Things That Grow

by Meredith Goldstein

  My mother is wearing an oversize brown dress with some sort of swirling turquoise pattern on the sleeves. It’s boxy and confusing and reminds me of the clothing you’d find in an art museum gift shop. There is one reddish chunk of hair at the front of her graying brown bob. There is also a geode—like a full amethyst rock formation—hanging from her neck.

  She catches me eyeing it.

  “Isn’t it lovely? Bill got it for me for our anniversary. It keeps out negative energy,” she says. I don’t know what anniversary she’s talking about. She met Bill only about eight months ago.

  Then Mom moves to Seth and they embrace, and I guess he can’t fight it either. No matter how irritating you find Becca Seltzer, you can’t reject her hugs. It takes Seth a few long seconds to pull away, straighten up, and clear his throat.

  “There’s lasagna and shit on the table,” Seth says, and that wakes up Bill, who whooshes past us to the dining room.

  “Nice to see you too, Bill,” Seth mutters, and Mom gives him a light slap on the arm.

  “He’s been driving for ten hours in traffic,” she says. “Be kind.”

  * * *

  Then we’re all around the oval dining room table, and at first glance, we look like a pretty typical family that might eat dinners at a table like this, even though that hasn’t happened since before I moved in. There’s Mom, Bill, Seth, Chris, and me. No one is sitting in Grandma’s chair at the head of the table, the one that always put her closest to the kitchen. We all take turns glancing at it.

  In the uncomfortable silence I notice that Bill is growing sideburns, which is a choice, I guess. Bill is balding, about my height, and looks like a lot of other people. If you put ten white, baldish men in front of me, it might take me a few long seconds to recognize him. Perhaps the sideburns will give him an identity of some kind. Like when you put a random bumper sticker on your very basic-looking car so you know you’ll be able to find it in a Target parking lot.

  I don’t know much about Bill, other than that he likes sports a lot, and I can’t say that makes him unique. It’s his conversation entry point with me, even though I do not like sports at all and have told him as much.

  Still, he’ll say things like “Your Sox look good this year,” to which I respond, “I literally have no idea,” because I literally don’t, and then I feel bad because he’s just trying to make small talk.

  Bill owns a small chain of dry cleaners in Maryland. My mom, who has lived right outside of Washington, D.C., for about a year now, met him at some self-help business class where you were supposed to “learn how to be your own best manager.” Mom said that she and Bill spent the seminar as partners and asked each other questions all day to help determine their most important social qualities (hers turned out to be “verbal communication” and his was “paying attention,” so that worked out for them), and then they had a four-hour lunch that turned into dinner.

  Bill does seem to have a number of good qualities, especially if you keep the bar low. For instance, he’s very good at showing up. He’s picked me up from the airport twice, on time. A solid showing, compared with Mom’s last boyfriend, Declan. I’m quite sure the delay in my mom’s arrival in Natick is not Bill’s fault.

  But the thing that that excites my mother most about Bill is what he comes with: free dry cleaning. My mother has mentioned this a lot.

  “I’ve always avoided buying anything that was dry-clean only, and now I don’t have to!” she said just before I met him for the first time.

  “I didn’t realize you were depriving yourself,” I said. “I’m really happy you finally have this in a relationship.”

  “Honey,” she said, “don’t be mean.”

  “I’m not trying to be mean.”

  “Uh huh,” she said, and gave me one of her looks.

  I am sarcastic about Bill only because there have been a lot of Bills. There was Jeff and Luis and David and Sam. There was Lance, who turned out to be married.

  When I was younger, we moved around for some of these guys—or didn’t when we should have—until Grandma put a stop to it and said it was time for me to move in with her. My mom’s love life—and her may career changes—became more palatable after I left. Meeting a new boyfriend wasn’t so high stakes.

  I suppose this all started with my dad, who was also temporary. He and my mom had an on-and-off thing until she got pregnant. He told her he’d help financially, but she declined, thinking it would be better to keep clear boundaries if he didn’t want to be involved. She told him she’d find love elsewhere.

