by Sheila Walsh
Kayanne’s ringtone startled her. Ava picked up her phone and sighed. Carrying it to her Gethsemane had been a mistake. She’d already been tempted to text Jason and see how he was doing at home, though he was restricted from his phone. Sienna had sent a text that she needed to talk to Ava soon. And now Kayanne . . . all in a matter of ten minutes.
“Hey, can I call you back in—”
“No, listen, I found him.” Kayanne’s voice was out of breath.
“You found him? Who? Oh, as in . . . him?”
“No, him him.”
Ava rolled her eyes and dropped her fork back into her salad. She closed the plastic top. “You found him him as opposed to just him?”
“Remember how him turned out?”
“Do I ever? If you would listen to your best friend when she tells you that him is not a twenty-eight-year-old guy who does professional Celtic dancing all around the world—”
“I know, but for a few weeks, we seemed so connected. This is different, I hope.”
“Okay, who is he? Where did you meet him?”
“He’s my new match on As You Wish.”
“Hmm.”
“Did I tell you I joined As You Wish dot com?”
“No, I think you were on Dallas Singles, Marriage-in-Your-Future, and some other one.”
“Wait. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?”
“I was in my divorce group and we were talking about friendships and how easy it becomes as a single person to become pretty self-involved. And I realized that in our friendship, sometimes all I talk about is my single life. It’s just so stressful being single after all these years.”
“I know it is, or I can imagine.”
“But you have things happening as well. Like what’s going on with Jason.”
“He won’t talk to us. He’s taking his punishment without argument, he was suspended from school, and he has all sorts of additional things he has to do for the football coach, like cleaning all the equipment.”
“But he won’t talk to you? Not Dane either?”
Ava dropped her salad container back into the bag. She cleaned everything up as a cold breeze inched beneath the edges of her clothes. She worried about leaving her son at home alone—what if he had a hidden stash of drugs in the house? Dane had searched his room and Jason had promised there weren’t any drugs there, but what if he ran away? But Ava knew she needed to keep her routine, and Jason could either come with her or remain in the house alone.
“He’s not talking to anyone, so there’s not much to say there. Now let’s get back to him him.”
“No, more about you. Dane? Sienna? You?”
Ava laughed as she walked back toward the main church, a tall, red-brick building with stained-glass windows. Ava appreciated Kayanne’s attempts to be a better friend. Since Kayanne had become single, her search for a soul mate often became all consuming. Their friendship had shifted considerably, which meant Ava was most often listening or giving advice and Kayanne sometimes neglected Ava's struggles as less important.
“I’m leaving the church after I meet Tammy. We’re going over her budget to look for a few areas to cut.”
She carried Kayanne inside the glass doors and toward the office kept available for ministry volunteers like her.
“You deserve a medal, and okay, I don’t want to be a bad friend, but I can’t wait to tell you about our first date.”
“Tell me.”
Kayanne launched into the details as Ava sat down at her computer, opening the file on event planning she used when she coordinated charity events. Ava listened, making comments and asking questions as usual.
“What?” Ava muttered as she perused her e-mail.
“Are you listening to me?”
“Yes. He sounds like a pretty nice guy. But I don’t think he’s him or him him.”
“Don’t say that yet. You’re going to jinx it.”
“Then I take it back. But are you ready for me to share my concerns?”
“No, no I am not. Let me have a few days of unchecked euphoria. Reality can be a bitter pill and I’m enjoying the moment.”
A knock sounded on the office door.
“Hey, I need to go. Tammy’s here.” She opened the door to the woman’s exuberant squeal.
“We’re down to just days until Dallas is blown away with my Children’s Charity Ball!” Tammy said, swishing into the office.
Kayanne said good-bye as Ava set aside her own cares for a while to help Tammy. It was time to focus on other people and Ava enjoyed the reprieve.
Twelve
THE NEXT MORNING, AVA WAS SITTING IN HER FAVORITE CHAIR with her Bible and journal when she heard the leaf blower rev up in the backyard. With a glance at the clock, she slipped on her shoes and pulled on a sweater before heading outside. Leo was emptying the leaf blower bag in the compost bucket. He jumped when he turned and saw her only a few feet away.
“Mrs. Kent. How are ya today?”
Ava shook his outstretched hand in greeting. He never appeared comfortable around her, and in the many years that he’d been working on their yard, they’d had little interaction. Dane organized that part of their lives. She gave Leo a container of homemade Christmas cookies with his bonus during the holidays or sometimes she took out a pitcher of ice-cold sweet tea or lavender lemonade on a hot Texas day, but that was the extent of their relationship.
“I’m doing well, thank you,” she said, trying to sound cheerful. “How are your wife and son?”
“Good, ma’am, very good. Can I help you with something today?”
Ava stuck her hands deep into her sweater pockets as the cold of the day worked its way to her skin.
“Yes, there is. Do you know what’s going on with my tree— the willow over there? Are you trying to kill it?”
Leo’s head whipped up. “No, ma’am, of course not. I wouldn’t do that.”
