance, and, on a girlish whim, she plucked a handful of blossoms for the kitchen counter. When she turned around to return to the chore of picking up the daily paper, she saw Frank Sanders walking with his old Australian shepherd, Turner.
“Beautiful hedge you’ve got there, Katherine,” he said.
“Thank you. It is lovely, isn’t it? I can’t take credit for it, you know? Tell Percy, the yard man. He’s the real green thumb around here.”
He laughed a little. Frank picked up the morning paper from the end of the driveway and shook off the morning dew from its wrapping. He walked it over to her.
“Here you go. Charles, the metro council reporter, says there should be a doozy of a story about city policing,” he mentioned.
“Oh really? What’s the angle you think,” she asked.
“Oh, something about how Old Town gets policed differently than the northern, poorer parts of the district. Harsher protocols. They’re rougher with dogs and too brutal during arrests. I don’t know, he just hinted around a bit in the coffee shop earlier this week. Might be a rough week for chief Barry if I had to guess.”
“Well, I’ll be looking out for the story. But I have to admit I don’t really follow politics as closely as I could. Walt was always the one that kept up with that sort of thing for us,” Katherine confessed, arranging the stems of her tiny bouquet.
“Well that makes sense. Walt was always an outgoing sort of man. Loved people, didn’t he? Probably didn’t burden him too much to follow their goings-on. Of course, if you don’t have the constitution for all that society scuttlebutt, it can be a bit exhausting,” he said.
“You get out much these days, Frank?” she asked.
“I guess I can be sort of a homebody. I like what I like,” he responded. “That’s a part of this getting old business. I like working in my garden in the mornings and enjoying my handiwork from the porch in the evening-time. Set in my ways, I guess. Still, I manage to keep up with town business for the most part,” he continued. “What about you? Circulating much?”
Katherine searched for a response that didn’t give away the complete truth. That she had nearly shut the world out save the gardener and housekeeper.
“I get out to town for this and that. But my social days are past me, I think. No reason to mingle as much as we used to, now that the kids are grown and moved and Walt’s business is sold,” she explained.
“It’s a strange affair, getting old, isn’t it? Feels like every week I hear about another schoolmate or friend from the club has passed. My son lives all the way up in New England if you can believe it and is busy with his own family now,” he said.
“I know what you mean. Feels like in our younger years when we were raising them, all we wanted was more time to rest and just be. Now, all I have is time. More quiet than is probably good for me if I was telling the truth,” she admitted.
Frank leaned in to examine one of the gardenia blossoms on the hedge while Turner trotted around the yard, finding smells here and there.
“You really should consider entering your hedge in the symposium’s garden show this year,” he encouraged.
Katherine returned a warm smile to accept the compliment and walked back to the brick steps of her house.
“Well, nice talking with you, Frank.”
“Have a good rest of your day,” he replied.
She turned around to go back inside but something tugged at her, whispering “more.” A fantastic whirl of honesty buzzed in her stomach, and then flew from her mouth like a swarm of bees off in search of new spring.
“Frank, why did we lose touch? It’s been years since I’ve heard from you.” She stood upright in her searing, irrevocable candor.
A subtle color came to Frank’s cheeks. He made a clicking sound for Turner to come and heal at his feet. He paused for a moment while he patted the dog’s head and looked towards Katherine, whose piercing sea-glass blue eyes stared back stoically. She’d always been a beautiful woman he thought, but the sharp point of her attention, the clarity of her mind, was what stood out about her the most. Somehow her openness, her willing transparency seemed to impart more oxygen in the air. Frank filled his lungs with a deep, easy breath and listened for the real meaning behind her question.
“I know I could’ve been better about keeping in touch after Walt died. Was a great man but you know that. If I had to say so right here on the spot why I stayed away, I guess it was because I missed him too much.”
“I see. I understand, I mean,” she said, feeling clumsy to have put the man on the spot with his own feelings.
“You must miss him terribly, Kat.”
Only Walt called her that. Her legs lost their balance a little as she tried to discern if what she was feeling was for Walt or Frank.
