Broken Homes & Gardens

by Rebecca Kelley

  broken homes & gardens

  a novel

  rebecca kelley

  Copyright © 2015 by Rebecca Kelley

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Blank Slate Press.

  Blank Slate Press is an imprint of Amphorae Publishing Group LLC.

  Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without written permission from the publisher. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors’ rights.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is merely coincidental, and names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  For information, visit us at www.blankslatepress.com

  Cover design & original art by Elena Makansi

  http://www.elenamakansi.com

  Cover photo from Shutterstock

  Cover font: Lemonade, designed by Rachel Lauren Adams

  Library of Congress Number: 2015935314

  ISBN: 9780991305889

  For Andy & Audrey

  broken homes & gardens

  1

  those nooks and crannies

  Joanna blinked away the sleep and waited. Her clothes hung limp off her body. One ring, two, then three before her sister picked up. She almost laughed with relief.

  It was past midnight and she had been traveling for over twenty hours. First to Prague, on to Frankfurt, San Francisco, now here. She had withdrawn money during her layover in San Francisco, and then bought a stale muffin and cup of coffee—her first meal on American soil since last summer. The muffin was too sweet, tasted like nothing but sugar. She had tried to reach her sister from the San Francisco airport—no answer. Joanna had been forced to leave a message. She had considered calling her mom but thought better of it. She would call later, once things had settled down.

  “Joanna?” her sister said.

  “It’s me.”

  “Where are you?”

  “At the Portland airport. Didn’t you get my message?”

  “I got it. But why are you here? This doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Laura.” Joanna closed her eyes and rested her head against the wall, holding the black receiver of the payphone against her ear. She could picture her sister exactly, so distressed by one little hair out of place. “Can you just come get me?”

  Her sister sighed—then relented. An entire lecture in a single sigh.

  Laura lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Northwest Portland, in an old house divided into six living units. Laura’s was on the third floor, facing a narrow alley, looking out at the building behind it.

  “The good news is, I never bought a washer and dryer for this room,” Laura said, flicking on the light in a large, empty closet off the kitchen. Laura had already set up an air mattress on the closet floor, complete with sheets and a quilt. Joanna had to smile at this. Her sister did not want her here, but she still cared about proper hospitality. After getting over the initial confusion of Joanna’s unexpected arrival, she’d snapped into shape, switched into gear. “The bad news is we have to do our laundry over at the Laundromat.”

  Joanna sunk down onto the mattress. She wanted nothing more than to change her clothes, brush her teeth, wash her face, and sleep for years.

  Joanna spent her first three days in Portland doing nothing. Jet lag, she told her sister. She would wake up sometime long after the sun came up, shower, then pull on her uniform of leggings and oversized T-shirt. She spent her days skimming books off of Laura’s bookshelves and looking up jobs on Laura’s computer. But without her own address or phone number, it hardly seemed worth it to apply. At night she’d go right back to bed without changing her clothes.

  On the third night, her sister knocked on Joanna’s door and peeked in. Joanna was sitting on the blow-up mattress, leaning against the wall, reading under a dim light. “I talked to Mom,” Laura said. “I told her you’re here.”

  Joanna sat up straight. “I was going to tell her! I was waiting until I had a plan.”

  “What is your plan?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the whole point—I wanted to figure something out. Mom will tell me to go back to Reno. But I can’t go back.”

  “Because of Dustin?”

  “Dustin?” Joanna widened her eyes in surprise, as if she had trouble placing the name. She laughed. “Please. I should have let Dustin go last August, before I left. A clean break, no hard feelings.”

  “You broke up? I thought you were trying to make the long-distance thing work.”

  “We were,” Joanna said. “Until we weren’t.” A little more than a month ago, Dustin had sent her a handmade valentine: a cartoon bumblebee holding a heart-shaped sign in its little insect legs. Bee mine. Inside he included the lyrics to the song he was writing about her. “Oh Joanna / I keep your bandana / wrapped around the neck of my steel guitar.” Never mind that she never gave him a bandana. Or that Dustin did not play the steel guitar. Or that Joanna / bandana was a facile, ridiculous rhyme.

  A week after that, he dumped her via email postscript: “P.S. I’m seeing someone.”

  “I wish him the best,” Joanna said to her sister. That was not true, of course. She’d ripped the valentine into four pieces and stuffed it in the trash the day after she arrived in Portland. She took his photograph out of its frame and threw it away, too. She didn’t experience any ritualistic pleasure from these acts. Simple housekeeping—no more to it than that. There was no anger left. It was easy to move on in Portland, another world. She was starting over. She was proud of herself. This is how you do it. This is how you move on. She could write a book about it. If only she could harvest the time squandered over limp-haired guys in earsplitting garage bands. She could have learned Czech better. Maybe another language, too. Read more books, earned an online PhD.

  “Go back to the Czech Republic and finish the school year, then,” Laura was saying. “Those poor kids—”

  “I can’t go back there!” Joanna said, too loudly. “Even if I had the money for another ticket, I couldn’t go back. Don’t you get it? I tried. It didn’t—it didn’t work out.”

