by Cody Ryder
Four
I smiled at Dakota in wonder. “I feel good…great, actually. Thank you, I think I needed to talk to you about this.”
He took off his straw gardening hat and placed it on a cooler beneath the table, next to a box of daikon radishes. His hair, as I had thought, was cut short and brushed back in a stylish wave. I could never have imagined Dakota wearing his hair like that back in high school, but he looked good – really good – with it.
“Great,” he said. “And no problem. I’m just happy to see you again, Roy.”
I felt a warm surge of happiness that had been long absent from my body. “Me too, Dakota,” I said emphatically. “Me too. So what about you? I want to hear about how all this happened.” I gestured to his spread of vegetables.
“And I want to tell you about it. But I think that story will have to wait.” He stood up. “It’s time to pack up shop.” He pointed, and to my surprise, I saw that many of the other vendors already were well into packing away their stuff. I’d gotten so caught up what we were talking about that I hadn’t even noticed.
I helped him pack up his things, taking down the canopy tent and loading it into the back of his van, along with his folding tables and many boxes of veggies. We were the last ones out, the janitor waving goodbye as he locked the gate behind us as we drove out of the parking lot. Sitting shotgun next to Dakota again brought back another flood of good memories.
“Remember that time we drove all the way up to Santa Barbara after school, just for fun? We got there, walked around on the beach for an hour, and then drove all the way back home.”
“Yeah,” he laughed. “What a great time. We didn’t do a thing, but it was so much fun. Hey, you should come over tomorrow. I’ve got a small church group coming by to get a tour of the farm in the morning, you could come over after that. I can show you what’s changed.”
“I’m there,” I said. “No doubt about it.”
He dropped me off in front of my house, and I waved to him as he drove away. Dakota stuck his arm out the window and waved back. I let out a breath, and smiled. Yeah, I sure felt like a teenager again—but this time it wasn’t such a bad thing.
***
I woke up the next morning feeling better rested than I had in a long time. A dreamless sleep was something I’d never thought I’d be thankful for, but these days it was definitely a blessing. I got out of bed, showered, shaved, and dressed in my usual morning routine. The smell of breakfast cooking from downstairs made me smile—it smelled just like the old days.
Mom was in the kitchen, wearing an apron that I had not seen her use since before high school, stirring a pan of potatoes, sausage, and zucchini on the stove. There was a plate of pancakes stacked up, and next to that, a plate topped with crispy bacon. Dad stood at the counter, staring at the TV as he mixed a salad from the vegetables bought from Dakota’s stand. On the surface, everything was how it should be. Family together, breakfast like the old days…but I immediately could feel that there was an energy missing from those times when I was a kid.
The pan spattered. “Shit! Oh, dammit.” Mom stepped back and wiped her arm where she had been splashed with oil. “Shit.”
Dad looked over his shoulder. “What happened? Did you get…Carol, I told you there was too much in the pan.”
“Just, worry about the salad, Joe?” Mom muttered. “Oh, Roy, you’re up.”
“Good morning, mom,” I said. “Everything okay?”
“Yes, fine,” she replied, looking a bit frazzled. “It’s just been a while since I’ve made such a big feast.” She smiled. “It’s almost ready, as long as your dad has finished with that salad. Joe? The salad?”
“I’m just mixing the dressing, it’s almost ready.”
“Does it take that long to make a salad? Honestly…”
I set the table, and then got my laptop out to check my e-mail and job applications while I waited for breakfast to be finished. Maybe this was just how things went when you’d been married for thirty plus. Maybe there really was no such thing as a couple made for each other, or a perfectly happy marriage. Maybe all love was meant to fade away, and it was only the fear of being alone that kept people together.
What a depressing thought!
I opened my e-mail and found nothing but junk. Depressing. I made my rounds through the job websites I normally frequented, checked my LinkedIn, checked my contacts on Facebook, and sent out another blast of resumes. The same routine I’d gone through what felt like hundreds of times already. I was beginning to think that I would never find my way back up to the bay again.
“Okay,” mom said, “it’s ready, finally. Let’s eat.”
I helped bring all the food to the table while my parents debated over the proper dressing to salad ratio. “This all looks delicious,” I said, trying to change the subject.
We sat down and dug in, my mom’s attention caught on her iPad, and my dad’s on CNN, and I looked back and forth between them and sighed.
“The vegetables are really something, aren’t they,” I commented. “I think these are the most flavorful tomatoes I’ve ever had.”
“Mm,” mom agreed, her mouth full. “Very good.”
Dad was engrossed in what some pundit was saying about Hillary Clinton and hadn’t even touched his food yet.
I put a fat stack of pancakes onto my plate, cut off a dab of butter onto the top, and then drizzled thick, maple syrup from the farmer’s market all over them. “This is really good, mom,” I said, stuffing my mouth full.
