Emory’s Gift Read Free

conversations when she was alive, not just animal games but discussions about my future, the war in Vietnam, what they were building at Dad’s shop. Now my dad would let a whole day go by without initiating a dialogue—I knew, because I’d tested it once, but it made me so heartsick that I broke the silence the next morning, babbling ceaselessly just to beat back the loneliness. That night’s final exchange had been typical.
    “Tomato cages.”
    The wire tomato cages were sitting out in the square patch of lumpy earth that used to be Mom’s garden, looking like skeletal soldiers filled with a twisted circulatory system of brown, dead plant stalks from the year before.
    One Mother’s Day long ago I’d presented Mom with flags I’d made for the tops of the cages. They were just strips of white cloth the art teacher provided, but I’d laboriously painted “Tomato” on them, seeing them in my mind as pennants snapping in the wind out in the garden, serving notice that the tomato cages were for tomatoes and not corn or potatoes or zucchini. In reality they hung limp from their wire frames, the letters illegible in the folds.
    Mom said she loved them. She never pointed out that tomato cages are supposed to be narrow at the bottom and wide at the top—I’d crafted flags for upside-down tomato cages. From that year forward she placed the tomato cages so that they looked like miniature oil wells out in the garden and at the end of each growing season would carefully roll up the flags and then duct-tape the roll so that the flags wouldn’t be affected when the tomato cages were stacked in the pole barn.
    Mom had had a good October day two years before, tending to her garden, preparing it for the winter and for a spring planting the doctors correctly predicted she wouldn’t see. I helped her do some raking and told her she didn’t have to tape the flags on the tomato cages. By that time I knew how stupid I’d been and was embarrassed that the neighbors might see our upside-down cages and think I was just a kid.
    “We should just throw those out,” I said.
    “Nonsense, Charlie. I love my flags,” Mom said. I was growing up, in my eyes, but she sometimes still treated me as a child.
    She tenderly taped each flag in a thick roll atop the cages, then straightened, putting a hand to her face. “Whew. Let’s put these away tomorrow; I need to go lie down.”
    The way I remembered it, she never really got out of bed after that, not in a way that didn’t make me feel as if she were invisibly tethered to it. By April of the following year, my dad and I were standing numbly in a spring snowstorm, listening to Pastor Klausen talk about what a wonderful woman Laura Hall was, while the wet built up on the casket in a way that made me want to towel it off to save the gloss from being ruined. My dad held my hand and his fingers were like ice.
    Most of the people wore black. I resented the ones who gave me pitying glances and I resented the ones who lacked the courage to look at me and I resented the ones who reacted to the wet weather with distressed expressions. I knew it wasn’t fair, but there was nothing fair about any of it.
    I didn’t cry until we got back home, where Mom’s presence was still everywhere, palpable, defying the unreal fact of her death. And then, when I cried, it was as much out of guilt for what I had done as anything else.
    So that’s why I hated my father for bringing up the tomato cages. Why now? Why did he even care?
    Touching them was the last normal thing my mother had ever done. As long as they still stood sentry out there in the garden, it was as if they were waiting for a woman who was coming back any time now.
    The next morning, instead of obeying my father’s instructions to yank the tomato cages, I deliberately chose to embrace a glorious disobedience. I’d long before discovered the small tin in my father’s bedroom drawer that contained the key to the gun cabinet. I loved to pull the