“Oh, of course I do,” she said and took a long inhale of her gardenia bouquet. “I do alright though,” she thought aloud.
“I imagine you do,” he said.
To her great relief, he did not look at her with even the slightest trace of pity, as so many others did these days. That was the most miserable part of the widow’s lot, the oceans of pity people heaped onto one. No, the resonance between them suggested that he was quite confident in her strength. In her ability to carry on. How she wanted that to be true. Katherine smiled again to accept the compliment. With that, she walked back towards the front door.
“It was very nice to see you,” she said and meant every word of it.
“The pleasure was all mine.”
When Katherine returned to the kitchen with her bundle of gardenias, there was a noticeable change in her. A quickening. Such was the magic of the right flower or the right fellow. She opened the cabinet to find a small vase for her flowers and wondered what the new feeling in her was. She had been bold and expository. What had gotten into her? She’d admitted that she felt estranged from him, which may have implied she’d rather not be. The thought of it, how forward and disclosed she’d been, made her cheeks flush. Thankfully, Frank had managed not to humiliate her, she thought. Moreover, he seemed to have not forgotten her at all.
“I saw that, Mrs. Katherine Gresham,” Lettie peaked in from the breakfast room with a broom in hand. “I hope that man likes cheesecake.” They both laughed.
“Lettie, that coffee must’ve went straight to your brainstem and destroyed all your sense.”
“Please explain to me how saying “hello” to a gentleman neighbor is nonsense? In fact, it makes damned good sense unless you are sworn to remaining a shut-in,” she chided.
“It’s a bad idea. We’re nearly strangers after so many years,” Katherine explained. “I spoke two words to the man and feel like my skin is inside-out. I don’t think I’m cut out for this.”
“Y’all looked awfully familiar to me,” Lettie said and swayed her hips in a playful sultry air as she went back to sweeping behind the piano.
“Besides, he was Walt’s friend,” Katherine said aloud, mostly to talk herself out of this wild idea of Lettie’s.
“Tell me one person in this town that wasn’t Walt Gresham’s friend,” Lettie hollered from the other room. “That’s no excuse.”
Katherine went to the cookbook and reviewed her mother’s recipe. When she held the heavy book wrapped in a brick-red fabric cover, she sensed the long line of women she’d come from. Wise women that knew how to make a home for themselves and their families. How to the churn the days into a life.
She wished she could ask her mother what she was supposed to do now. She wished she knew how to live again now that Walt and the children were gone. Somehow she was supposed to find new life under all that burnt forest inside her.
She held the cookbook to make contact with her mother’s memory and the line of women that had come before.
“What now,” she asked them.
No angelic voices came down from on high, but undeniably that cookbook was keeping the spirit of all the women who’d made a home by it. It’s quiet pull on Katherine was very real if invisible. The current that moved her to take it from the shelf, preheat the oven and cream sugar into butter was the voice of her mother and the spirit of the women from which she had come. On the pages of that red cookbook they called out to her. To go on living. To keep her home and heart alive. To use what she had and make something out of it.
Past the pyre and down the cinder-paths, deep in the heart of the scorched forest of her, there stood one ghostly tree. A single alder, leafless and forgotten. Looking with the mind’s eye just then, one could see a hand take what looked like Walt’s pocket knife to the jagged bark of that scorched alder tree. Its sharp blade cut patiently into the brittle trunk. Underneath the deadwood and the years of dormancy, was the cool, green cambion of Katherine. There was life yet underneath all that burnt-up feeling.
Katherine went on about her kitchen work humming a tune she remembered from an Etta James record. She gathered the wet ingredients and the dry. She assembled the graham crust in the spring form pan as she’d done countless times. Pressed the crumbs down flat with her bare fingers. She creamed the cheese and sugar together with a little vanilla from Tahiti. Then, the cupboard feelings spoke. What the cake, and her life, needed was something sweet and unexpected. Something like honey. Katherine opened the cabinet and saw the orange blossom honey in a small glass jar, the one she’d picked up at the farmers’ market from a woman beekeeper outside of town. She added a few generous teaspoons and the subtle smell of citrus flower filled the air and the craggy peaks of cream cheese. “Wonder why I hadn’t thought to do that before,” she thought.