“Mm. Very good,” dad agreed.
Mom looked up from the book she was reading on her iPad and smiled. “Is it how you remember it?”
How’d it been back then? The good ol’ days?
Dad told stupid jokes to try to make me and mom laugh. They talked about things—of course I can’t remember what, but it always seemed to be happy and agreeable. Everything was vibrant and colorful.
I guess fond memories tended to be that way. I seemed to be full of memories these days. In fact, my entire existence as of late seemed to be just recalling memories. It was time to look forward not backward.
“Yeah,” I said, pushing away the thoughts. “It’s great.”
After I finished eating, I let my parents know that I was going to see Dakota’s house. Dad told me that he was glad I was getting out of the house, and mom packed me up some left overs to share.
“Let him know we enjoyed his vegetables very much,” she said as I headed out the door. “We’ll be back to buy from him again.”
Outside, the day was hot and dry, definitely a good day to go to the beach or take your shirt off. Powlton was founded on semi-arid inland desert, hilly and rocky with the evidence still visible around the city’s outskirts. We were in a drought, and looking around at the mountains and hills visible from Powlton road, it was easy to see just how dry things were here. It was complete opposite of a place like San Francisco, which actually could be quite lush. Sure, people here had freshly manicured lawns with trees and things like that – but those were starting to become frowned upon and excessive in these bad drought conditions. It was hard to believe that Dakota could grow food without spending an absolute fortune on water.
His house was located on the north eastern-most side of Powlton, just a five-minute drive from where my parent’s house was on the south western-most side. The northeast side was definitely the wealthier part of Powlton, with large, sometimes multi-acre properties and gated communities. I remembered the first time I’d gone to his house being surprised at how huge his backyard was—it felt like he had a whole park back there, where it stretched on so far that you couldn’t even see where the back fence was. They had a concrete path that meandered through it, but back then it had become overgrown and untended, filled with unfriendly low growing scrub and trees that seemed to house all sorts of spiders. We hardly used it whenever I was over, except to occasionally smoke weed in secret.
I’d found out that Mr. Heart had bought the propert
y because his wife, Dakota’s mom, loved gardens and gardening, but when she passed away he’d stopped tending to it.
The house looked the same as I remembered it from the front, except for the sign hanging over the garage that said “Heart Lifespring Gardens”. His van sat parked out in the driveway, and by all appearances, it just looked like any other house on his street.
Dakota Heart’s house.
I stuffed my hands into my pockets and smiled to myself as I stood outside my car and looked up at the place. I never thought I’d ever find myself back here again. I could almost see the two of us from back then—Dakota’s battered Volvo station wagon in the front instead of the van, the two of us getting out after a day at the beach, him jumping up on me for a piggy-back ride.
I was surprised to feel that butterfly sensation in my stomach again as I recalled the memory.
“Were you just going to stand outside all day?”
I blinked as Dakota’s voice called me back from the memory. I’d gotten caught in the past again.
He leaned against the doorframe, his arms crossed over his chest and that lopsided grin on his face. He wore a sky blue V-neck t-shirt that hung loosely on his muscles, a pair of grey linen shorts, and his sunhat dangled from between his fingers. Again, I was surprised to see this new Dakota, so clean cut and…well, grown up.
I raised up the bag of Tupperware I had. “Brought some food for you, made fresh from your garden.” I grinned. “Hope you’re hungry.”
“Starved, actually. The tour group just left before you got here, so I haven’t had anything to eat yet. Come in.”
He opened the door and was greeted by a happy looking border collie that ran up from inside the house, its tail wagging furiously. The dog licked his hand and then excitedly came over to investigate me, running around my legs and nudging my thigh with its head.
“Hello, who’s this?”
“This is Rosie,” Dakota said. “Rosie, this is Roy. Rosie, sit! Good girl.”
She quickly sat down in front of me, her tail swishing the floor. I let her smell my hand and then gave her a scratch behind the ear.
“Rosie. Wasn’t that your mom’s name?”
“Yup. She’s been with me for about five years now,” he said. “Got her as a puppy when it started to become pretty lonely here. She was probably the best thing to happen to me after my dad passed, asides from tending the garden.”
I followed him through the house and to the kitchen, looking around in a kind of surreal amazement. Rosie ran ahead, jumping into her bed on the kitchen floor and taking up a chew toy into her mouth. There were flashes of things I recognized from back when I’d last been here, when the house had been his dad’s, but mostly everything had been redecorated and remodeled. “Your house has changed a lot.”
Dakota took the Tupperware from me and pulled out a plate from the cupboard. “You hungry?”
“No, I just ate.”
“Thirsty? I brew my own beer.”
“Well, there’s no way I’m turning that down.”
He pulled open the fridge and produced an unmarked beer bottle, uncorked it, and poured the red amber liquid into two glasses and handed one to me. “After my dad died, he left me a pretty hefty inheritance.” He put his plate into the microwave on the counter and turned it on.
