Betty's (Little Basement) Garden

by Laurel Dewey

  But things didn’t get better. One year later, by the Fall of 2008, she had her dream kitchen, but she’d also eaten through one hundred thousand dollars of the life insurance policy. By the time she was “up to code,” she’d said goodbye to the pricey designer and worked as hard as she could to personally button up that never-ending nightmare. She essentially had a one hundred and twenty thousand dollar kitchen surrounded by a dilapidated and outdated house. A hideous, sobering reality set in. Betty could lean against the marble countertop and stare out one of the three large, handcrafted, etched windows and wonder what in the hell she was thinking a year prior when she came up with this terrible idea. There was nothing to smile about now. No reason to flash her twenty-five thousand dollar grin. She had less than thirty grand left from Frank’s insurance policy. Her large cushion had turned into a small pillow, and she would have to dip into the fund again in order to keep The White Violet afloat.

  By the late spring of 2009, it became patently clear that the economic downturn had finally skulked into Colorado. Gourmet chocolate was not at the top of people’s “must have” list when holding onto their home was the key priority. It didn’t help matters that sixty percent of the businesses around The White Violet shut down, leaving the once fashionable locale looking like a boomtown gone bust. Empty storefronts and poorly maintained landscaping around the area didn’t exactly attract out of town visitors or locals.

  Thus, The White Violet doled out its last elegant chocolate confection in May of 2009. With fewer than ten thousand dollars left of Betty’s “cushion,” she retreated to her home, shoved the chocolate equipment in the workspace above the garage and wondered what in God’s name she was supposed to do with the rest of her life. A year later, she was still asking herself the same question. However, now the ache of failure and confusion permeated her bones. She still had to pay back the equity loan, and the monthly interest payment of $666 – a number with obviously sinister connections – was barely covered by Frank’s death benefit. His pension of Full Colonel, Rank O-6, gave Betty fifty-five hundred dollars each month. Nothing to complain about, she reasoned. But between property taxes in her upscale neighborhood, utilities, food, and sundry expenses, she was left with around three thousand dollars. Again, not something that was forcing her into Tent City. But it seemed every month, something monumental occurred to the house that needed drastic and immediate attention.

  It was as if the kitchen remodel had triggered a cascading march of house repairs. Tug at one thing in nature and you affect something else; knock a wall down in the kitchen and suddenly it weakens a shaky foundation and the chimney falls over. That damaged the roof, leaving a hole in the attic. Then an old, imposing sycamore fell down in the driveway, seriously uprooting the cement. The plumbing was the next to blow. Bit by bit, the extra three grand quickly evaporated every month.

  The only area of the house that didn’t seem to be affected was the basement. But that didn’t surprise Betty. Frank’s sacred domain was built like a bunker. There, amidst his medals, uniforms and enormous gun collection, Frank whiled away his retirement years drinking, smoking and reliving his beloved, brutal moments during his thirty year military career. Betty rarely spent much time down there, except to do the laundry or remove another gun from Frank’s collection to sell to a gun dealer across town. Those sales had helped supplement her income, but all the guns were gone now, save for the Beretta Tomcat she kept for home defense.

  She was caught between that familiar rock and a very hard place. In order to sell the house in the quickly deteriorating economy, she needed to put at least fifty thousand into it. And even that would be inadequate to attract a buyer in such a competitive market. However, the house was now worth half of the eight hundred thousand appraisal when she got the home equity loan. She didn’t have fifty grand, so she was stuck, and mortified she’d allowed herself to reach this point of helplessness. All the derisive lectures she had to listen to from her husband, telling her she lived in a bubble or had no sense of “the real world” haunted her. Even her parents, rest their judgmental souls, never raised her to be this liberal with her resources. She’d had some fun and now she suffered for it. But she always knew that would happen because “having fun” was not in the game plan. Not under her parents’ roof or in Frank’s grip. “Fun” had a cost and it was steep and unrepentant.

  But there was always something else tugging at her heart. Even if she could sell the house, the emotional toll would be tremendous. It wasn’t that the old, broken down domicile held beautiful memories. If anything, the walls still shuddered from her husband’s alcoholic rages, the deafening silence of regret and the thunder of pain Betty suppressed her entire marriage. No, it wasn’t the house. It was what surrounded the house. It was the show-stopping front yard, ablaze with botanical colors from April through October. And it was the large backyard with the swinging bench hanging on the large canopy elm with those words her son carved into its trunk the last time she saw him alive. When life became too difficult, Betty could always sit on that swinging bench and pretend Frankie was sitting beside her, sharing a story and hurriedly eating whatever she could whip up before his father got home and found him. Their visits had to be clandestine and so brief after Frank kicked his namesake out of the house when he was eighteen. She begged Frank to pay for rehab for their son but his chiseled pride would have none of it. “I don’t invest in failures!” Frank would shout. “He got himself into this fucking mess, he can get himself out!