“I was kidding, Leo. I know you wouldn’t do that.” She bit the edge of her lip. This wasn’t going well.
“I’d say so.” He nodded his head with a look of being insulted.
“Really, it was a joke. I apologize, all right?”
Leo frowned as he stared at his shoes. “Okay. I did see the tree is dying. We need to pull it on out.”
Ava turned to the tree, then back to Leo.
“No.”
He raised an eyebrow and rubbed his chin. “What’s that? We can pop a new tree in there. You can even buy them already growed up if you don’t like waiting for shade. I could bring over a catalog for you and the mister to see what you like.”
“No, I don’t want to pull it out.”
“And why not?”
“Does it matter why not?”
He stumbled over his words. “No . . . I . . . you’re right. It ain’t my business if you’re committed to it. I’m just saying. I’m no master gardener, ma’am. I know how to fix things, trim, prune, cut the grass, and blow the leaves. But something’s right wrong with that tree. In my experience, that could be the start of something for all your trees. Have you heard about the mountain pine beetle in Colorado? It’s eaten through entire forests.”
“And you think this tree has that beetle though it’s not a pine and we’re nowhere near Colorado.”
Leo shrugged. “Don’t know. I’m just saying. If it does have that or some bacteria or worm or something, it might start knocking out everything around here. Why would it die out of nowheres? I been caring for this yard for, what, eleven years? That tree’s been growing and doing just fine through winters and summers. Something ain’t right.”
“But that’s so extreme.”
“Why do you like it so much?”
Ava considered the man for a moment. “I had a grove of them back along the river where I grew up. They remind me of the few good times I had when I was a kid.”
Leo’s frown deepened as he studied her. “Where you from?”
“A little town out in the middle of nowhere Texas,” she said with a sm
ile that felt somewhat forced. She remembered the wide river lined with weeping willows just like this one. Were they still there? What was the lifespan for trees like this? Maybe it had come to its end, as all things eventually did.
“I know towns like that. Always thought you were from Dallas, a city girl.”
Ava smiled. “I hide it well, then?”
He nodded with a slight smile. She thought he seemed more at ease with her suddenly. “I’d say so.”
“It never leaves me, though. Guess that’s why I’m so attached to something like a silly tree.” Ava felt a stab of guilt over calling it “silly.” Her eyes wandered down the pathway to where its bare branches reached up toward the sky and bent down back toward the ground.
Leo scratched the dirt with his shoe, then cleared his throat.
“I don’t even like this tree. Too messy for one thing and roots shallow, running close to the ground and messing up the lawn. Never liked these willows.”
“The roots aren’t deep?”
“No, look how they run through the lawn.” Leo bent down and pointed at roots threaded through the ground.
Ava couldn’t help wonder about the significance of that.
“I like it much better than that scraggly looking eucalyptus. They sure do grow a lot, but ugly with a capital U. But like I say, I'm good at yard cleaning and fixing things, but no good at plants. Seems like I should be, but I’m better with the remains and keeping them looking nice. You need me to find somebody?”
“No, I’ll see what I can find. Thank you.” Ava took a few steps away, already plotting her next move. Perhaps there were some master gardeners at the college or someone they could hire to save it. It couldn’t be too late, though something nagged within her that perhaps it was. Perhaps she’d neglected it too long.
“I’m sorry about your tree, ma’am.”
Ava saw genuine regret in his eyes, and she appreciated the sentiment. But she wasn’t about to give in.
“Thank you, Leo. I think there’s still hope for it.”
“Hope is good, but I say you should prepare for bad news.”
“I live too much of my life preparing for bad news,” she said with humor in her voice, though this truth was a painful reality. “Can’t one thing be hoped for without the fear of disappointment?”
Leo took off his hat and wrung it in his hands, then he slapped it against his dirty blue jeans. “In my experience, there ain’t much that comes back from the dead.”
Thirteen
AVA LEFT THE BACKYARD WITH ONE DETERMINED THOUGHT IN her mind. She had to get down to the business of saving the weeping willow.
“Jason, get your shoes on,” Ava called as she walked toward her bedroom, pausing at Jason’s room. He was on the floor of his bedroom, building a house of cards.
“Why?” he asked with a frown. Grounded from friends, technology, television, and video games left few options. Ava had seen him doing his school work in between wandering aimlessly outside, sleeping a lot, reading a little, cleaning his old snowboard, and pulling boxes of toys out from the closet.
“I want you to come on an errand with me. We’re going to save the willow tree.”
“Do I have to?” The cards crumbled silently onto the carpet. Jason dropped the stack onto the floor and rose with the energy of an old man.
“You need to get out. I’ll get you a milkshake at Sonic.”
“Okay,” he said, still scowling.
Ava drove toward the nursery with photos of the tree taken on her phone at all angles, a bag of its leaves in the backseat, and Jason sitting wordlessly beside her. Maybe this excursion would resurrect both tree and son.
