In the First Early Days of My Death Read Free Page A

began to ache. But there was nothing else she could do about it. There was no known cure for phantom pain.
    â€œI’m fine,” she said. “But you’re going to get heatstroke.” She poured two glasses of lemonade and told me to sit down for a minute.
    I laid the beets down on the porch in the shade and picked up the glass of lemonade, listening to the ice cubes clink and fizz. I held the glass against my damp neck. Then I drank it down and poured myself another.
    We sat in silence, surveying the garden.
    â€œDo you think she’s dangerous?” Noni asked.
    I looked at the flaming yellow poppies, the tall zinnias stuffed to bursting with surreal orange and russet petals, the cabbages fat as green planets, and the nicotiana flowers bending over them like white stars. Everything had grown too large, too quickly, that summer. The morning glory had topped the fence early in July, climbed across the rough shingles of the tool shed walls and up the telephone pole, where it bloomed a bright continuous blue against the sky. The yellow beans were plump and ready to be picked, their stalks out of control, strangling each other. Great bushes of crackerjack marigolds exploded among the tomato plants. It was only the twenty-first of August, but the pumpkins were already round and symmetrical as beach balls, and the zucchini were so numerous I had taken to leaving them on neighbours’ doorsteps, like abandoned babies, in the middle of the night.
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. I got up and returned to the beet patch, thinking about Evelyn. Of course she was dangerous, in an obvious way. She was interfering with my marriage, disturbing my peace of mind, making me crazy. But that’s not what Noni meant, and we both knew it. Noni meant, was she violent? Was she likely to throw rocks through the window, threatening notes attached? Would she show up at the library, a pipe bomb in her backpack? Slit her wrists in my bathtub one day, so that I’d come home to find bloody water trickling under the door, seeping into the hall carpet?
    â€œWhat can I do, anyway, even if she is dangerous?” I asked. I braced myself in the mud, struggling to pull up a particularly fat beet.
    â€œThere has to be some way to get rid of her,” Noni said.
    â€œHow?”
    â€œThere has to be a way,” she said.
    But before we could formulate any sort of plan, we were interrupted.
    A fat little chow chow came streaking through my open back gate and tore right through the garden, with no regard for the vegetables and flowers.
    Noni, who was afraid of dogs, grabbed for her leg and scrambled to tie the harness to her thigh.
    â€œHey!” I shouted. But the dog paid no attention. It trampled the romaine lettuce and raced straight through the oregano, trailing a red leash from its collar.
    A moment later, the dog was followed by a burly red-faced man, who was a little more careful about the garden. He rushed down the path, then stopped when he saw me.
    â€œPardon us,” he said. He was panting slightly. “My dog seems to have taken a liking to your cat.” He gestured toward the elm tree, where the dog sat expectantly, waggling its rear end. Its ears were rigid, its nose pointing toward the sky.
    I looked up and saw a yellow cat sitting calmly on a low branch. “That’s not my cat,” I said.
    He approached his dog from the side and slid his hand into the handle of the leash. “Sorry to disturb you,” he said. “Poppy is a little, ah, undisciplined.”
    â€œI see that,” I said. I looked at the crushed, muddy leaves of the romaine. “What a mess.”
    â€œSorry,” he said again. He seemed mortified.
    He was surprisingly timid for his size. He must have been six-foot-four, with thick, powerful arms, and a bit of a beer belly. He was in his early forties, I guessed, but his face was as freckled and sheepish as a little boy’s. He was sweating profusely,