  It killed Betty to watch Frankie’s decline. Each time he’d show up for another stolen moment, the roadmap of pain was carved onto his face. It wasn’t just the slaughter of hardcore addiction; it was his ache of feeling cast out and left to flounder in a world that had always been too harsh for a boy that sensitive, reflective and gentle. As macho and arrogant as Frank Sr. was, Frankie was the polar opposite.

  He was different almost from the beginning. As a youngster, Frankie spent hours alone, playing with imaginary friends only he could see. Betty would observe him in the backyard and sense he was straddling between two distinct worlds. At times, Frankie appeared to have a deeper connection with things unseen than with the three dimensional world. His clear, hazel eyes held wisdom far beyond his years but that didn’t garner popularity with his peers, especially when he would imprudently make what some of his friend’s mothers called “a bizarre comment” about some event that was going to happen in their future. The odd thing was that many incidents young Frankie foresaw came true in one form or another. That just made him a freak in the eyes of his friends and his father, so he learned to keep his mouth shut. He was the epitome of that line from the song, “Vincent” – “And how you suffered for your sanity. And how you tried to set them free…” He was too tender for this world, and Frank Sr. never let an opportunity go by to remind his son of it. Even as the drugs began tearing at his soul, Frankie never became violent. If anything, he became more internalized, grasping daily for the meaning of life.

  Frankie had been dead for five years, but his imprint remained in the house and always under the large canopy elm. No one ever knew it, but after his death and during the time Frank was sick and waiting for his liver transplant, Betty would wait until her husband was asleep and then creep out into the backyard. There, she would lie in the grass under the elm with the fragrant flowers around her and absorb the serenity. It was like a botanical IV that shot her full of just enough energy to get up and face another dreadful day. That tree, the grass, the flowers and the manicured bushes were her truest and most loyal companions. She couldn’t express all that pent up anger and resentment to her friends, but the elm tree knew. The grass and the flowers never judged her. And those manicured bushes even relaxed enough to listen to her when she talked to Frankie and cried for all the reasons she failed him. Betty’s connection with nature defied her upbringing and appearance. Looking at her, you’d never know that without her plants, she would be a shell of a person. They embraced her when nobody else did
, and for that she would never forsake them.

  So as she lay a little longer under the covers on this spring morning, Betty steeled herself against the dogged fears biting at her heels, and she slowly threw back the covers. Sleeping in, Betty still believed, was for people who hadn’t planned their day correctly. She had to keep busy. God, that was imperative. Keep moving. Keep doing. “It is in the doing,” her father used to tell her as a child, “that progress begins.” And Betty had been praying at the altar of progress her entire existence.

  As she moved around the bedroom, stretching and getting her bones to stop creaking, she planned her day to the minute. She would shower and select the appropriate outfit for the day. After breakfast and just one cup of coffee, she’d hoist the American flag outside her front door and set off in her fifteen-year-old green Ford Taurus, praying it would continue to run for just one more day. Her first stop would be the consignment store two towns south of her. Nobody knew her there, and that was vital in order to maintain a semblance of anonymity as she sold her cherished antiques to total strangers. Little by little, the house was losing a few more items, but she was able to cover it up by rearranging furniture and filling in the empty spaces with large vases of flowers from the yard. The lie she sold to Judi at the get together the day before about her needlepoint chair being fixed was unplanned, and she realized she’d have to come up with a better story if she was confronted with the same situation again. Like a boy scout, Betty would be prepared. None of this fly by the seat of her tailored dress crap for her.

  After the consignment store, she’d drive back to town and visit Peggy. The chocolates she’d set aside for her dying friend were already wrapped in a White Violet gift box. She just hoped to God that Peggy wasn’t moaning or throwing up when she arrived. That would be too much for Betty to handle. Her inexorable fear of death had become so persistent that it dominated her life now. It was strange in many ways, since for the past year, she really wasn’t that invested in living. Death, in some ways, would be welcome, if anything just to break the daily boredom.

  She was just about to lay out her outfit for the day when that familiar syncopated flutter began again in her right ear. It was enough to drive her crazy. She pressed her hand tightly against the ear and felt her jaw tighten and then click. That was followed by an uncomfortable pop in her jaw. Good God, this day was getting off to a helluva start. She dressed in a cheerful salmon colored dress and donned her favorite, off-white, springtime sweater with its jaunty embroidered collar. She’d parted with many of her cherished designer sweaters and coats over the past year when she found out they could fetch a decent price. But she couldn’t part with this one and found herself wearing it more than ever before. Selecting the ideal brooch to doll up the outfit, she came upon Frank’s gold wedding band in her jewelry box. Squinting, she read the inscription inside the ring: This We’ll Defend. It was the motto of the U.S. Army. Ever the combatant, Frank somehow thought it was the most romantic thing to carve into his wedding ring. But to Betty, the dictum made her feel like she was a territory that needed to be secured and conquered. As she re-read those three words, the familiar tightness in her neck began to creep up. Setting the golden band in her palm, she assessed the possible weight of the metal. Last time she checked, gold was going for nearly twelve hundred dollars an ounce. She debated what to do. But then she could almost hear Frank’s coarse voice telling her to put the goddamned ring back in the jewelry box. He wasn’t even there, but he still had his thumb wedged on her spirit. She obliged his phantom order and slammed the gold band back into the drawer.

