Community
by Heather Struck
Ellen spent the Friday morning before her vacation dealing with the calendar. By two o’clock her employer, a high-up executive in a bank, was already on his way east to his renovated property that was a few miles from the plucky fishing boat he crewed as a boy. He had given her a backward wave on his way to the elevator, already in short sleeves and slacks. “Have a good week!” she had called.
The monitor in front of her was an exhilarating glow of red. She had selected the color, which the application called “Tomato.” She had learned somewhere to use red as a visual only when you wanted to grab attention with urgency. Anyone who saw the out of office message and immediately panicked would go through to Ellen, who would notify her employer and, if he asked her to, would be put directly through to his cell in Sag Harbor. She had been doing this long enough to remember times that were less strained, but they had followed different swells of anxiety. Her employer’s calm, intuitive nature was one of the reasons for his success. Yet, she had never managed to connect his shrewd capabilities with the way that banking really seemed to work, in its human-like swells up and down of joy and despair. She set the office phone to forward to her work cell, turned the computer monitor off, and stood from her springy swivel chair to begin her week off, which she planned to spend at home, reading.
School had recently let out. Outside her subway stop in Brooklyn children were clustered in groups around their indecipherable interests. Ellen maintained her steady beat on the sidewalk. She carried her gym bag on her shoulder. She would enjoy a break from that, too, with its weak shower nozzles and chilled, mechanical air. She planned daily walks in the park alone, watching other people’s dogs run from one end to the other.
The street she walked on was a main thoroughfare. Apartment high rises continued to appear, more every year. An old cinema had erected a digital marquee in the middle of the street, failing to draw attention amid the construction. Near a tall iron fence that enclosed a broad, unkempt community garden, something soft brushed the top of her forehead. The weighty arm of a lilac branch was hanging over her head. She paused under its warm perfume, turning her face up to it. She considered it briefly, standing under the blossoms while school kids bumped past her. When she looked down again there was a man. She knew the man, or rather, she used to know him. He was walking through the open gate into the garden.
Ellen had not seen this man, or the man she thought he was, in thirty years. He held a heavy sack over his shoulder. After a moment, he came out again where more lopsided bags lay in a fecund heap on the sidewalk. He had a broad back and stout, athletic legs. He wore cargo shorts that looked a bit like the ones the school kids were wearing.
It occurred to her that she was staring. She could not recall the last time she had thought of this man. Ricardo was his name. They had been classmates in school. Oddly, the first thing she remembered was the size basketball shoe he wore, a size 13. He had once placed its thick rubber sole against her forearm to show her its length.
After a few trips in and out of the garden hauling the heavy bags, the man noticed Ellen. “You can come in,” he said. It had taken her a long couple of minutes until she could finally admit that it was not him, only an extraordinary likeness. He gestured toward the inside of the garden, where a rough path of gravel lay. There were lines around his mouth when he smiled that accelerated Ricardo in her memory, as though he had aged before her eyes.
A bus passed them on the avenue and pulled noisily to the end of the curb. A woman stepped unsteadily off the bottom step, holding a child tightly by the hand.
“Do you live in the neighborhood?” he asked.
“I’m from New Jersey,” she said.
“The garden state?” he said, smiling again.
“I live here now,” she said, “down by the waterfront.” She gestured somehow. She felt oddly inadequate.
“You can join, with anyone else in your household. Or just yourself. We’re not strict about the work requirement.”
“Thanks,” Ellen said, “but we’re not interested. My husband and I work long hours.”
The man nodded. The gate shifted as he removed the weight of his hand from it and turned to his work. She felt something in her core, an unbidden tenderness that confused her. She had not eaten before leaving the office, having worked through a difficult scheduling knot during lunchtime. She needed to go home. She thanked him, this man who was like Ricardo, but was not. She walked away from the garden without looking at him again.
Ellen and Carl lived at the end of a quiet street between an avenue and the canal. Theirs was the first floor of a narrow townhouse that they shared with an elderly Greek woman who lived above them. Aside from the woman’s grown children, two women and a man around their own age whose families they heard on occasion racing up the hall staircase, the townhouse received few visitors.
For dinner Ellen cooked salmon. It cooked quickly and needed only a sprinkling of salt and pepper. She put a pouch of rice into the microwave, a recent discovery at the store where she shopped. These days she played a simple game, putting as little as possible into the cart and seeing how far it stretched them at home. She had done away with most sauces and kept only olive oil and mayonnaise stocked in the pantry. It was not frugality. Even with the price inflation, she had never been thrifty. Cooking just seemed like the least interesting thing to do. She preferred to order in. On special occasions they walked down to the Ethiopian on the corner.
Carl was brought up in a part of Manhattan where a hospital had earned landmark status after the AIDS epidemic. He had a sandy thrush of hair and a semi-permanent tan that he had acquired as an account executive on the golf course. He never complained when Ellen’s moods of scarcity struck, which she believed was because he cared little for what he ate. He would eat bread and cheese every day and not complain. This was one of Carl’s good qualities, his easiness.
Carl sliced a cucumber and they both had some wine. A slackening fell over them ahead of the weekend. Carl would be at work the following week, and Ellen would have the house to herself. She looked forward to this. Carl suggested they put on a record after they changed out of their work clothes. Half an hour later Ellen found him at their shared desk, staring into his laptop.
“The record?” she asked.
“Just give me five minutes.”
Ellen thought about the oddness of the earlier encounter outside the garden while she loaded the dishwasher. It was when she lived in New Jersey with her mother that she knew Ricardo. She had known him in school as a child, and then later, as a young man and woman in high school, they had some closer moments. She recalled his strong arms. His ears were big enough to show from under a mop of hair.
They sat together on the sofa. Carl had placed a new record on the player, something he must have picked up recently. A woman’s voice cut through the room. It sounded like gospel.
“Do you want another drink?” she asked.
Carl looked at her. “Sure,” he said, a wave of surprise or amusement passing over his face. He stood to find the bottle of whiskey in the pantry. They had not opened it since Christmas. Ellen remembered the convivial impulse then, wanting to cap off a meal with their friends. Carl sat next to her holding the two glasses. They clinked them briefly, almost playfully. She raised it to her lips and watched Carl take a sip and swish it deftly around his mouth. She drank from her glass and felt pleasantly warm, despite her knowledge that the alcohol would keep her awake deep into the night. She didn’t care about that now. She had a feeling of unrest growing inside her. After a few moments, she made a silent plan to return to the garden the next day.
Carl had been the one to teach Ellen about whiskey. When they met, Ellen was sharing rent and expenses with two other women in an apartment in Chinatown. She and Carl would share a spicy meal in a Thai or Chinese restaurant before walking back together to her little windowless bedroom. One evening Carl invited her to his apartment for a “tasting,” as he called it. He had recently returned from a backpacking trip in Scotland where he had acquired numerous bottles of Scotch whiskey along with the terroir knowledge of each. When she arrived at his apartment, she saw that he had arranged the bottles in a particular order on top of an oddly-placed cherrywood dresser that stood in his kitchen. Next to the dresser was a wood table and two flimsy chairs. Aside from the double bed, this made up most of the furnishing in the apartment. They sat at the small table and Carl poured two fingers of whiskey at a time in the order that he had arranged them, explaining as they sipped everything that he had learned on his trip. It was an admirable study, Ellen had thought at the time. It was one of the earliest moments that she realized, despite all the drink, that Carl was a serious learner. After three hours they were both weary and drunk and incapable of saying more than good night. “Sleep well,” Carl had said. “I will call you tomorrow.”