Jason slumped into the passenger seat with his eyes out the window. Ava explained where they were going with as much enthusiasm as if they were off on a great adventure. Jason mumbled in response, and Ava gave up on small talk after a few miles. She turned on a new audio book she’d ordered, a mystery she hoped Jason might enjoy as well. He sighed loudly and leaned his head against the window.
A gate barred the entrance to the nursery with a Closed sign spray-painted onto a piece of plywood. Plastic pots and gravel piles implied the place had gone out of business, not just shut down for the season.
Jason glanced at her.
“We’ll try another place,” she said, putting the car into reverse.
At a larger nursery, she pulled into the lot and parked beside neatly stacked bags of soil and mulch.
She hopped out, making it clear Jason should join her, and carried her bag of leaves into the nursery. Ava breathed in the rich scent of earth and flowering plants.
“I love that smell,” she said cheerily to her uninterested teenage son.
An elderly man tipped his cowboy hat at her as she made a turn down an aisle of decorative grasses. A misting machine shushed overhead as they moved through an area of ferns and mosses.
In another life, Ava would have put her energy here, into soil and growing things, having them multiply, bear fruit, go to seed, and grow again the next season. It sounded peaceful being a gardener, spending days with plants and watching them grow beneath a careful hand.
“Can I help you with anything?” a deep voice asked as Ava reached a section of potted trees.
“Yes, I hope you can,” Ava said to the young man walking toward them wearing a polo with the nursery’s name written over a pocket. He pulled off work gloves and reached for the handful of twigs and leaves Ava removed from the bag.
“Please tell me my tree can be saved. It’s been looking funny for a while, and now it’s in a pretty bad state.”
The man broke the branch and touched the end. He studied the leaves.
“I have pictures as well.” She pulled out her phone and opened the first of a dozen pictures of the tree, the trunk, the branches, and leaves taken from different angles as she explained every detail.
“This is the tree you’re trying to save?”
“Yes,” Ava said with conviction.
The nursery worker scrunched his eyes and smacked his mouth. “I’m sorry, but from what I see, there’s not much hope for it.”
“Not much? But that means there is some.”
“The only hope I can give is to wait till spring and see if it comes back. Or cut the whole thing down about two feet up the trunk. Some trees sprout back up from the old trunk.”
“But . . . why is it dying?” Ava wanted to tell the guy that he was much too young to know the tree was dead for sure.
He shrugged. “Could be all kinds of reasons. Too much water, bacteria, fungus, insects, age, competing plants in the yard. Have you had any construction work done in the last year?”
“My husband had a new shed built in the backyard.”
“That might be it, if the roots were compromised. Or sometimes they just get old and die.”
“It was planted from just a sprout of a tree when my son was born.” She motioned to Jason.
The man scratched his head. “Sometimes we don’t know.
A plant dies. Same as how some people just go out of the blue.”
The man looked at Jason. “Shouldn’t you be in school? You helping out yer ma?” he asked heartily.
“Not helping that much,” Jason muttered.
“Play football?”
That seemed the question most people asked Jason. Ava wondered if it was just a Texas thing.
Jason and Ava glanced at one another as Jason said, “No.”
“Kid your size, you should be playing ball.”
Ava walked across the parking lot to find Jason leaning against the car waiting for her.
“I found another guy for a second opinion. But he said the same thing.” Her determination to save the tree struggled to recover. Her eyes swept the rows of bushes and trees, many dormant for the winter, looking similar to the willow. Perhaps the first guy was right and the tree would surprise her come spring.
Jason responded with an unconcerned grunt.
“Do we have to listen t
o this, or can we just turn it off?” Jason said when she turned on the engine and her audio book came to life.
Ava flipped the power button off and set the bag of leaves behind Jason’s seat.
She remembered her grandmother saying she’d never grow anything. The little houseplant she’d been given as a prize at school died within the first month she’d had it. Grannie would also regurgitate the story of how Ava forgot her Barbie doll outside in the fort she’d constructed with Clancy. The dog chewed off one leg. Grannie whipped her good for that one, Ava clutching the one-legged Barbie. She’d cried even longer when Grannie confiscated the Barbie after the spanking and gave it back to the dog.
“Maybe that’ll teach you. I just hope you never have children. They probably won’t survive you being their mama, just like you can’t grow anything.”
Neither Ava nor Jason spoke the rest of the drive home. Ava went through Sonic and bought Jason a chocolate milkshake, but she’d lost her appetite for one. As soon as she pulled up to the house waiting for the garage door to rise, Jason opened his car door.
“You know, I would’ve appreciated you being a part of this today. That tree is special to me, and you made it harder than it already was. You’re acting like I did something wrong and you’re punishing me. I haven’t done anything, Jason. So knock it off.”
“I’m not . . . punishing you,” he muttered.
“Are you ever going to acknowledge that what you did was wrong?”
“What—today or the other thing?” he muttered.
“I guess both.”
“Of course,” he said, his voice cracking. “I just want to go up to my room. Can I?”
“We need to talk about this.”
“Can we later? I just want to go to my room.” He clenched his jaw, but to Ava, he appeared boyishly meek and small.