“3 tsp. orange blossom honey, optional,” she wrote in the margins of the recipe.
She placed the cake into the oven set at 375º like the book said. The mixture of soft, tangy cheese, sugar and vanilla would bake into a golden pillow of sweetness in under an hour. She walked over to her chair near the double-sided fireplace that smelled like fresh, outdoor air and wood-ash. Katherine’s was a well-used chimney. She crumpled some newspaper and set it under a couple of small logs of firewood. Once she got the thing lit, she sat back in her blue checkered chair to solve the paper’s word puzzles. Noël hopped up to lay beside her and take in the warmth of the flames. Katherine had a habit of breaking into the green tin for cigarettes when she was solving the crosswords, especially one of its more clever riddles. She could’ve sworn that a smoke helped her think better.
She started with 3 across. Loud noise heard in a time of prosperity. It was too easy to justify a cigarette, but she opened the green tin anyway. Maybe the clues would get more challenging. She wrote the letters C-R-A-S-H in all caps with the black, silky ink of her ballpoint pen.
Katherine let the smells of firewood, baked cheese and cooking sugar crystals bathe her senses. She smoked the last of her cigarette and made quick work of the newspaper crossword. Every letter in its right place without not so much as a scratch-out. She felt a vague, cheap satisfaction when she considered how adeptly she’d solved the paper’s riddles, how she had routinely mastered the otherwise entropic details of her life on 19th Street. But, as usual, the delicious feeling of order faded quickly. She spotted the gardenia bouquet on the counter near the window and remembered the new feeling she’d found in the yard that morning. The quickening. How out of step her honesty had been. How messy but alive it was.
“Lettie, do you suppose that I have stopped really living?” Lettie came in from the laundry room.
“Did we get into the rosé this early?” joked the housekeeper.
“No, you old bag. I mean it. My life is immaculately managed. Every inch of it is clean lines and order, down to the very last sock drawer. But there is absolutely no room for chance. Fortune or misfortune,” Katherine evaluated and took a long dreamy inhale of her cigarette.
“That’s my thinking on it. No bad can come from you sticking to your ways in this big, empty house. But no good either,” agreed Lettie.
“Now, I’m not saying that I was wrong to keep my distance from chance. But maybe I’m ready for,” she trailed off, sensing some place far away where the bees searched for spring. “Something different,” Katherine finished.
“Well, the only law in the whole of life is change. It’s coming all the time. Just have to let it have its way is all,” said Lettie as she cleaned various surfaces. “You know what you need, Katherine? You need to make a little prayer-show. You need something to say that you are ready to bury your old life as Walt’s wife. To say you’re ready to go on with your livin’.”
Katherine took another puff with a smirk. “You mean putting him in the ground at Grace Episcopal didn’t quite do the job?”
“I reckon it didn’t,” responded Lettie. “Got anything of his we can bury to make a show of it?”
“Lettie, you are a strange bird.” Katherine teased her friend, but she was already scanning her house for some token of Walt’s to put in the dirt of her backyard.
After a few minutes of rummaging drawers of old mementos, she returned with a baby blue ribbon in hand. She’d worn it around her pony tail on the day they’d first met. She given it to him after they kissed at his secret fishing spot, and he’d kept it all his years. He liked to retell her the story of how he’d spotted her at the club that first summer.
“You were the most unusual girl I’d laid eyes on. Equal parts innocence and wit. How lovely your long hair was tied up in that girlish ribbon. After you gave it to me, I kept it on my person always. Somewhere in a pocket. It was entirely you. The smell of it and the feel of it on my fingers when you were away.”
Now that he was gone, she kept the ribbon in her bedside table next to their letters and an old black and white picture of her parents.
“Well, the neighbors will think we’ve gone plum loony if they see us giving a funeral to a blue ribbon, but I’d rather be crazy than stuck another day in this house with a crossword that couldn’t stump a third-grader.” Lettie chuckled.