A side effect of Ellen’s career as an executive assistant was that she had gained access to a porthole through which she peered at a vast world of money, parties, and charities. She learned how to operate in this world as an outsider. She learned how to wear a uniform of crisp white shirts, slim trousers, and loafers or leather slippers. Here and there, she was given her own little perks. Theater tickets and invitations to gala events appeared on her desk every other week. When she attended these events, she felt herself a slim, necessary presence. Without her assistance, the cogs in the big wheels of the industry in which she worked would not rotate. The executives she worked for needed constant reassurance. Her presence at her computer, managing their calendars, their calls, their travel, meant more than most people recognized. She moved through elegant events, sometimes being spoken to by an interested person, and more times not, watching people. It was one of these perks that put her in the yacht party where she met Carl. By then, she had discovered a quiet ease had taken root inside her. As an assistant she had no need to act or to create, but to maintain a steady calm while big deals occurred around her. This is one of the first things that Carl had told her he liked about her. “You’re even-keeled,” he had said.
It was because she had already made the decision that she knew she needed to bring it up. Otherwise, the encounter at the garden would have been, as it still felt to her, entirely her own. She thought of how odd it would sound, that she was caught looking for too long at this man who she thought she had grown up knowing. That now she could not go back to the day or hour or even minute before she saw him.
Carl put his arm on her. His hands were smooth, his fingers carefully round. Banker’s hands, he used to say. They sat this way for a few moments. Then she told him, without thinking too much about how. She left out the details about the man who looked like Ricardo, saying only that she had signed up to volunteer in the garden, and she would begin tomorrow morning. He was untroubled. Should he have been? Ellen wondered now. “That sounds like a nice idea for your week off,” he said, and he suggested they meet for iced tea in a café they both liked after she finished with her volunteering.
They went to bed together, laying close but not leaning into each other as they had done at one time. Ellen waited in the dark while Carl fell asleep and the night began its long stretch forward until the next day.
A weather front came in from the southeast, making Saturday morning almost cool in the rain. Ellen wore a parka over her shorts and arrived at the garden to find Hector there alone, squatting over an irrigation hose. There was faint woodsmoke in the air, a smell that always took her to the Shore at dusk.
Gnats sparkled in a corner where someone had piled leaf clippings. Ellen sat in a chair on a patch of gravel and felt it wobble into the soft earth. A picnic table was pushed up against the fence next to her. She heard a man shout something from within the depths of the construction project across the street, but the garden was quiet. Low-hanging aspen and red bud with two-toned leaves formed a canopy over the middle of the garden.
When he turned around and saw her there was a brief pause in which Ellen could feel his surprise.
“You’re back,” he said.
“I’m back. I have some time today.”
“Good.”
“I’m Ellen, by the way.” When he stood to approach her she saw again how different he was from Ricardo after all. Up close, his skin smelled like pine.
Gravel crunched under them as they cleared plastic water bottles and wrappers from the garden beds, placing them in a contractor bag at the foot of the path. There were plants with small yellow and purple flowers blanketing their curling leaves. It was a pollinator garden, Hector told her. Ferns grew wildly along the path. She supposed from his explanation that it wasn’t meant to be pretty.
“You’ll have to show me everything,” Ellen said after they reached the end of the gravel path. They were standing next to a shed with a closed lawn umbrella leaning against it.
“There’s really not a lot to do,” he said. “These plants are native. They do very well on their own.”
“How often are you here?”
“My father used to head up the volunteers here before his fall,” Hector said, looking around him at the overgrown shrubs. “He had a wonderful garden in his own country years ago, but he’s slowing down, as you can probably tell.”
“You’ve taken over for him.”
“No. I’m probably here more often than I should be though.”
“What a nice thing to do.”
“Well, he loved it here.”
“Sure, but one thing doesn’t necessarily connect with the other,” she said.
“No,” he said, looking at her.
The gate creaked and clanged. A family entered the garden with two young children. A boy who was five or six years old ran ahead of them on the path, stopping to look at an overturned wheelbarrow. After a moment, another boy appeared and grasped one of the wheels. They began to shout to one another, continuing an imaginary game that was already in progress. They laughed as the wheel spun wildly. A man’s voice came from nearby, and then a man and a woman appeared, tending to the boys and leading them away from the wheelbarrow and toward the picnic table.
Ellen and Hector watched the family and said nothing for a moment. Then Hector led her to a section of the garden where he explained how they would prune and rake. Ellen looked around at clusters of lamb’s ear and fern. Hector squatted and lifted a portion of the foliage with a gloved hand, exposing crisp tangles of dead leaves. He cut a few leaves from the plant with garden shears and scooped them away with a quick movement into his other hand.
“There’s something you haven’t told me,” he said. There were tiny moles on the skin around his cheekbones that came into focus when he looked at her. “Why did you come? Maybe it’s none of my business, but you didn’t seem like you were going to.”
Ellen’s breath halted. She felt as though she were trying to cross a country road toward a wild, beautiful animal.
“I have a soft spot for gardening,” she said, untruthfully. “And I’m on vacation.”
“That explains it.”
When Ellen was twelve her mother took her to an animal shelter on the outside of the town where they lived. “For friendship,” her mother said as they looked at the bushy dog shaking in its concrete cell. Wet dirt clung to the ends of its fur.
This was the same year that Ellen’s father had moved out and left behind an indecipherable irrigation system for the lawn. Together, Ellen and her mother observed as the grass grew spiked and yellow, drying in patches like an unkempt beard. Around it, Ellen’s mother planted the oakleaf and roses that she remembered from her own upbringing in Pittsburgh. Thick wax-like petals of begonia bloomed red as nail polish. In summer Ellen and her mother drank lemon iced tea on lawn chairs and tanned in the sun, swatting spiders from their ankles.
Ellen’s father was an untenured professor of mathematics who waited for a student of his to graduate before getting her pregnant. They had two children when Ellen was a girl, and then two more babies, twins, after that. Her parents argued about money. He reasoned that he needed to use his income for a house large enough for his new family. His girlfriend – they would never marry – convinced her parents to allow them to stay with them for a while, which must have been the darkest despair that Ellen’s father had ever encountered. For all his deficits in honor, he was a proud man. After months of suffering under their disapproval, Ellen’s father managed to find a large house that was heated by fireplace deep in the Pine Barrens of South Jersey. Somehow he managed to get a tenured position at a small religious college. About all this, Ellen’s own mother hesitated to show her true anger. She showed only a part of it, in the way she snatched a glass off a shelf, or the way she sometimes made a helpless sort of motion before returning her hands to the wheel of the car.