  “You’re young, beautiful, and speak two languages!”

  Laura had spent a semester in Spain her junior year and had a wonderful time. Joanna had seen photographs of her sister, the fastidious one, with the perfect pale skin, smooth blonde hair, and blissful, half-closed eyes, holding mugs of beer to the camera. She ate octopus and drank sangria and smoked unfiltered cigarettes. She had an affair with a Dane. She learned to speak Spanish with a Castilian lisp and saw the Guernica in real life. This is what “going abroad” did for people—for other people. Loosened them up, exposed them to new things, made them more interesting.

  It was a horrible thought—that she, Joanna, was incapable of enjoying the very best moments of her own life. It was like so many other experiences she’d been told to savor because they would only happen once: her entire childhood, her first kiss, first love, college. Not only had she not enjoyed those milestones, she’d been relieved when they’d ended.

  “Well, maybe it would be good for you to be on your own for a while,” her sister was saying. “I mean, you’ve been living with Mom your whole life. You’re twenty-four—”

  “I wasn’t ‘living with Mom.’ Tess and I rented that apartment together—”

  “You even had the same job for a while—”

  “What do you think that whole work abroad thing was about? I was trying to be on my own.”

  “Don’t go back then!
You still have to call Mom sometime.”

  “But I don’t have a job or a place or anything.”

  “You can stay here,” Laura said. “I mean, until you find a place of your own. I’m sure you don’t want to live in a windowless room forever, right?”

  Joanna tried to keep her expression neutral. She had, in fact, been thinking she could get by pretty well in this little closet. Staying seemed so simple. It would take no effort. “Are you sure?”

  “I wouldn’t have offered if I wasn’t sure. You do need to look for a job, though. You’ll need to move out eventually.”

  Joanna let her face open into a grin. “Yes, yes. I know. Thank you.”

  “So you’ll call her?”

  “She’ll be hysterical. I can’t deal with that right now.”

  “Why would she be hysterical? You’re acting like she’s some kind of nut.”

  Joanna gave her sister a look. “When’s the last time you lived with her?” No answer. “I think I know her a little better than you,” Joanna said.

  Laura handed her the telephone. “I promised I’d make you call her.” She shut the door behind her.

  Joanna took a breath and dialed her mom’s number.

  “Joanna!” her mother screeched into the phone. The barrage of questions began: What happened? Why did you leave? What did the Czechs do to you? Why Portland? What are you going to do now? What were you thinking?

  Joanna couldn’t explain any of it. “I don’t know, Mom, okay? You know they say how going abroad changes your whole perspective? How you’ll have the time of your life and never be the same? Well … I didn’t. I wasn’t out there living it up. I was sitting inside my apartment watching American television dubbed over in Czech. Nothing really happened. I just decided to visit Laura for a while.” This was not the picture she’d painted earlier. She’d written home about how amazing everything was—the church made of bones, the crispy potato pancakes she bought from street carts, the delightful children eager to learn how to conjugate English verbs.

  The reality of Joanna’s work experience abroad was something else entirely. The gymnázium where she worked was somewhere in the middle of Moravia, hours away from Prague. She taught conversational English in the mornings and had most afternoons to herself. At the end of every day, she crossed off the square on the wall calendar, like a prisoner. The highlight of each week was going to the village’s tiny grocery store and choosing one of the five waxy, yellow peppers available. She taught herself Czech expressions she would never have the opportunity to use: Jak se jmenutete? Dáte si něco k pitě? Miluju tě! What’s your name? Would you like a drink? I love you!

  “Why didn’t you just come home?”

  “No flights from Prague to Reno, Mom.”

  “You can come home now, though. We could talk to Anita about getting your shifts back. And you should see my new place—I’ve got it all fixed up. And your room! I have it just how it was in our old place, with all your things. The bed with the black and white quilt Grandma made you, your Little House on the Prairie box set. Everything’s the same, but better! It has a view—”

  “Laura said I could stay with her for a while.” Joanna braced herself for hysterics. Instead she heard nothing but silence on the other end of the line. “Mom?” Any second her mother would start crying or moaning. Or maybe she had fainted. “Look at everything you did while I was gone, Mom. You’re doing so well at that job, you bought a townhouse—that’s amazing! And I was only gone seven months. I need to be on my own some more—we both do.” Joanna stopped and listened for her mother to react. She didn’t hear anything, not even breathing at the other end of the line. “Mom?”

  “You’re right,” her mother said at last. Her voice sounded low and calm, not hysterical at all. “We should be on our own.”

  Sometimes the sisters stayed in. Joanna had started making regular trips to the library, returning with stacks of books about mail-order bungalows and vintage kitchen design and Pacific Northwest cottage gardens. Joanna pored over these books while Laura graded her fifth graders’ homework under lamplight. Other evenings Laura invited someone over, and then Joanna would tiptoe out of the apartment. She didn’t know what to do with herself at first, but she didn’t want to hang around Laura’s friends or hide out in her little laundry room while Laura entertained some guy she was trying to impress. At first Joanna would hole up in coffee shops, nursing a milky coffee beverage and reading outdated magazines. Later she took off on walks around the neighborhoods, trying to learn the city.