  Chris thinks it’s weird that I don’t reach out to my dad, but I don’t know what I’d say. I do check his LinkedIn profile sometimes, and I looked to see his special skills, which are things like “sponsorships” and “personnel management,” but I always hope he’ll add something like tightrope walking.

  I am still hoping that Bill will reveal a special skill that actually makes my mother a better parent. So far, no one’s done that.

  One of the most notable things I learned about Bill when I first visited his apartment is that he collects expensive corkscrews, which he displays on tiny hooks all over the wall in his kitchen. They look like serial killer weapons. I intend to write a truly terrifying story about them, but I can’t figure out what the plot would be.

  The most upsetting thing about Bill’s corkscrew collection is that he barely drinks wine. He prefers beer. My mom told me that once, casually, and I freaked out. It made the whole thing so much more troubling, but also awesome.

  Why would you collect hundreds of corkscrews and put them on your wall if you don’t ever plan to use them? What are you trying to unscrew, Bill?

  “Hey, Bill, good sideburns,” I say, because I haven’t formally greeted him yet.

  “Thanks,” he says, and he looks up from his phone, beaming. “So sorry about Sheryl.”

  “Me too,” I say.

  “Double-header today,” he adds.

  “Sure is,” I say. I know he’s trying.

  Mom scoots her chair closer to the table. “So, how’s everyone feeling?” she asks, like she’s licensed to help us.

  “Like our mother just died,” Seth says, and Mom takes a deep breath.

  “Christopher,” she says, finally acknowledging Chris. He’s in the chair next to me, tapping his foot near mine. “It’s so lovely to see you. Thank you for being here for Lori right now.”

  “You’re welcome, Ms. Seltzer,” Chris says, because he’s too nice.

  “Christian,” I snap. “My best friend’s name is Christian.”

  Mom has the decency to look embarrassed, at least.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s been a long few days.”

  “No problem,” Chris says.

  “Honey,” Mom says, looking at me while holding onto her neck geode, “we have to talk about practicalities here. We’re going to have to get you enrolled and set up at a school in Maryland.”

  “Mom,” I say, wanting to cover my ears and scream like a kid. I try to breathe.

  “I know I just arrived and we’re all processing the shock of this, but school starts very soon, and we’re going to have to deal with the house.”

  “I bet you’ll get a lot for it,” Bill says, surveying the room for a second, and then I know he sees my look of death because he wilts into his chair.

  “I don’t want to move,” I say.

  “I’m not ready to sell the house,” Seth says at the same time.

  “Of course you don’t,” Mom says, “but that’s the only option on the table. She’s gone, Lor. My work is in Maryland, and I can’t see any reason for us to hold on to an empty house, Seth. I know there’s a lot of history here—for all of us. We’re all going to have to make some adjustments.”

  “Just let me think,” I say, and Chris puts his hand on my hand, which is clenched in a fist. He takes each of my fingers and extends them, making me feel even less relaxed because now I’m not only furious, I’m also feeling a riot of aggre
ssive butterflies in my stomach. He has touched me so many times in the past few days that I can barely focus.

  “You can’t just expect me to pick up and leave,” I say.

  “Not today—but very soon,” Mom says. “Before school.”

  “You don’t even have a real second bedroom,” I remind her.

  When I stay with her, I sleep in a tiny office space that doesn’t have a window. She said that the sublet would be temporary, but she’s been there for more than a year.

  “Bill has a three-bedroom condo,” Mom says. “The public high school in his town is very good.”

  My head snaps up. Now it’s clear. Mom is moving in with Bill after less than a year of dating him. Of course she is.

  “I’m not living with Bill,” I say, and then I see Bill pretending not to hear, staring at his phone. “No offense, Bill.”

  “None taken,” he whispers, and scratches the shiny part of his head.

