Alice Bliss - Laura Harrington [79]
“Of, or consisting of beans,” Ellie says as she pushes her glasses up on her nose.
“Who knew?”
“Seven-letter words you can play on a musical instrument include acceded, baggage, bedface, cabbage, defaced, and effaced.”
“Bedface?” Alice asks.
“It’s in the dictionary,” Ellie says, as she plays the seven-letter words.
“It’s not exactly a tune.”
“No, it’s an oddity, an aberration, an anomaly . . .”
“Okay! Okay!”
“What’s your new favorite word?” Gram asks.
“I have two: Acnestis. Noun. On an animal, the point of the back that lies between the shoulders and the lower back, which cannot be reached to be scratched. And pandiculation. Noun. The stretching that accompanies yawning.”
“How about procrastinate?” Alice shoots back. “Or perseverate? Or temporize? Delay! Delay! Delay!”
“What are you talking about?” Gram wants to know.
“I’m supposed to be planting the garden. It should be done. Finished. Put to bed.”
“Too late now,” Ellie says.
“Thanks a lot, sport.”
“Maybe it’s just as well,” Gram offers. “We’re supposed to be getting more sleet tomorrow.”
“These are the cold weather crops. Cold weather crops like the cold.”
Alice finds herself close to tears, yet again. Why is it no one will listen to her today?
“Ellie! Time for bed!” Mom calls from the living room.
“That’s my cue,” says Gram. “Eddie, I need my coach and four!”
The next thing you know, Gram and Uncle Eddie are on their way home, Ellie’s in the bathtub talking a mile a minute to Mom, who is perched on the edge of the tub, and Alice is out the door. In the workshop she puts on her dad’s jacket, work gloves, and a hat. She slips into her rubber boots, then gathers what she needs: a hoe, string, stakes, seeds, the Coleman lantern. And finally, finally she is in the garden.
She goes back into the workshop to get the stool for the lantern so that, elevated, it can shed more usable light. In the cold, drizzling rain, in the dark, she stakes her rows one by one. Leaf lettuce, red and green, spinach, beets, radishes, peas, carrots. She hears her dad’s voice reminding her to alternate the red and green lettuce. They look so nice like that. Short rows, Alice. Stagger the planting over two weeks.
She stops for a moment to listen to the wind in the branches and the steady drip of the rain, and then bends to work with the hoe, making her furrows. Not too deep. The soil is wet and heavy but she takes her time, just the way her dad does, and her rows are true.
She has to take her gloves off to handle the seed packets and the seeds. Her hands are freezing as she tears open the first seed packet.
“Alice?”
It’s her mom. In a raincoat and rain boots and holding an umbrella.
“Half an hour, I’ll be done.”
“Can I help?”
“Not with that stupid umbrella.”
Angie closes the umbrella, pulls a hat out of her pocket, and waits for Alice to tell her what to do.
“Dad and I work in from the outside. So we don’t get in each other’s way.”
“Okay.”
“Can you see the last row? Beets.”
She hands her the seed packet.
“Be patient. Don’t over seed.”
“Just one row?”
“I’ll see how you do and then decide if you get to do another one.”
They work in silence except for the slight hiss of the Coleman lantern and the steady drip of the rain.
“It’s raining down my neck!” Angie complains.
“You’ll live,” Alice says.
Alice is down on her hands and knees, carefully mounding soil over the seeds.
“Sweetie, I’m not really dressed for kneeling in the dirt.”
“I’ll do it. You just do the seeds.”
Angie straightens up from the row of beets.
“Good enough?”
Alice checks out her mother’s work, as well as she can, given the limited light.
“I guess I’m gonna have to trust you on this one.”
“What’s next?”
Alice hands her a packet of carrot seeds.
“How do you keep your hands from freezing off?”
“You don’t.”
Alice finishes the spinach and the radishes and the peas in the time it takes Angie to finish the row of carrots, and then she’s on her knees, mounding the soil over the seeds. She is rewarded with her dad’s voice again: Tamp it down a bit. Not too tight.
The soil