At home, Ellen opened the sliding door and the dog shot into the back lawn, where it ran serpentine toward a cluster of rose bushes. Ellen’s mother stood on the patio smiling and holding a bowl of water the way she might if she were being asked to feed a mature tiger. She placed it neatly on the thinning grass and turned away while the dog performed an elliptical survey of the lawn. After she returned to the kitchen where Ellen was waiting, she said, “he’s only going to pee all over it.” It sounded like an apology, the way she said it, but Ellen knew the truth about the dead lawn.
The dog barked an entire day and through a night. The next day, while Ellen rinsed dinner dishes in the sink in front of the bay window, she noticed that the neighbor had erected a makeshift wood fence around their bed of new tulip bulbs.
“So unattractive,” Ellen’s mother said while drinking a cup of coffee, knowing how much it must have pained them to put it in.
It turned out that Ellen didn’t need friendship, as her mother had feared. She was an easy, agreeable member of a good group of girls. They played softball and tennis, ignored drugs and alcohol for longer than most, and spent most of their time in messy, comfortable bedrooms at home. Her school years were common enough and her mother’s worry for her gradually lessened. There was only the possibility of making a comment that belied their ignorance, making the others stand back in surprise, that worried each of them.
One early morning when Ellen was preparing to graduate high school, she was standing in the cold while the dog circled the brown lawn for a place to pee. His soft paws sunk into wet leaves on the ground. It was in this moment that Ellen became aware of a feeling. It was different somehow, in temperature, or maybe in sound. It felt like a downward sweep of energy that had to be put somewhere, but there was nowhere for it to go. In the garden it was raw and unmitigated. Not knowing what this feeling was, or what to do with it, she never gave it a name.
Not long after, she moved to the city to attend university. Ellen began to think about herself differently. There was a certain level of friction in her life that she could, if she tried, remove entirely by simply adding distance from her mother’s house. She took courses in architectural history, business, and art. At graduation her family staged a reunion. Her father sat stooped under a beige umbrella, dressed in his academic sweater and slacks. Her mother sat several rows away in the stadium seats, under her own umbrella, looking pained.
After the commencement ceremony they ate pasta in a family-style restaurant where cola and house wine arrived in matching carafes. Ellen’s father handed her a pink and gold greeting card that had been signed by his entire family. Inside was a check that she later used to pay the balance on her credit card. He paid the dinner bill and then left to catch his train.
Her mother held her hand as they walked to her hotel. She said many things, the memorable one being that Ellen could always come home. This could have been a response to Ellen’s father’s complicated absence, but Ellen did not read it so. She felt it a wrong thing to say, as if her mother were calling her a failure on the same day that she graduated from college.
Hector and Ellen worked quietly together, moving in turns to a contractor bag where they deposited the browned and dead fronds of native plants. It was alarmingly physical work. Ellen’s legs cracked at the knee when she stood from her crouching position. Her rides on the stationary bike at the gym had become an exercise in locating ambition, which she found more challenging than the exercise itself. She rarely pushed herself above a light sweat. Now, in the garden, as she stood up and leaned down and worked from one square of earth to another, she felt like it was her first time outdoors in a long time. A thought flashed into her mind, that she could go around the garden shed with Hector and feel his body press into hers. She pushed it away, looking at a stone in the soil.
She recalled a day when she was in high school. She was sitting on a brick wall waiting for her mother to pick her up with the car. It would have been late in the afternoon, her mother picked her up after working in her clerical job at a real estate firm and rarely arrived before five o’clock. Ellen had studied in the library and then come out to sit on a portion of brick wall next to the tennis courts where an elm tree was in full leaf. A door behind her opened and from it came voices of boys she knew. It was the tennis team coming out of the training gym, Ricardo among them.
It was not by chance that Ellen was sitting there. She had placed herself there, knowing that the team went to the gym on Tuesdays after practicing on the courts. She knew that Ricardo would be with them. Though she wouldn't acknowledge it at the time, it was desire that led her there.
She did not raise her eyes when she felt him see her. Then she heard her name. Had he expected to find her waiting for him? A moment later he was sitting on the wall near her. She felt something leap inside her. He moved closer to her. His arm was bending around the back of her neck, and he hung it there. It was heavy. His training shirt was damp. After another minute the boys on the team disappeared into the locker room, and they were finally alone. She wiggled free and looked at him, and then he kissed her, his mouth wide, his tongue moving in. She pulled away. He laughed.
“Don’t you know how to kiss?” he said.
She felt something sting, embarrassment, maybe. It was much later in her life that she realized that it was disappointment.
“Not like that,” she said. He didn’t laugh at her, but he didn’t make her feel better either. He must have been feeling his own kind of disappointment. Ellen slid her body away from his. After another minute, he jokingly told her he would see her tomorrow.
When Ellen moved over the bricks, back into her own space, she felt something bigger getting away from her. Her desire had been crushed under Ricardo’s weight. Even though their flirtation continued until graduation, it was without the same thrill of discovery. She saw him on the football field in May in his graduation gown, surrounded by his family, with the calm knowledge that it would be the last time. Her mother never even knew his name.
She often took the train to New Jersey to visit her mother and their dog. They had named him Sandy, her mother’s idea, after Olivia Newton John in Grease. She walked with Sandy on the two-lane road to the forest trailhead. He chased birds and rolled over leaves before accompanying Ellen to the bagel shop on the main street. Some years after Ellen had started working in a corporate job, her mother asked her if she planned to take Sandy to live with her. But Carl was allergic, and they had just moved together into the townhouse by the canal.
“Allergic?” her mother had said. As if that were never a part of the plan. But Ellen was getting to know her new neighborhood. She and Carl were happy, feeling the shapes of each other’s days and nights. There were many times when Ellen had thought about her good fortune in meeting Carl. She had wondered about the injustice of it, about those houses that were spared in a neighborhood thrashed by a tornado. She had wondered about her mother, who had not been as lucky. After so much wondering, she had allowed herself to fall into a calm understanding that there was no reason for her good fortune, just like there was no reason for misfortune in the lives of others.
When they had met, Carl was a public relations apprentice who had earned Ellen’s employer as a client. After a few years living together he was working longer hours, but even with his career demands he was the one who pushed them to get married.
“Life can’t be all work,” he had said.
They were married at City Hall. Ellen’s mother and Carl’s sister were the only ones in attendance, getting along like old friends. Ellen wore a sleeveless dress with an open neckline. She put it on feeling like she was stepping into a costume. The air conditioning in the room had stalled and the ceremony was sweaty, but sincere. They held hands and kissed.
After they were married, they took off and had fun together. A trip up the state for a fancy meal in Toronto, a detour to Niagara Falls. They were clear-headed in their love. In those days they had had broad optimism and happiness in just being alone in the same bedroom together. If there was a narrowing in focus, it was a few years after they were married, when an abrupt conflict emerged when a child, which had long been Carl’s quiet desire, did not arrive. There were months of attempts and then appointments with fertility doctors before Ellen begged him to let her rest. In time, he did.