  “You’re springing this on me now? That you’re moving in with another boyfriend?”

  “He is more than just another boyfriend, Lori,” Mom says.

  “Sure! He comes with free dry cleaning!” I say, and I regret it as soon as the words are out of my mouth. There is no reason to be cruel to Bill.

  “Sorry again, Bill,” I say. “This is not about you.”

  “Honestly, no problem,” he says, and smiles.

  “I didn’t want to have to fight about this,” Mom says. “There’s no alternative, Lori.”

  “I’ll be eighteen this December.”

  Chris’s foot taps at hummingbird speed.

  Mom leans forward. “Are you saying you want to live here on your own?”

  I shrug.

  “Out of the question,” she says with a laugh. “You are one hundred percent seventeen, and even if you weren’t, we wouldn’t allow you to live in a three-bedroom suburban home by yourself.”

  Fair.

  “Well, we’re at an impasse then, because I can’t go. Chris and I have a year of issues of the N-Files planned. I have strong relationships with teachers who’ll be giving me recommendations for college—which I’ll be applying to in just a few months. I’m a writing lab aide for Miss Checka, which is going to look great on my applications. You can’t pull me out now.”

  “Miss Checka is still there?” Seth says, his mouth full of lemon cake. “Becca, you remember Miss Checka?”

  Sometimes it’s hard to believe that Mom and Seth lived in this house and went to my high school, even though it was in an older, smaller building back then.

  “She was so elegant,” Seth says, smirking. “Is she still elegant? She looked like a movie star.”

  “She really is,” I say. “She always wears these ornate scarves.”

  “Yes, the scarves,” Seth says. “I wanted to be her.”

  Chris and I smile. We have long fantasized about the secret personal life of Miss Checka. My mom looks irritated, but before we can get back to the matter at hand, the doorbell rings, and I’m saved, at least for now.

  I assume it will be the food basket delivery from the Feldbergs, who told Seth they were having some sent all the way from Chicago, but when I swing open the door, I see a group of people who are staring at me as if we’ve met before.

  There are five of them—four women and one man. The man wears a shirt with a beaver on it that says DAM!

  “Who are they?” whispers Seth, who has followed me into the hallway.

  Before I can guess, they confirm.

  “We’re the Garden Girls,” says the woman at the front of the pack. She has white, spiky hair and is dressed in jeans and a beige tank top. Despite her hair color, I think she might be a lot younger than Grandma. She walks in, the others trailing behind her, and goes to Seth.

  “You must be the prodigal son!”

  “I am,” he says.

  Another woman—she has black and gray dreads and is holding a pan of lasagna—chimes in. “I read your book, Seth. It was lovely. Very depressing, but I suppose all the best books are.”

  “Which book?” Seth asks.

  “The one about Sheryl,” the woman says.

  “It wasn’t technically about her—” Seth starts, but the woman has passed us and is on her way to the kitchen.

  “You must be Lori,” says the man in the DAM! T-shirt. He looks way too young to be in this group, like maybe he’s not even in his thirties. “We’ve all heard so much about you,” he tells me.

  “You too,” I say, because I have.

  When Grandma Sheryl retired from being a public school English teacher, there seemed to be so many more hours in the day, she told me. She tried joining a few book clubs, but she said she was a know-it-all in them. Always lecturing. She said she’d rather read her favorites on her own. So she took up her other hobby and signed up to volunteer for the parks department. Through that work, she met the Garden Girls, and that’s where she got to be social, maybe for the first time since my grandpa died.

  The Garden Girls had meetings and did community projects such as tending to the trees around town hall or teaching a class about herb growing to people at the senior center.

  I’ve always known about the Girls, as well as the names of the members—I know the one man in the group is Kevin, and I always assumed he was some old widower and that he texted Grandma Sheryl a lot because he was in love.

  I was wrong, apparently.

  In the three years I’ve lived here, I’ve had no reason to meet them. Most of the stuff they do together is during the day while I’m at school or on weekends when I’m with Chris and Jess and Jason.