“Are you planning on burying anything of yours today, Ms. Medicine Woman?” Katherine asked.
“That’s a thought. I’ve always got something I’m ready to be rid of.” Lettie considered a moment. “I’ve got a choir program in the car I’d be rather happy to put underground.”
“What’s the story there?” asked Katherine. “The new choir director at church, Mr. Harris Fairchild, Brother Harris we call him, is a prima donna and a kill-joy at that. It’s not right the cloud he’s got us all under up at the church. I’d like to say to my soul and to all of the town, my singing is not for that man. It’s about a higher place in me.”
Katherine nodded supportively, and wondered at Lettie’s struggle as a church-woman. She figured there was a unique suffering that only the politics of church could cause a soul, but perhaps for her friend the medicine of communion was stronger than its poison.
“Okay, I say let’s get the shovel.”
After some digging, a small hole in the earth of the flower bed lay open for the women’s relics.
“Church ladies first,” said Katherine. Lettie laid the folded choir program in the hole.
“On this day, I, Lettie Knight, lay to rest my days of giving a limelight-hungry man power over my gifts. I reclaim the joy that is my right in the house of God. May the Lord bring swift justice to the congregation and dispel any illusion the church deacons may have that Brother Harris deserves to be director,” she announced ceremoniously.
“Goodness, Letitia. Remind me not to get on your bad side,” Katherine chuckled.
“Okay, now you,” Lettie signaled.
There was a long pause while Katherine let the story of her life rise.
“I’d like to say that I could not have been any happier with you, Walt Gresham. I know you passed years ago now, but I never did let you go,” she said and twisted the blue ribbon around her index finger as she gathered her thoughts. “I still hear you playing the piano while Pickle howled to sing along. And how the children would laugh. When the radio is on, I see us dancing in the kitchen. How you’d spin me around and dip me while you sang like a goofy Bing Crosby.” She paused and looked at the house. “I guess, even after all these years, I run this home like it’s still ours. As if it were still you, me and the kids. But things are so different. The children are all gone now, Walt. All this quiet in a house that once held so much life, our life, it’s more than a woman should be able to bear.” Lettie handed her friend a handkerchief. “I wonder if there might be some living still left in me if I could ever figure out how to stop being your wife.” She placed the ribbon in the hole next to Lettie’s program. “I suppose what I want to say is that I’m ready. To carry on, I mean. But I’ll never stop loving you, Walt.” Behind her tears, she saw his face. His bright blue eyes, his hand in his pocket, his pilot’s lighter.
“Very good then. And now for the sprinklin’ of earth.”
The two women took turns putting earth over their old stories. Once the items were fully buried, they stood together quiet while the sounds of the garden district encircled them.
On the way back into the kitchen, Lettie took Katherine’s hand. “There’s real power in burying the past, my girl.” She looked directly at Katherine, not with her eyes, but with the light of her knowing. The part of her that could sense her sister’s long-suffering and the courage that was rising to the surface so that Katherine’s life could go on. “You take that cake down the way. You too good a cook to be baking only for ghosts and Martha Honeycutt’s greedy grandchilds.”
Back in the warm, sweet-smelling kitchen, the rooster timer sounded. Katherine took the fluffy soufflé out of the oven. It was perfectly golden on top and had a slight wiggle when she sat it on the counter cooling rack. She released it from the springform pan and relished its delicate simplicity. Katherine looked at the honey-infused custard and knew full-well its message. It held within its silken body the fertility and magic of bees, and all her capacity for rebirth. It looked back at her from the counter, a trumpeting herald, singing of her very own return of spring. There was no way around it; that cake was meant for Frank Sanders.
Back in her wardrobe, Katherine couldn’t remember the last time she considered her own attractiveness. She took the engraved silver brush from the vanity with its soft horsehair bristles and ran it through her white-blond curls. She had been one of the lucky ones she thought. She’d aged gracefully over the years, and still had a certain elegant radiance about her. Not that she was in the habit of throwing it about for attention, but it was there when she considered it. She warmed her complexion with a dusting of peach blush and dabbed a rosy pink tint on her lips.