After three hours, Hector stood up and placed his trowel in a back pocket.
“We can pack up,” he said.
She stood and straightened her back. The construction had paused across the street and now she heard wind in the trees. She knew that she would return to the garden the next morning, the thought of it moving in her like cool air. She removed her cell phone from the cargo pocket of her hiking pants and placed it into her bag on the picnic table. She saw as she put it away that she had received a text message from Carl. He would be asking her how it was going. She didn’t read the message. She sat at the picnic table to wait for Hector to finish his clean up.
When he returned, Hector was holding a pair of garden gloves. “For next time,” he said, giving them to her. When she raised her eyes to his she saw there was a tender look in his eyes. She felt a sudden awareness of herself in her hiking pants and wrinkled shirt.
He took a seat in the chair next to her. “Are you a coffee drinker?” he asked.
“Not for a while. I had to give myself a break from it.”
“Yes, I understand,” Hector said, looking at her. “You must have young kids?”
“No.” After a moment she added, “I don’t know why I drank it so much.”
“It’s just what people around here do,” Hector said.
Ellen nodded, and then Hector began to talk. They sat together, side by side, on the picnic bench. He told Ellen about a coffee shop around the corner from where they sat, on the way to Ellen’s street. It was a small shop, wedged between a print studio and an auto mechanic. It was the kind of place where one waits for the coffee to filter before receiving it, perfectly measured, into a small cup. Hector did not drink expensive coffee, he said. He came of age on the strong, heavily sweetened cups from the street cart. Nevertheless, early one morning some weeks ago he found himself in the small coffee roaster, ordering a cup of coffee that had a place like Honduras or Nicaragua for a name, and finding that it was good. It was so good, in fact, that he returned the next few mornings in a row. After a while it became a part of his routine, and though he was out a few more dollars than usual, he fell into the groove of a regular. He got to know the workers behind the register, young men who did not speak to everyone, but when they liked you, their conversation was warm and friendly. After a while, Hector found himself on the receiving end of this friendly conversation, exchanging jokes, chatting about bizarre neighborhood happenings, and learning that he favored the coffee from Costa Rica.
He worked afternoon shifts as a doorman in a building downtown. Friendly people, many of them long-term residents. Lately, since his father had been unwell, his mother needed his help often, three or four times a week. He would leave his wife with his daughter in the morning to come to the neighborhood where he grew up and help his father use the toilet and get dressed. It was during these visits that his father entreated him to go to the community garden and give it a good look over.
One morning, Hector came into the coffee shop later than usual and found a long line of people waiting to be served. He checked the time and decided to try his luck. He remembered that morning because the young woman who was standing in front of him was holding a large bag that was constantly brushing into him as she adjusted it. He didn’t remember what she was doing, she might have been looking into her phone or maybe talking to someone next to her. He only had a distinct memory of that bag on her shoulder. He reached the front of the line in time to order his coffee, and he was already halfway down the block on his way to his parents’ house when he heard someone running up behind him.
He turned around to find his acquaintance from behind the coffee bar hurrying to catch him. He asked if Hector would mind coming back in for a few minutes. The man was rushed and his eyes had a darting uncertainty to them. Hector, anticipating his mother’s complaints about his father’s breakfast getting cold, told him he was late. The man said it was important, so they went quickly back to the coffee shop. When they arrived, the woman with the bag was waiting by the register. He could see she had been busy making herself heard. The man asked if Hector had seen something in her bag. Hector said he hadn’t.
“My wallet is gone,” the woman spoke forcefully. “Did you take it?”
Hector became suddenly aware of the little coffee cup in his hand.
“No,” he said.
“I felt you take something,” the woman said.
“I didn’t.”
Hector looked at the man who was now standing weakly by the bar. He did not force Hector to talk, but he also did not say anything to defend him.
“Show us your pockets,” the woman said, “and I won’t ask him to call the police.”
Hector put the cup on the bar and carefully turned out his pockets. Saying nothing, he walked out. He felt fingers of anger spread from his chest to his gut.
He knew that a return to normalcy would not be possible. It was to save himself that he did what he did. As he passed the coffee shop the next morning, he took a screwdriver from his pocket and removed one wood leg from the sandwich board that stood outside the shop. He carefully leaned the board against the wall, adjusted his position, and threw the wood through the glass window. He recalled the sound of the glass shattering.
He chose not to run. He knew it was a choice, he told Ellen, because every inch of muscle in him wanted to run. Next came his mother’s confused questions and his resulting shame. He was given sixty hours of community service, which he had chosen to do in the garden where they were sitting now.
He became quiet, and Ellen felt his unease. He was looking at the overturned wheelbarrow, which had the pained look of function being made ineffective.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Hector looked at her. His face was calm and slick. “Nothing to be sorry for,” he said.
Ellen couldn’t say any more. She had experienced a burst of familiarity, a violent shock that felt like it had shaken her from a deep sleep.
Hector shifted in the garden chair. He looked absently into the plot where they had been working. A bushy oak leaf that they had pruned and cleared around was greener against the contrast of the fresh soil. The milkweed had tiny flowers in bloom – a honey-like orange the color of sunlight.
Ellen turned to him. There were dark crescents under his neck and arms where perspiration had dried through his shirt. She wanted to condemn the people who had wronged him, or support his rash act of violence, but she could think of nothing to say.
There was one morning when Ellen was maybe in the third or fourth grade, waiting with her schoolmates on the sloped school yard. She spied Ricardo in the distance. He was standing at the top of the slope that led into the school. He looked stricken. The school bell rang and kids all around Ellen began their frenzied move up the small slope, circling around Ricardo and then moving past him. She felt incapable of removing her attention from him. As she moved closer, she saw that he was weeping. On the asphalt next to him was a small briefcase. It was black and smooth, a flat, foreign object in their public school. It was not a fine piece of luggage, Ellen could see that. It was made of plastic in poor imitation of black leather. She imagined a man in Ricardo’s life, a father or an uncle, giving him the briefcase as a gift, and she could see in the way he wept that he had cherished it. It lay next to him, crushed in on its broad side. One of the brass latches was open and the other closed. It had been jumped on and battered by kids who were no longer nearby. Ricardo stood there without moving, perhaps afraid to pick up the case and feel its uneven closure. Ellen could no longer look at him as she walked to her own classroom. She could not bear to share his humiliation, which had seeped inside of her and frozen there.
Years later, when Ricardo and Ellen found each other on the high school campus, feeling their fingertips touch and flirting in their light, thrilling way, Ellen had succeeded in forgetting the incident with the briefcase.
The energy that falls in the garden has a natural end, as on a curve. Hector picked up the contractor bag they had filled and tied it off, holding it in one hand, seeming at ease again. “I opened up,” he said, apologizing. “I guess I don’t get the chance to vent enough,” he broke off, smiling.