  Sometimes they take these long day trips to see, like, one tree.

  “Jill found a gorgeous spruce on Instagram in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, so we’re going to take a drive,” Grandma would say, and then she’d be off for the day.

  It’s not like I was ever going to join them for that.

  The last three Girls file in, clogging the hallway, some of their summer sandals clicking on the wood floor.

  “You’re all here,” I say, overwhelmed, and I hope they don’t take that to mean I want them out of my house.

  “What’s left of us,” the woman with the spiky white hair says from the living room. “There were ten of us just two years ago, and then six. Five now, I suppose. She was the best of us, your Sheryl.”

  “She was, wasn’t she?” another woman says. “Not the greenest thumb of us, but certainly the sharpest mind.”

  Kevin tears up and wipes his eyes, which makes me wipe mine.

  “You should all have lemon cake,” I say.

  “I’m Jill, by the way,” says the woman with the spiky gray hair. “That’s Kevin.”

  “I figured,” I whisper to him, and he smiles because I’ve heard of him.

  “I’m Deb,” the woman with the dreads and the lasagna calls from the kitchen.

  The last two Garden Girls—a tall, elegant older woman in a navy sundress, and a short woman around the same age wearing ill-fitting jeans and a T-shirt with a cat on it—introduce themselves as Rochelle and Lenny respectively. I cannot imagine a world where Rochelle and Lenny are friends, but they seem to be a pair, and honestly, kudos to the Garden Girls for bringing this crew together.

  “Don’t worry about feeding us,” Jill calls to me; she’s moved to the living room. “We’re here to work.”

  “Work what?” I ask.

  Rochelle and Lenny are on the move then, too, toward the kitchen, with a confused Seth at their heels. I follow behind Jill, who makes a beeline for the massive tree Grandma Sheryl kept by the living room window. Kevin heads upstairs. Seth and I whirl around in circles, seeing how the house has been taken over.

  I put my focus back on Jill, who puts two fingers in the tree soil.

  “Kev?” she yells. “Can you bring me two cups?”

  “Just give me one second,” he yells from somewhere on the second floor. “We have a small emergency here.”

  Seth and I follow Jill upstairs, w
here Kevin is next to a plant Grandma kept on a table under a skylight in the hallway. The plant has pink lines all over its green leaves, but you wouldn’t know that, because it looks very dead.

  “Too much sun, not enough water,” he says, looking at me and then at Seth as if we did a murder.

  “I haven’t even thought of the plants,” I admit.

  “Don’t worry,” Kevin says. “I can save it.”

  We follow Jill back downstairs and into the dining room, where my mother, Bill, and Chris look bewildered while the other Garden Girls buzz about them like fairy godmothers.

  “You must be Becca,” Jill says, and her tone is a little too flat to be kind.

  My mom sticks out her hand, and Jill gives it a lukewarm shake.

  “Are you going to be able to keep up with all this?” Jill asks me.

  “The Fittonia might sag quickly, but that doesn’t mean you should give it more water,” Kevin tells me now that he’s returned to the first floor. “Try putting an ice cube at its base.”

  “Which one is the Fittonia?” Seth and I ask at the same time, which makes all the Garden Girls pause and stare at us.

  “The one upstairs,” he says, as if this is obvious. “The pink one.”

  Our question makes them nervous. The Garden Girls are worried that we’re going to kill the plants, and they’re right, we might. But honestly, does it matter?

  “She’d want the plants to thrive,” Jill says, reading my mind. Rochelle and Lenny, who have gathered in the dining room with us, nod behind her.

  “Would it be better if we took some of them?” Deb asks. “To care for them so you don’t have the responsibility?”

  “No!” I snap. I don’t want to start giving away Grandma Sheryl’s things. I don’t want to feel less permanent here.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Deb says. “I don’t know where my head is. We’re being so rude.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Jill says.