I sipped on my beer and was greeted with an explosion of hoppy, malty flavor, colored with a slight fruitiness that blew my hair back. It was so good! I immediately took another gulp of it.
“How do you like it?” Dakota asked, not oblivious to the look that had crossed over my face.
“Amazing,” I said.
“Good,” he laughed. “You’re the first to have tried it. I was afraid you were going to say it was horrible. Anyway, after my dad died, things were pretty difficult for me, especially being charged with taking care of this place. I decided that if I was going to live here, I needed to make it my own.”
I nodded. “It’s you, for sure. I mean, your tastes have changed over the past decade but it definitely feels very you. Everything is so organized.”
“My dad was never very good at keeping things clean and organized, was he?” Dakota chuckled.
“I remember having to step over piles of CDs and records and stuff.”
The microwave beeped, and Dakota went over to sit down at the dining room table. Rosie followed, curling up on the floor nearby. I walked around the room, looking at the photos on the shelves and walls while Dakota ate. There were a lot of old pictures that I recognized—photos of him and his parents together when he was a child, photos of him and his dad. I laughed and picked one frame from off the shelf. In it was his senior photo from high school, with his long, messy brown hair and boyish lopsided grin. “Here’s the Dakota I remember,” I said.
“God, that hair,” he laughed. “I don’t know what you saw in me, Roy.”
My heart skipped a beat, and it was useless for me to try to contain a smile. “Are you kidding? I loved that look. Brooding, emo, scenester Dakota.”
“Hm, do you think I’d still be able to fit into my skinny jeans?”
We laughed, and I put the photo back onto the shelf and continued to peruse around. I noticed one thing pretty quickly—there were a couple photos of him and his dad that must’ve been taken after high school. His hairstyle had already changed, but there weren’t really any of him taken after that. I’d wondered if I would find photos of him and a new boyfriend, or maybe even a family—but it seemed like Dakota was still a bachelor.
I decided to just bring it up. “Gotta admit, I’m surprised that you’re not married right now.”
He finished the last of the food on his plate. “Really good. Those were my vegetables? Tell your mom thank you for me.”
“Mmhm.”
He got up and took his plate to the kitchen. “You thought I’d be married?” He sounded amused.
“Well, yeah. I mean, you’d always talked about starting a family and all that, so I always thought that you’d be in domestic partnership or whatever it was called back then.”
“Yeah, that’s true. I guess I did see that for myself. I always thought I’d get some kind of unconventional job, since college was never a priority for me, and then I thought I’d settle down with my man and adopt a couple kids. Things changed when dad got sick. Now Rosie is all I need. Right, Rosie?”
With her head resting on her paws, Rosie’s ears pricked up and her eyes looked curiously back and forth at us, as if she was wondering what we were saying about her.
I looked back at the photos on the shelf. There was one of Dakota with a much smaller Rosie sitting at his feet, smiling at the camera while standing in what looked like a forest. So Dakota hadn’t been with anyone since we’d gone our separate ways? It was a bit of a shock to me. Sure, he wasn’t as outgoing as I had been back in those days, but he had this soft, quiet charm about him that was incredibly attractive. He was also way more mature than most of the people I knew at that time, so I just kind of figured that he’d settle down pretty quickly.
“Come on, let me show you the backyard,” he said, beckoning. He walked through the kitchen to the back door, and Rosie sprung up from where she laid on the floor and darted over to him, her nails clicking on the tile. We went outside, and I was greeted with a sight that completely took my breath away.
I’d been expecting a vegetable garden—maybe rows and rows of crops, with planters and fruit trees neatly organized side by side—but what I saw could only be described as a forest. It was like he had a forest in his backyard.
“Holy shit,” I breathed.
There were all sorts of different trees with still-ripening fruit hanging down off the branches, and below them were lower growing trees, also with fruit. There were trellises with vines creeping up them, with squash hanging down and tomatoes. All along the ground, I saw zucchini, cucumbers, different kinds of melons, and all sorts of other plants growing all in between. A few chickens plucked their way through along the forest floor, pec
king at the ground. Birds darted around the trees, and bees were buzzing around the flowering plants. I could hear water running somewhere off further out into the yard. It was a far cry from the prickly, unfriendly looking place that I’d known from high school.
Rosie dashed out and chased after a chicken before darting deeper into the garden, leaping through the leaves and over plants.
“This is Heart Lifespring Gardens,” Dakota said, sweeping his hand majestically. “A lot has changed from what you last remember, huh?”
“I’ll say. It’s like a jungle sprouted up in your back yard. This is all food?”
“I’d say ninety percent of it is food producing, yeah. I have certain flowers and other kinds of plants planted in to act as pest control and pollinator attractors. Come on, we can walk through this way.”