Hector pulled the gate closed as Ellen passed him out of the garden and turned the key on the padlock before returning it to his doorman keyring on his belt. A blur of light from the marquee illuminated the clouded sky. Ellen felt for her cell and found a message from Carl. He was already waiting in the café. She looked at Hector and said goodbye. Until she saw him again, she would put him out of her mind.
The monitor in front of her was an exhilarating glow of red. She had selected the color, which the application called “Tomato.” She had learned somewhere to use red as a visual only when you wanted to grab attention with urgency. Anyone who saw the out of office message and immediately panicked would go through to Ellen, who would notify her employer and, if he asked her to, would be put directly through to his cell in Sag Harbor. She had been doing this long enough to remember times that were less strained, but they had followed different swells of anxiety. Her employer’s calm, intuitive nature was one of the reasons for his success. Yet, she had never managed to connect his shrewd capabilities with the way that banking really seemed to work, in its human-like swells up and down of joy and despair. She set the office phone to forward to her work cell, turned the computer monitor off, and stood from her springy swivel chair to begin her week off, which she planned to spend at home, reading.
School had recently let out. Outside her subway stop in Brooklyn children were clustered in groups around their indecipherable interests. Ellen maintained her steady beat on the sidewalk. She carried her gym bag on her shoulder. She would enjoy a break from that, too, with its weak shower nozzles and chilled, mechanical air. She planned daily walks in the park alone, watching other people’s dogs run from one end to the other.
The street she walked on was a main thoroughfare. Apartment high rises continued to appear, more every year. An old cinema had erected a digital marquee in the middle of the street, failing to draw attention amid the construction. Near a tall iron fence that enclosed a broad, unkempt community garden, something soft brushed the top of her forehead. The weighty arm of a lilac branch was hanging over her head. She paused under its warm perfume, turning her face up to it. She considered it briefly, standing under the blossoms while school kids bumped past her. When she looked down again there was a man. She knew the man, or rather, she used to know him. He was walking through the open gate into the garden.
Ellen had not seen this man, or the man she thought he was, in thirty years. He held a heavy sack over his shoulder. After a moment, he came out again where more lopsided bags lay in a fecund heap on the sidewalk. He had a broad back and stout, athletic legs. He wore cargo shorts that looked a bit like the ones the school kids were wearing.
It occurred to her that she was staring. She could not recall the last time she had thought of this man. Ricardo was his name. They had been classmates in school. Oddly, the first thing she remembered was the size basketball shoe he wore, a size 13. He had once placed its thick rubber sole against her forearm to show her its length.
After a few trips in and out of the garden hauling the heavy bags, the man noticed Ellen. “You can come in,” he said. It had taken her a long couple of minutes until she could finally admit that it was not him, only an extraordinary likeness. He gestured toward the inside of the garden, where a rough path of gravel lay. There were lines around his mouth when he smiled that accelerated Ricardo in her memory, as though he had aged before her eyes.
A bus passed them on the avenue and pulled noisily to the end of the curb. A woman stepped unsteadily off the bottom step, holding a child tightly by the hand.
“Do you live in the neighborhood?” he asked.
“I’m from New Jersey,” she said.
“The garden state?” he said, smiling again.
“I live here now,” she said, “down by the waterfront.” She gestured somehow. She felt oddly inadequate.
“You can join, with anyone else in your household. Or just yourself. We’re not strict about the work requirement.”
“Thanks,” Ellen said, “but we’re not interested. My husband and I work long hours.”
The man nodded. The gate shifted as he removed the weight of his hand from it and turned to his work. She felt something in her core, an unbidden tenderness that confused her. She had not eaten before leaving the office, having worked through a difficult scheduling knot during lunchtime. She needed to go home. She thanked him, this man who was like Ricardo, but was not. She walked away from the garden without looking at him again.
Ellen and Carl lived at the end of a quiet street between an avenue and the canal. Theirs was the first floor of a narrow townhouse that they shared with an elderly Greek woman who lived above them. Aside from the woman’s grown children, two women and a man around their own age whose families they heard on occasion racing up the hall staircase, the townhouse received few visitors.
For dinner Ellen cooked salmon. It cooked quickly and needed only a sprinkling of salt and pepper. She put a pouch of rice into the microwave, a recent discovery at the store where she shopped. These days she played a simple game, putting as little as possible into the cart and seeing how far it stretched them at home. She had done away with most sauces and kept only olive oil and mayonnaise stocked in the pantry. It was not frugality. Even with the price inflation, she had never been thrifty. Cooking just seemed like the least interesting thing to do. She preferred to order in. On special occasions they walked down to the Ethiopian on the corner.
Carl was brought up in a part of Manhattan where a hospital had earned landmark status after the AIDS epidemic. He had a sandy thrush of hair and a semi-permanent tan that he had acquired as an account executive on the golf course. He never complained when Ellen’s moods of scarcity struck, which she believed was because he cared little for what he ate. He would eat bread and cheese every day and not complain. This was one of Carl’s good qualities, his easiness.
Carl sliced a cucumber and they both had some wine. A slackening fell over them ahead of the weekend. Carl would be at work the following week, and Ellen would have the house to herself. She looked forward to this. Carl suggested they put on a record after they changed out of their work clothes. Half an hour later Ellen found him at their shared desk, staring into his laptop.
“The record?” she asked.
“Just give me five minutes.”
Ellen thought about the oddness of the earlier encounter outside the garden while she loaded the dishwasher. It was when she lived in New Jersey with her mother that she knew Ricardo. She had known him in school as a child, and then later, as a young man and woman in high school, they had some closer moments. She recalled his strong arms. His ears were big enough to show from under a mop of hair.
They sat together on the sofa. Carl had placed a new record on the player, something he must have picked up recently. A woman’s voice cut through the room. It sounded like gospel.
“Do you want another drink?” she asked.
Carl looked at her. “Sure,” he said, a wave of surprise or amusement passing over his face. He stood to find the bottle of whiskey in the pantry. They had not opened it since Christmas. Ellen remembered the convivial impulse then, wanting to cap off a meal with their friends. Carl sat next to her holding the two glasses. They clinked them briefly, almost playfully. She raised it to her lips and watched Carl take a sip and swish it deftly around his mouth. She drank from her glass and felt pleasantly warm, despite her knowledge that the alcohol would keep her awake deep into the night. She didn’t care about that now. She had a feeling of unrest growing inside her. After a few moments, she made a silent plan to return to the garden the next day.
Carl had been the one to teach Ellen about whiskey. When they met, Ellen was sharing rent and expenses with two other women in an apartment in Chinatown. She and Carl would share a spicy meal in a Thai or Chinese restaurant before walking back together to her little windowless bedroom. One evening Carl invited her to his apartment for a “tasting,” as he called it. He had recently returned from a backpacking trip in Scotland where he had acquired numerous bottles of Scotch whiskey along with the terroir knowledge of each. When she arrived at his apartment, she saw that he had arranged the bottles in a particular order on top of an oddly-placed cherrywood dresser that stood in his kitchen. Next to the dresser was a wood table and two flimsy chairs. Aside from the double bed, this made up most of the furnishing in the apartment. They sat at the small table and Carl poured two fingers of whiskey at a time in the order that he had arranged them, explaining as they sipped everything that he had learned on his trip. It was an admirable study, Ellen had thought at the time. It was one of the earliest moments that she realized, despite all the drink, that Carl was a serious learner. After three hours they were both weary and drunk and incapable of saying more than good night. “Sleep well,” Carl had said. “I will call you tomorrow.”