  “Don’t go because of me,” Laura said one evening. She had set the kitchen table for two.

  “Wow,” Joanna said, eyeing the cloth napkins, the vase full of flowers, the two tall candlesticks with freshly-snipped wicks.

  “Too much?” Her sister placed her hands on her hips, assessing the tabletop. Then, with an air of decisiveness, she relocated the vase to the coffee table in the living room and retired the candles to a drawer in the kitchen.

  “Better,” Joanna said. She slipped into her sister’s raincoat and stepped into her boots.

  Portland in spring was misty and fragrant with cherry blossoms. The air cool but thick with fog, the sidewalks wet and shiny with rain. She moved quickly, gazing up through the tree branches outlined against the sky. She walked until it grew dark, taking in the wood smoke from chimneys, the fresh scent of laundry from dryer vents, the smell of rain and new grass. She inhaled greedily, almost gulping the air down. As she walked, she looked in the windows of houses, lights glowing gold inside all of those rooms. She could walk all night, squinting through wavy glass.

  Her favorite houses had what she thought of as nooks and crannies: tiny four-paned windows on an upstairs dormer, winding staircases leading to a turret or widow’s walk, upstairs balconies covered with plants and wicker furniture, sunrooms lined with books, attics with sloped ceilings and skylights. For the first time Joanna saw that houses were more than walls and rooftops, yards more than grass and trees. She was astonished to find they were more complicated than that, that all this time she had missed these details and that the details had names, a whole vocabulary she hadn’t known existed: soffits and rafter tails, clematis and delphinium.

  She returned to the apartment building with a flush in her cheeks. The carpet on the stairs leading up to the third floor was soft and green, like a bed of moss. Her arms brushed against the jacket of a guy coming down the stairs. They both looked up at each other and nodded. He seemed to be smiling over some secret joke, his eyes bright. Something in his amused expression made her sure he was Laura’s visitor. He looked different from the boys her sister had dated in the past—guys Joanna had secretly called “business school douchebags,” with sculpted haircuts and fake grins. She watched this prospect, with his slight build and wispy light-brown hair, as he whistled down the stairway then pushed the doors open and slipped out.

  Laura was in a good mood when Joanna entered the apartment, humming as she tidied the kitchen.

  “How was your date?” Joanna asked.

  Laura sat down at the table and smiled. “How was your walk?”

  “Good.”

  “What do you do out there? Where do you go?”

  “Nowhere in particular.” Her sister was looking up at her as if she really wanted to know the answer to her questions, so Joanna elaborated. “I like it. Walking through the rain, peeking into all those windows, looking into the houses.”

  “So you’re a voyeur.”

  Joanna shrugged.

  But that wasn’t it at all—it had nothing to do with other people’s lives. It had to do with hers. She needed to be out there, devouring the air and running her fingers along the mossy walls. She peered into houses and imagined herself tucked away in those nooks and crannies. All those windows were glimpses into all the ways her life could take shape.

  2

  this was the kind of flattery that worked at three o’clock in the morning

  Out tending her tomato plant, Joan
na was struck with what seemed, at that moment, to be a brilliant idea: she could move out onto the balcony. The warmer, dryer weather made it possible to spend more time outside—she practically lived out there anyway. As her bare hands loosened the soil along the edges of the pot, she took in an invigorating breath, inhaling the sharp scent of the plant, the compost’s complex odor of damp leaves and earth.

  Already in June the plant was rewarding her diligence. Its delicate yellow flowers shriveled up, revealing hard, green marbles: her first tomatoes. By July or maybe August the tomatoes would sustain her, starting with a Bloody Mary for breakfast. For lunch, a salad of sliced tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil. (She needed to get a basil plant!) For dinner, gazpacho. (And a cucumber plant—it could curl around the railings of the balcony.) A blender, electric skillet, and a hot pot would allow her to cook everything right out in the open air. And with a cot and a sleeping bag, she could sleep under the stars. When the rains started she’d have to construct a kind of large eave or overhang—

  “Joanna?” Her sister was standing in the doorway. Joanna had been sitting on the balcony floor—her legs around this giant terra cotta pot, her hands in the soil—for the last five minutes. She cleared her throat and patted down the dirt. Laura was staring at her. “Well?”

  Joanna blinked up at her sister, trying to retrieve the thread of conversation she’d dropped while daydreaming about relocating to the balcony. It wasn’t even a romantic balcony overlooking vineyards or an elaborate yard. It looked out over the top of the building next door. The lids of dumpsters clanged shut in the alleyway three stories below. A few phone lines crisscrossed in front of what would be her view.

  “You’re still coming, right?”

  Joanna sighed. “You know me and parties.” She yawned. “And I’m really tired. I didn’t sleep too well last night.”