PART 4
The six months were four.
I’ll say that plainly because Rick would have.
Four months of Saturdays, and then Tuesdays and Thursdays too, because he wanted to be in the greenhouse and by September he couldn’t get there without an arm.
I was the arm.
I want to tell you about the Saturdays, because they’re the part the will doesn’t cover.
He taught me the greenhouse.
Not gardening — he’d tried that in the first year and I’d k*lled a basil plant in a way he described as “impressive” — but the greenhouse itself: which panes leaked, which bench his wife had built, where the good light was at four o’clock in October.
He talked about his wife.
Margaret.
De*d eleven years, and he’d never once, he said, mentioned her at a Sunday dinner, because nobody at the table had asked.
“She built that bench,” he said. “Badly. It’s the only thing in this house that wobbles. Bradford wanted to replace it. I told him if he touched it I’d leave everything to the dog.”
“You don’t have a dog.”
“Bradford didn’t know that. He’s never once looked around this house long enough to count the animals.”
He talked about his sons — not with anger, with something sadder.
“I gave them everything, Marnie. That’s the mistake. I gave them so much they never once had to stay in a room they didn’t want to be in. They don’t know how. It’s not their fault. It’s mine. I raised two men who leave.” He looked at the bench. “And then a girl who followed her friend across a state sat down at my table and talked to me about tomatoes, and I thought: there’s one. There’s finally one who stays.”
The conservatorship petition was heard in October.
Rick attended.
In a wheelchair, in a suit, with an oxygen line he’d refused to wear until the courthouse steps, and Mr. Sato beside him, and me behind him, and his children across the aisle with a lawyer and a doctor named Whitlow who had, it emerged under a very short cross-examination, never once been in a room with the man whose capacity he’d sworn to.
The judge asked Rick one question.
“Mr. Hollis. Do you understand why you’re here?”
“I’m here,” Rick said, in a voice that took some breath, “because my sons would like to sell my house before I finish dy*ng in it. I’d like to finish first. Then they can have the argument with my wife, who is considerably tougher than I am and doesn’t need oxygen.”
The courtroom made a sound that was not laughter but wanted to be.
Petition denied.
On the steps, afterward, Bradford stopped me.
Not Rick.
Me.
“You think you’ve won.”
“I don’t think anything, Bradford. I think your father’s tired and I’d like to get him home.”
“He’s leaving you the house.”
“For life. Not to own. When I’m gone, it goes to Violet’s trust. Your daughter, Bradford. It goes to your daughter. That’s what you’ve been fighting for four months — to stop your father from leaving your daughter a house.”
He didn’t have an answer.
Pamela did.
“She’ll never live in it,” Pamela said. “Violet won’t take a thing from you. She cut you off, remember? You’re the woman who married her grandfather. She’d sooner burn it.”
I looked at Pamela’s bracelet.
Then at her.
“Then I’ll keep it warm until she changes her mind,” I said. “I’m good at staying in rooms I’m not wanted in. Ask your father-in-law. It’s the whole reason I’m here.”
Rick d*ed on a Thursday in November.
In the greenhouse.
I’d wheeled him out at ten, the way he liked, and he’d asked me to put a trowel in his hand — “for the feel of it, Marnie, I’m not going to dig” — and he’d held it, and looked at the tomatoes, and said, “You’ll want to pinch the suckers on those. Violet knows how. Ask her.”
“Violet’s not speaking to me, Rick.”
“She will,” he said. “There’s a letter. You’ll know when.”
Then he closed his eyes with the trowel in his hand, and I sat beside him with mine, and it was very quiet, and after a while I understood that it had gotten quieter, and I did not move for a long time, because he’d asked me to stay in the room, and I was going to finish the job.