A side effect of Ellen’s career as an executive assistant was that she had gained access to a porthole through which she peered at a vast world of money, parties, and charities. She learned how to operate in this world as an outsider. She learned how to wear a uniform of crisp white shirts, slim trousers, and loafers or leather slippers. Here and there, she was given her own little perks. Theater tickets and invitations to gala events appeared on her desk every other week. When she attended these events, she felt herself a slim, necessary presence. Without her assistance, the cogs in the big wheels of the industry in which she worked would not rotate. The executives she worked for needed constant reassurance. Her presence at her computer, managing their calendars, their calls, their travel, meant more than most people recognized. She moved through elegant events, sometimes being spoken to by an interested person, and more times not, watching people. It was one of these perks that put her in the yacht party where she met Carl. By then, she had discovered a quiet ease had taken root inside her. As an assistant she had no need to act or to create, but to maintain a steady calm while big deals occurred around her. This is one of the first things that Carl had told her he liked about her. “You’re even-keeled,” he had said.
It was because she had already made the decision that she knew she needed to bring it up. Otherwise, the encounter at the garden would have been, as it still felt to her, entirely her own. She thought of how odd it would sound, that she was caught looking for too long at this man who she thought she had grown up knowing. That now she could not go back to the day or hour or even minute before she saw him.
Carl put his arm on her. His hands were smooth, his fingers carefully round. Banker’s hands, he used to say. They sat this way for a few moments. Then she told him, without thinking too much about how. She left out the details about the man who looked like Ricardo, saying only that she had signed up to volunteer in the garden, and she would begin tomorrow morning. He was untroubled. Should he have been? Ellen wondered now. “That sounds like a nice idea for your week off,” he said, and he suggested they meet for iced tea in a café they both liked after she finished with her volunteering.
They went to bed together, laying close but not leaning into each other as they had done at one time. Ellen waited in the dark while Carl fell asleep and the night began its long stretch forward until the next day.
A weather front came in from the southeast, making Saturday morning almost cool in the rain. Ellen wore a parka over her shorts and arrived at the garden to find Hector there alone, squatting over an irrigation hose. There was faint woodsmoke in the air, a smell that always took her to the Shore at dusk.
Gnats sparkled in a corner where someone had piled leaf clippings. Ellen sat in a chair on a patch of gravel and felt it wobble into the soft earth. A picnic table was pushed up against the fence next to her. She heard a man shout something from within the depths of the construction project across the street, but the garden was quiet. Low-hanging aspen and red bud with two-toned leaves formed a canopy over the middle of the garden.
When he turned around and saw her there was a brief pause in which Ellen could feel his surprise.
“You’re back,” he said.
“I’m back. I have some time today.”
“Good.”
“I’m Ellen, by the way.” When he stood to approach her she saw again how different he was from Ricardo after all. Up close, his skin smelled like pine.
Gravel crunched under them as they cleared plastic water bottles and wrappers from the garden beds, placing them in a contractor bag at the foot of the path. There were plants with small yellow and purple flowers blanketing their curling leaves. It was a pollinator garden, Hector told her. Ferns grew wildly along the path. She supposed from his explanation that it wasn’t meant to be pretty.
“You’ll have to show me everything,” Ellen said after they reached the end of the gravel path. They were standing next to a shed with a closed lawn umbrella leaning against it.
“There’s really not a lot to do,” he said. “These plants are native. They do very well on their own.”
“How often are you here?”
“My father used to head up the volunteers here before his fall,” Hector said, looking around him at the overgrown shrubs. “He had a wonderful garden in his own country years ago, but he’s slowing down, as you can probably tell.”
“You’ve taken over for him.”
“No. I’m probably here more often than I should be though.”
“What a nice thing to do.”
“Well, he loved it here.”
“Sure, but one thing doesn’t necessarily connect with the other,” she said.
“No,” he said, looking at her.
The gate creaked and clanged. A family entered the garden with two young children. A boy who was five or six years old ran ahead of them on the path, stopping to look at an overturned wheelbarrow. After a moment, another boy appeared and grasped one of the wheels. They began to shout to one another, continuing an imaginary game that was already in progress. They laughed as the wheel spun wildly. A man’s voice came from nearby, and then a man and a woman appeared, tending to the boys and leading them away from the wheelbarrow and toward the picnic table.
Ellen and Hector watched the family and said nothing for a moment. Then Hector led her to a section of the garden where he explained how they would prune and rake. Ellen looked around at clusters of lamb’s ear and fern. Hector squatted and lifted a portion of the foliage with a gloved hand, exposing crisp tangles of dead leaves. He cut a few leaves from the plant with garden shears and scooped them away with a quick movement into his other hand.
“There’s something you haven’t told me,” he said. There were tiny moles on the skin around his cheekbones that came into focus when he looked at her. “Why did you come? Maybe it’s none of my business, but you didn’t seem like you were going to.”
Ellen’s breath halted. She felt as though she were trying to cross a country road toward a wild, beautiful animal.
“I have a soft spot for gardening,” she said, untruthfully. “And I’m on vacation.”
“That explains it.”
When Ellen was twelve her mother took her to an animal shelter on the outside of the town where they lived. “For friendship,” her mother said as they looked at the bushy dog shaking in its concrete cell. Wet dirt clung to the ends of its fur.
This was the same year that Ellen’s father had moved out and left behind an indecipherable irrigation system for the lawn. Together, Ellen and her mother observed as the grass grew spiked and yellow, drying in patches like an unkempt beard. Around it, Ellen’s mother planted the oakleaf and roses that she remembered from her own upbringing in Pittsburgh. Thick wax-like petals of begonia bloomed red as nail polish. In summer Ellen and her mother drank lemon iced tea on lawn chairs and tanned in the sun, swatting spiders from their ankles.
Ellen’s father was an untenured professor of mathematics who waited for a student of his to graduate before getting her pregnant. They had two children when Ellen was a girl, and then two more babies, twins, after that. Her parents argued about money. He reasoned that he needed to use his income for a house large enough for his new family. His girlfriend – they would never marry – convinced her parents to allow them to stay with them for a while, which must have been the darkest despair that Ellen’s father had ever encountered. For all his deficits in honor, he was a proud man. After months of suffering under their disapproval, Ellen’s father managed to find a large house that was heated by fireplace deep in the Pine Barrens of South Jersey. Somehow he managed to get a tenured position at a small religious college. About all this, Ellen’s own mother hesitated to show her true anger. She showed only a part of it, in the way she snatched a glass off a shelf, or the way she sometimes made a helpless sort of motion before returning her hands to the wheel of the car.