Katherine dotted the slightest amount of perfume on each side of the neck and on both wrists. No man she’d ever known cared for the perfume really, but she couldn’t be parted with the combination of citrus and smoky amber. The point was that she felt beautiful in this cocktail of flower and earth, and if she was going to walk straight over to a man’s house with a cake, whatever else came of it, she wanted to feel magnificent.
Katherine remembered the first time Walt sat eyes on her. She’d been at the club for dinner with her parents and he was there working in the golf shop. He was all charm and smiles. Gregarious and popular with the club members. He was a hard worker. An honest young man her parents had noted. But his eyes. There was something otherworldly about them. There was such a great depth and gentleness there, something that told her exactly who Walt Gresham was, that he’d know how to make her a happy woman.
He kissed her that summer under the willow tree by the Clarksdale pond.
“When I’m an old man, grown, fat and happy, I want to remember this summer. Every second of it. How I knew in an instant that you’d be my girl. How I knew that first day in the club that I wanted to show you this spot. My own father shared this place with me when I was just a kid. Best fishing for miles around. It’s where I come if I ever need to be alone and think. It’s always been my secret place. Now,” he kissed her lips, “it’s your place, too.” He wrapped his hands around her waist and rocked their bodies back and forth to some strange music that only they could hear.
She must still have some of the same beauty he’d seen in her then, she hoped as she observed her reflection. Katherine looked in the mirror with her most sophisticated smile and practiced a greeting or two. Good heavens, what would she say? “Noël, I’m nervous as a school girl.” The purring cat jumped up on the green velvet vanity stool for a head rub.
Katherine returned to the kitchen for the cake. She placed a few colorful flowers from the yard in the center and along a small portion of the edge. It was just the right touch given her new addition of honey to the custard.
“Something resurrected this woman if I’m seeing straight,” Lettie almost sang as she came into the kitchen and witnessed Katherine’s flower arrangement and lipstick.
“Don’t you ever mind your own business?”
“It’s not in my nature, no,” she laughed. “Katherine, I’m gonna take next Saturday off if it’s all the same to you.”
“Of course. I don’t mind in the slightest. You know better than that.”
“Oh, I know. I reckon I’ll take some quality time with the grandkids. Might go to the park for a lunch picnic if the weather is right. Or maybe dress-shopping for Easter.”
“A lovely idea. You work too hard, Lettie. I’m certain you’ve got better things to do with your time than spy on an old lady’s comings and goings. Enjoy your grandchildren now while you can.” With that, Katherine left through the screen door of the piano room and walked that beautiful cake down the driveway and three doors down 19th Street.
“Yes, lord. Make us new each day,” Lettie chimed. She went back to her mopping in the hallway by the grandfather clock, humming some church song, happy for her friend. Happy for all women risking a fresh start.
Katherine walked as confidently as she could down to Frank’s house with the forest green porch and hanging plants. He was a real green thumb, which was a great relief. They’d at least have something to talk about other than the weather or her widowhood, which they’d already covered more than was advisable. The thought of their morning visit made her cheeks flush the color of rhubarb. When she flipped the latch of his wooden gate, a quaint metal bell announced her entry. Turner barked from some place in the backyard. As she walked up the front sidewalk, she slowed to admire the elaborate concert of color in the front gardens. There was majestic, violet butterfly bush in both of the street-facing corners of the yard. Their intoxicating halos of honey-perfume hung pleasantly in the air signaling, in case there was any doubt, the beginning of flowering season. The masses of purple blossom had evidently done their planter’s bidding of calling to the address a plethora of monarchs in the height of their semi-annual migration. Some flitted in their quiet way from bloom to bloom gathering nectar, some sat atop sturdier stems hypnotically fanning their velvet, tangerine wings to gather warm sun rays while there was still daylight. Glory bush, in bright juts of blue-purple lined the walkway, using their regal, delicate petals to hospitably welcome guests into the bright constellation of flower and herb.
