Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [158]
“Bring it up here, then.”
And Jim did.
Candid high-desert light of such tough clarity. Bonnie sat under it alone. Her husband was at his job. Sam had gone off with friends. She communed with her brave geraniums and pretty petunias. A little green lizard kept her company.
She looked around the patio and thought about all the work that had gone into making it such a nice refuge from the world. Charlie had come up with the idea of designing those herb beds using tires off the car when they bought the new radials.
—No need to go throwing them out, he’d said. —We lay them along the back fence, fill them with topsoil, and presto you got planters.
Sometimes he really got things right, did her husband. Mint prospered in one tire. Sage, rosemary, and verbena in the others. Maybe painting the tires white had been an extravagance, but it looked very professional to Bonnie’s eye. She glanced around at other perfections. Thistle in the bird feeder, so shiny and black. The concrete deck hosed off by her younger son just this morning. Her cup of Sanka on the round glass table. She could remember each and every thing that had gone into creating this small Eden. Every bush pruned to the shape she liked. The garden hose wrapped in a tight circle. Of course, the cedar fence could stand to be restained, but they’d get around to it in time.
In time. That was the point. Just like the Hill where she was born, Bonnie was getting on, and anything that remained as it was when she looked at it last was good. Gone were the days when she and Brice ran around on the muddy April roads from Sundt house to the clapboarded and rustic Tech buildings where the physicists worked. Gone the days when her mother taught school to the handful of first-generation Los Alamos children. Her older son, Sam’s big brother, was gone, and all she had for him was some stupid beeper number he seldom checked—he didn’t even know his grandmother was dead. But look, she thought, the rufous hummingbirds came around each year. One even now sipped nectar from the lilies. The sage she could smell in the sunlight would flourish again next year, if frosts didn’t kill it at the root. And as the sages said, you couldn’t count on anything staying the same. Plants, animals, people. The first scientists who settled this mesa were not coming back, any more than the Anasazi before them.
Well, she didn’t know what she was thinking. Trying to think. Maybe just hoping to keep it together, her fledgling sense of what it means to be parentless. Generations come in waves, and so long as Ma was alive the distance between Bonnie Jean and the shore on which she herself would eventually break seemed farther away. She never thought like this before. We were all just waves coming to shore, Bonnie reflected. How many waves had beached since Creation? Trillions, tens of trillions? On the other hand, what did the numbers matter, anyway? She and Charlie and Brice and Jessica and Kip were next, and nothing could stop it or even should. A life was enough, Bonnie Jean thought. Seventy, eighty years, what more do you want? Dogs are happy to get ten. Some butterflies make do with a day. The milk-bonnet mushroom, so fresh in the morning, melts by noon. People who wish they could live forever are nuts. Pretty as the garden is, good as her husband and children are, nothing remains inspiring forever. Especially nothing you think is yours. You want something so bad you can taste it, and then you possess it, and next thing you know either you’re its possession or you forgot what drew you to it in the first place.
The funeral would be held in a few days. Brice had gone down-state, but promised he’d be back to help carry the casket and make the graveside speech. Jessica and Ariel would be there, too, he’d assured her, though assembling the family wasn’t going to be as easy as it might’ve been under other circumstances. Brice had asked his sister if she wouldn’t mind working out things with the minister. They both knew where their mother had wanted to be laid to rest. Really, in Bonnie Jean’s imagination