At home, Ellen opened the sliding door and the dog shot into the back lawn, where it ran serpentine toward a cluster of rose bushes. Ellen’s mother stood on the patio smiling and holding a bowl of water the way she might if she were being asked to feed a mature tiger. She placed it neatly on the thinning grass and turned away while the dog performed an elliptical survey of the lawn. After she returned to the kitchen where Ellen was waiting, she said, “he’s only going to pee all over it.” It sounded like an apology, the way she said it, but Ellen knew the truth about the dead lawn.
The dog barked an entire day and through a night. The next day, while Ellen rinsed dinner dishes in the sink in front of the bay window, she noticed that the neighbor had erected a makeshift wood fence around their bed of new tulip bulbs.
“So unattractive,” Ellen’s mother said while drinking a cup of coffee, knowing how much it must have pained them to put it in.
It turned out that Ellen didn’t need friendship, as her mother had feared. She was an easy, agreeable member of a good group of girls. They played softball and tennis, ignored drugs and alcohol for longer than most, and spent most of their time in messy, comfortable bedrooms at home. Her school years were common enough and her mother’s worry for her gradually lessened. There was only the possibility of making a comment that belied their ignorance, making the others stand back in surprise, that worried each of them.
One early morning when Ellen was preparing to graduate high school, she was standing in the cold while the dog circled the brown lawn for a place to pee. His soft paws sunk into wet leaves on the ground. It was in this moment that Ellen became aware of a feeling. It was different somehow, in temperature, or maybe in sound. It felt like a downward sweep of energy that had to be put somewhere, but there was nowhere for it to go. In the garden it was raw and unmitigated. Not knowing what this feeling was, or what to do with it, she never gave it a name.
Not long after, she moved to the city to attend university. Ellen began to think about herself differently. There was a certain level of friction in her life that she could, if she tried, remove entirely by simply adding distance from her mother’s house. She took courses in architectural history, business, and art. At graduation her family staged a reunion. Her father sat stooped under a beige umbrella, dressed in his academic sweater and slacks. Her mother sat several rows away in the stadium seats, under her own umbrella, looking pained.
After the commencement ceremony they ate pasta in a family-style restaurant where cola and house wine arrived in matching carafes. Ellen’s father handed her a pink and gold greeting card that had been signed by his entire family. Inside was a check that she later used to pay the balance on her credit card. He paid the dinner bill and then left to catch his train.
Her mother held her hand as they walked to her hotel. She said many things, the memorable one being that Ellen could always come home. This could have been a response to Ellen’s father’s complicated absence, but Ellen did not read it so. She felt it a wrong thing to say, as if her mother were calling her a failure on the same day that she graduated from college.
Hector and Ellen worked quietly together, moving in turns to a contractor bag where they deposited the browned and dead fronds of native plants. It was alarmingly physical work. Ellen’s legs cracked at the knee when she stood from her crouching position. Her rides on the stationary bike at the gym had become an exercise in locating ambition, which she found more challenging than the exercise itself. She rarely pushed herself above a light sweat. Now, in the garden, as she stood up and leaned down and worked from one square of earth to another, she felt like it was her first time outdoors in a long time. A thought flashed into her mind, that she could go around the garden shed with Hector and feel his body press into hers. She pushed it away, looking at a stone in the soil.
She recalled a day when she was in high school. She was sitting on a brick wall waiting for her mother to pick her up with the car. It would have been late in the afternoon, her mother picked her up after working in her clerical job at a real estate firm and rarely arrived before five o’clock. Ellen had studied in the library and then come out to sit on a portion of brick wall next to the tennis courts where an elm tree was in full leaf. A door behind her opened and from it came voices of boys she knew. It was the tennis team coming out of the training gym, Ricardo among them.
It was not by chance that Ellen was sitting there. She had placed herself there, knowing that the team went to the gym on Tuesdays after practicing on the courts. She knew that Ricardo would be with them. Though she wouldn't acknowledge it at the time, it was desire that led her there.
She did not raise her eyes when she felt him see her. Then she heard her name. Had he expected to find her waiting for him? A moment later he was sitting on the wall near her. She felt something leap inside her. He moved closer to her. His arm was bending around the back of her neck, and he hung it there. It was heavy. His training shirt was damp. After another minute the boys on the team disappeared into the locker room, and they were finally alone. She wiggled free and looked at him, and then he kissed her, his mouth wide, his tongue moving in. She pulled away. He laughed.
“Don’t you know how to kiss?” he said.
She felt something sting, embarrassment, maybe. It was much later in her life that she realized that it was disappointment.
“Not like that,” she said. He didn’t laugh at her, but he didn’t make her feel better either. He must have been feeling his own kind of disappointment. Ellen slid her body away from his. After another minute, he jokingly told her he would see her tomorrow.
When Ellen moved over the bricks, back into her own space, she felt something bigger getting away from her. Her desire had been crushed under Ricardo’s weight. Even though their flirtation continued until graduation, it was without the same thrill of discovery. She saw him on the football field in May in his graduation gown, surrounded by his family, with the calm knowledge that it would be the last time. Her mother never even knew his name.
She often took the train to New Jersey to visit her mother and their dog. They had named him Sandy, her mother’s idea, after Olivia Newton John in Grease. She walked with Sandy on the two-lane road to the forest trailhead. He chased birds and rolled over leaves before accompanying Ellen to the bagel shop on the main street. Some years after Ellen had started working in a corporate job, her mother asked her if she planned to take Sandy to live with her. But Carl was allergic, and they had just moved together into the townhouse by the canal.
“Allergic?” her mother had said. As if that were never a part of the plan. But Ellen was getting to know her new neighborhood. She and Carl were happy, feeling the shapes of each other’s days and nights. There were many times when Ellen had thought about her good fortune in meeting Carl. She had wondered about the injustice of it, about those houses that were spared in a neighborhood thrashed by a tornado. She had wondered about her mother, who had not been as lucky. After so much wondering, she had allowed herself to fall into a calm understanding that there was no reason for her good fortune, just like there was no reason for misfortune in the lives of others.
When they had met, Carl was a public relations apprentice who had earned Ellen’s employer as a client. After a few years living together he was working longer hours, but even with his career demands he was the one who pushed them to get married.
“Life can’t be all work,” he had said.
They were married at City Hall. Ellen’s mother and Carl’s sister were the only ones in attendance, getting along like old friends. Ellen wore a sleeveless dress with an open neckline. She put it on feeling like she was stepping into a costume. The air conditioning in the room had stalled and the ceremony was sweaty, but sincere. They held hands and kissed.
After they were married, they took off and had fun together. A trip up the state for a fancy meal in Toronto, a detour to Niagara Falls. They were clear-headed in their love. In those days they had had broad optimism and happiness in just being alone in the same bedroom together. If there was a narrowing in focus, it was a few years after they were married, when an abrupt conflict emerged when a child, which had long been Carl’s quiet desire, did not arrive. There were months of attempts and then appointments with fertility doctors before Ellen begged him to let her rest. In time, he did.
After three hours, Hector stood up and placed his trowel in a back pocket.
“We can pack up,” he said.