  An hour later she headed out the door. She advised Ronald she would return shortly and to “keep watch.” His failing, fourteen-year-old eyes could hardly find his dish let alone an intruder, but he played along. Outside the front door, she raised the American Flag into its secure slot and gently unfurled its colors. Walking past the white wooden garden sign that simply stated, Betty’s Garden, she heard footsteps coming from on top of her roof. Spinning around, she was shocked to see Buddy, her portly maintenance man securing a piece of insulation.

  “Buddy! I wasn’t aware you were working today. You realize it’s Sunday?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Buddy replied, heaving his work belt lower on his overhanging gut. For a guy who wasn’t even thirty-five, he moved like someone twice his age. “But my regular job has me doin’ overtime and I just figured you needed to get this done before the end of summer.”

  Betty regarded him with uncertainty. “Is that a joke, Buddy?”

  He scratched his scraggly brown beard that still had specks of the morning’s donut in it, complete with sprinkles. “Well, yes and no, ma’am. I always have to allow for my low back goin’ out and gettin’ me stove up.”

  She furrowed her brow. “Stove up? What in the world is that?”

  His jaw slacked and then came to attention. “Stove up,” Buddy countered, as if it was perfectly clear. “Stiff, sore, can’t move. Stove up.”

  “Well, of course,” Betty said with a slight Texas inflection. The poor man needed to lose the fifty pound barrel around his gut. That would certainly do wonders to lessen the strain on his back, but Betty sure as hell wasn’t going to be the one to tell him that. “Listen, I have to go out and run errands. So, I might not be here at lunchtime to make you something to eat.”

  “That’s okay, Mrs. Craven. I’ll figure it out.”

  Betty observed Buddy’s demeanor. He seemed saddened by the news. At least, that’s what she believed. He could have just had gas. She started toward her car and then turned back, “Oh, Buddy, I’m running a bit tight this month. So, if you could –”

  “Don’t worry about it, Mrs. Craven. I know you’ll pay up when you got it.”

  Betty smiled, trying to hold her head high, but she was both appreciative and appalled by Buddy’s seemingly lack of concern as to when his work would be compensated. His trust in her was something she took quite seriously, and even though she tended to speak to him in a tenor set aside for workmen and bathroom attendants, she was fond of the big, slack-jawed scalawag. She tried valiantly to introduce him to culture, once playing Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker” while he worked. When he asked her what the “song” was called, she told him. He laughed so hard mucus ran from his nostrils, and from then on he called it “that ball-buster music.” Sadly, Betty surmised, the only culture some people experience is the mold growing on cheese in their refrigerator.

  With Peggy’s box of chocolates secured safely in a cooling bag – one of the many accessories left over from The White Violet – Betty locked the car doors and put on her seatbelt, making sure not to create any unsightly wrinkles in her dress. Then she did what she always did before starting the car. She prayed. If she were Catholic, she’d pray to St. Christopher, the Patron Saint of travelers. But since she was a Methodist, she silently bowed her head and prayed to God to make the car start and continue to run until she reached her destination. As the turned the key, God answered her prayer.

  Chapter 4

  “That gentleman over there is checking out your Biedermeier.”

  The Gilded Rose was not exactly bustling when Betty arrived. There was only one man perusing the furniture section and a young girl waiting at the empty counter. Sure, it was Sunday but where were all the customers she was told adored this high-end antique store? As she moved closer to the counter, a wave of patchouli assaulted her senses. It appeared to emanate from the young girl now leaning on the counter and playing with the business card holder next to the cash register. Betty regarded the girl, who looked to be in her early twenties, with silent disparagement. Her fingers were painted in coal black polish, making it look to Betty as if she’d dipped her nails into Satan’s burnt caldron. Hoop earrings adorned her right eyebrow and left nostril. Betty never understood this accessory, always picturing a leash attached to the hoops so the unrefined colt could be led around the paddock. To add another dose of chaos to this unfortunate young woman’s appearance, a black str
eak of hair coloring extended down the middle of her bleached blond hair. The image of a cheap skunk materialized.

  Betty erected a steel wall between herself and the girl, making a point to turn away and pretend to take an interest in a red velvet Victorian couch that looked like it belonged in the lobby of a brothel.

  “Hi!” the girl said sweetly.

  Betty turned to her. Even though she was appalled by the girl’s appearance, her upbringing dictated that she posture politeness. “Hello.”

  “I think Lily’s in the back room. She’ll probably be out any second.”

  “All right.”

  “Hey, um, can you crack a Benji?”

  “A Benji?”

  She held up a one hundred dollar bill. “Benjamin Franklin? I just came over to get some change. I work a couple doors down, and all we’re getting is hundies.”