Katherine had never quite thought of a garden as a work of art, but Frank’s yard was quickly showing her that some painted with seed and soil as effectively and perhaps as thoughtfully as Monet had worked his oils into a scene of Giverny. The spritely zinnia in bright, confident tufts of yellow, red and orange lifted her spirits with their upright bodies. The neon-pink bottle brush was a darling and surreal thing to witness. Its fantastic puffs of flamingo-red made her laugh aloud at its shameless flaunting, as if they were girls out on the town together with every possibility before them. Conspirators in their blatant beauty. Of course, all that pink had done a number on the neighborhood hummingbird season. Frank’s yard was evidently a magnet for that bewilderingly energetic creature too. They darted in and around the bottle brush. Some leisurely floated between blooms, some piloted across the garden in a excited chatter.
“The man is not on his own in the slightest with all these beauties hanging about his handiwork,” she spoke to the bottlebrush.
Katherine’s breath was taken away. The closer she looked, the more she noticed the intricate planting the man had accomplished in one yard. The camellia, in charming shades of ivory and pink macaroon, were catalogue-worthy. The Japanese mock orange towered in stately, protective columns around the property.
She walked nearer to the front of the house, and approached a perfectly dignified row of white roses all along the porch. She’d asked Percy to plant some like that in the back one year, and he’d given her an interminably long talk regarding the difficulty of their cultivation and maintenance. She’d called it off without very much fuss at all. Just the talk of roses alone had been exhausting enough for her. But here they were, the notorious white rose. Frank Sanders had a most sophisticated crop of the persnickety flower, proving it was not at all impossible to tend to something so delicate in the infernal Southern regions of the country. His white roses were entirely civilized. She breathed in their fragrance and decided Frank could be nothing but a consummate gentleman with a garden that cared for.
She walked up the steps, her heart in a state of fluttering, and took several deep breaths. “Why am I so nervous,” she wondered. She had to admit the time for stoic pride was long-gone. She was at the man’s door after all. Katherine excused her ego, useless in this setting as it was, and let herself feel like a girl again. Beautiful, full of potential, foolish even.
With a quiet command of her courage, Katherine made a declarative rapping with the copper door-knocker. An excruciatingly long moment passed while no answer came.
“Of course he wouldn’t be home, after all this fretting,” she murmured. She knocked again, half-convinced he was out. Still, no one came. She let out a sharp exhale, a mixture of relief and disappointment washed over her as she descended the steps of the front porch and walked toward the gate.
“Probably for the best,” she whispered to no one.
“Katherine, is that you?” came a voice from the side yard. Frank came around the corner with a wagging Turner at his feet.
“Hi, Frank. Hi, Turner,” she smiled, a bit caught off guard. “I’ve baked a cake today, and I thought I’d offer to share if you’re free this afternoon.” The hummingbirds darted past, spelling invisible lines in the air between them.
“Funny little guys, aren’t they,” he offered and pointed to the top of the mock orange. “They’re nesting there on their way down to the southern Americas.”
“I couldn’t help but notice your garden has many admirers,” Katherine mused.
“Quite,” he said with a smirk and took a long pause so they could take in the garden another moment. “Why don’t you join me for my afternoon vigil on the porch?” he took off his gardening gloves.
“I’d like that,” she returned. “Like I told you, I’m a creature of habit. I work in the garden in the mornings and a bit after lunch, and then Turner and I sit a while and observe. Gives me a chance to think about how various elements are faring and how to ready the place for the next season.” He extended his right hand, directing her up to the front porch.
He walked her to a white, sturdily-constructed wooden chair. “Have a seat. Care for iced tea?” he asked.
“I’d love some.” She could see her own house so clearly from this vantage point. She tried to imagine how her red-brick home with the neat row of gardenias must appear to her neighbors who could only really guess at her life. “How utterly unknown we must be to each other,” she mused silently.