She stood and straightened her back. The construction had paused across the street and now she heard wind in the trees. She knew that she would return to the garden the next morning, the thought of it moving in her like cool air. She removed her cell phone from the cargo pocket of her hiking pants and placed it into her bag on the picnic table. She saw as she put it away that she had received a text message from Carl. He would be asking her how it was going. She didn’t read the message. She sat at the picnic table to wait for Hector to finish his clean up.
When he returned, Hector was holding a pair of garden gloves. “For next time,” he said, giving them to her. When she raised her eyes to his she saw there was a tender look in his eyes. She felt a sudden awareness of herself in her hiking pants and wrinkled shirt.
He took a seat in the chair next to her. “Are you a coffee drinker?” he asked.
“Not for a while. I had to give myself a break from it.”
“Yes, I understand,” Hector said, looking at her. “You must have young kids?”
“No.” After a moment she added, “I don’t know why I drank it so much.”
“It’s just what people around here do,” Hector said.
Ellen nodded, and then Hector began to talk. They sat together, side by side, on the picnic bench. He told Ellen about a coffee shop around the corner from where they sat, on the way to Ellen’s street. It was a small shop, wedged between a print studio and an auto mechanic. It was the kind of place where one waits for the coffee to filter before receiving it, perfectly measured, into a small cup. Hector did not drink expensive coffee, he said. He came of age on the strong, heavily sweetened cups from the street cart. Nevertheless, early one morning some weeks ago he found himself in the small coffee roaster, ordering a cup of coffee that had a place like Honduras or Nicaragua for a name, and finding that it was good. It was so good, in fact, that he returned the next few mornings in a row. After a while it became a part of his routine, and though he was out a few more dollars than usual, he fell into the groove of a regular. He got to know the workers behind the register, young men who did not speak to everyone, but when they liked you, their conversation was warm and friendly. After a while, Hector found himself on the receiving end of this friendly conversation, exchanging jokes, chatting about bizarre neighborhood happenings, and learning that he favored the coffee from Costa Rica.
He worked afternoon shifts as a doorman in a building downtown. Friendly people, many of them long-term residents. Lately, since his father had been unwell, his mother needed his help often, three or four times a week. He would leave his wife with his daughter in the morning to come to the neighborhood where he grew up and help his father use the toilet and get dressed. It was during these visits that his father entreated him to go to the community garden and give it a good look over.
One morning, Hector came into the coffee shop later than usual and found a long line of people waiting to be served. He checked the time and decided to try his luck. He remembered that morning because the young woman who was standing in front of him was holding a large bag that was constantly brushing into him as she adjusted it. He didn’t remember what she was doing, she might have been looking into her phone or maybe talking to someone next to her. He only had a distinct memory of that bag on her shoulder. He reached the front of the line in time to order his coffee, and he was already halfway down the block on his way to his parents’ house when he heard someone running up behind him.
He turned around to find his acquaintance from behind the coffee bar hurrying to catch him. He asked if Hector would mind coming back in for a few minutes. The man was rushed and his eyes had a darting uncertainty to them. Hector, anticipating his mother’s complaints about his father’s breakfast getting cold, told him he was late. The man said it was important, so they went quickly back to the coffee shop. When they arrived, the woman with the bag was waiting by the register. He could see she had been busy making herself heard. The man asked if Hector had seen something in her bag. Hector said he hadn’t.
“My wallet is gone,” the woman spoke forcefully. “Did you take it?”
Hector became suddenly aware of the little coffee cup in his hand.
“No,” he said.
“I felt you take something,” the woman said.
“I didn’t.”
Hector looked at the man who was now standing weakly by the bar. He did not force Hector to talk, but he also did not say anything to defend him.
“Show us your pockets,” the woman said, “and I won’t ask him to call the police.”
Hector put the cup on the bar and carefully turned out his pockets. Saying nothing, he walked out. He felt fingers of anger spread from his chest to his gut.
He knew that a return to normalcy would not be possible. It was to save himself that he did what he did. As he passed the coffee shop the next morning, he took a screwdriver from his pocket and removed one wood leg from the sandwich board that stood outside the shop. He carefully leaned the board against the wall, adjusted his position, and threw the wood through the glass window. He recalled the sound of the glass shattering.
He chose not to run. He knew it was a choice, he told Ellen, because every inch of muscle in him wanted to run. Next came his mother’s confused questions and his resulting shame. He was given sixty hours of community service, which he had chosen to do in the garden where they were sitting now.
He became quiet, and Ellen felt his unease. He was looking at the overturned wheelbarrow, which had the pained look of function being made ineffective.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Hector looked at her. His face was calm and slick. “Nothing to be sorry for,” he said.
Ellen couldn’t say any more. She had experienced a burst of familiarity, a violent shock that felt like it had shaken her from a deep sleep.
Hector shifted in the garden chair. He looked absently into the plot where they had been working. A bushy oak leaf that they had pruned and cleared around was greener against the contrast of the fresh soil. The milkweed had tiny flowers in bloom – a honey-like orange the color of sunlight.
Ellen turned to him. There were dark crescents under his neck and arms where perspiration had dried through his shirt. She wanted to condemn the people who had wronged him, or support his rash act of violence, but she could think of nothing to say.
There was one morning when Ellen was maybe in the third or fourth grade, waiting with her schoolmates on the sloped school yard. She spied Ricardo in the distance. He was standing at the top of the slope that led into the school. He looked stricken. The school bell rang and kids all around Ellen began their frenzied move up the small slope, circling around Ricardo and then moving past him. She felt incapable of removing her attention from him. As she moved closer, she saw that he was weeping. On the asphalt next to him was a small briefcase. It was black and smooth, a flat, foreign object in their public school. It was not a fine piece of luggage, Ellen could see that. It was made of plastic in poor imitation of black leather. She imagined a man in Ricardo’s life, a father or an uncle, giving him the briefcase as a gift, and she could see in the way he wept that he had cherished it. It lay next to him, crushed in on its broad side. One of the brass latches was open and the other closed. It had been jumped on and battered by kids who were no longer nearby. Ricardo stood there without moving, perhaps afraid to pick up the case and feel its uneven closure. Ellen could no longer look at him as she walked to her own classroom. She could not bear to share his humiliation, which had seeped inside of her and frozen there.
Years later, when Ricardo and Ellen found each other on the high school campus, feeling their fingertips touch and flirting in their light, thrilling way, Ellen had succeeded in forgetting the incident with the briefcase.
The energy that falls in the garden has a natural end, as on a curve. Hector picked up the contractor bag they had filled and tied it off, holding it in one hand, seeming at ease again. “I opened up,” he said, apologizing. “I guess I don’t get the chance to vent enough,” he broke off, smiling.
Hector pulled the gate closed as Ellen passed him out of the garden and turned the key on the padlock before returning it to his doorman keyring on his belt. A blur of light from the marquee illuminated the clouded sky. Ellen felt for her cell and found a message from Carl. He was already waiting in the café. She looked at Hector and said goodbye. Until she saw him again, she would put him out of her mind.