“Let me wash up a bit; I’ve been up to my elbows in topsoil. And I’ll grab a knife and some forks so we can taste that creation of yours.” Frank, now that she was looking at him with her new-feeling eyes, was a handsome man. He was maybe six feet tall and had aged well himself. He had the look of a man that had seen a lot of sun, but his eyes were a fiery hazel hue and showed a sharp, perceptive mind in their focus. And there was something utterly trustworthy about a man who wore linen button-downs around the house. Frank’s was a thin charcoal grey with the sleeves rolled up the forearms.
When he returned they each took a slice of cake.
“Frank, I have to say, it’s no wonder they put you in charge of the garden symposium. Planting is evidently something of a calling of yours,” Katherine offered.
“Well, thanks. I suppose it is. I’d be happy to give you a proper tour of the garden if you’re interested.”
“I’d like that.”
Katherine felt quite at ease on Frank’s porch that late afternoon.
“You know, when the kids were still at home, we’d sit on the back screened-porch in the evenings while they did their homework. We loved sitting out there while the night crickets came out. So funny how our habits can entirely rely on the people in our lives. When the boys and then finally Charlotte, my youngest, left for college, I guess I left the porch,” she admitted. “I miss this.”
“You are most welcome to join Turner and I for a porch sit any time. I do understand what you mean. That’s probably truer than most of us would like to admit. How heavy a hand others have in shaping our lives.” He was thinking of his first marriage and how it had been happy at first. How he and the family had carved out their evenings in front of the radio and the weekends at the lakehouse. How it had soured after the kids hit their adolescence. How his wife had wanted to leave. He let her go without any fuss. His failing had been passivity. He knew that now. Her leaving was when he’d taken up gardening. The feeling of earth on his hands was the only thing that helped him get through all that quiet. Sometimes, when he was trimming hedges or weeding in the beds, he wondered if he hadn’t fought hard enough to keep her. All that color in his garden was his way of taking back some goodness for himself.
Frank took another bite of cake and realized how deeply soothing its elements were.
“I’ve got to hand it to you, Katherine. You’ve always been a terrific cook. This has got to be the best cheesecake I think I’ve had.” She smiled. It was very good.
“Well, I can’t take credit for it really. It’s my mother’s recipe and probably hers before that. I did add some raw Wilson county honey to the filling. On an impulse really, but I rather like it.”
They passed the rest of the afternoon in this way. Touring each other down the pleasanter corridors of their neighborhood memories. Mostly stories about their children’s growing up years. Katherine told the one about how Charlotte, who’d never been a strong swimmer, had fallen in at the marina at the gulf as a young child and how she had to be rescued. And about how Kevin, her youngest boy, had been a beautiful pianist, but that his two older brothers teased him so much that he gave it up for tennis. Went to college on a tennis scholarship in the end, but she’d always missed hearing him play “Clair de Lune” in the evenings. She played it now for herself, she explained, when she missed him.
Frank for his part told how once when there were nasty clouds in the sky there was a group of men getting a golfing lesson on the course that lined their neighborhood. The golf pro was demonstrating the proper form for a swing and with his club in the air, he was struck right there by a lightning bolt. Man was knocked unconscious and every other man was knocked clear out of his shoes.
“That man’s full head of hair went grey overnight! Can you imagine?” As he told his story, she noticed he bit his lip slightly when he was trying to remember some detail from the past.
They laughed easy and rocked their chairs while the wind in the trees made its own peaceful melody. The familiar sounds of 19th Street kept them company.
“Care for a cigarette?” he asked and took a soft pack of Marlboros out of his pocket.
“Sure,” she responded. Why had she waited so long to leave her coffee table, crosswords and privacy, she wondered. Visiting like this was lovely. She’d been good at it, and had forgotten over the years how easy it came to her. She took a cigarette from the pack he offered and put it to her lips. The smell of sweet, earthy tobacco mingling with the white roses along the porch danced between them.
Frank took the lighter out of his pocket. He leaned over with a quiet look in his eyes. With one hand, he blocked the airflow near her face and with the other he lit her cigarette. His eyes were on her in that familiar way, sensing some place in her where new life grew. Where a single alder tree gave way to spring.
It was still true, she smiled quietly. There was nothing like a man lighting a cigarette for a woman.
Some Other Spring 