When my mother passed away in September, I dreaded returning to the house to clean it out. She had lived there for fifty years, pouring her heart into her famous garden. Her prize possession was a row of six rare heritage rose bushes beneath the kitchen window.
I pulled into the driveway on a Tuesday morning and stopped dead.
The roses were gone. Only gaping, muddy holes remained.
I looked toward the property line. My mother’s neighbor, Brenda, was in her own yard, wiping mud off her knees. A shovel leaned against her porch. Brenda had always been sharply critical of my mother, complaining about leaves blowing into her yard and refusing to wave when we drove past.
Anger flared in my chest. I marched across the wet grass, ready to demand she return the plants.
“What gave you the right?” I demanded, my voice shaking.
Brenda spun around. She looked exhausted, her gray hair plastered to her forehead with sweat. She wasn’t holding a trowel or a gardening shear. She was holding a heavy, rusted metal canister.
“I didn’t want the roses, Sarah,” Brenda said quietly. Her hands were shaking so badly the canister rattled.
“Then why did you dig them up?”
Brenda looked down at the metal tube. She slowly unscrewed the top. “Your mother called me from the hospice the night before she died. She made me promise to dig this up before you or your brother got to the house.”
She reached into the canister and pulled out a stack of faded, handwritten letters tied with a black ribbon.
“She didn’t want you to know,” Brenda whispered. “But I can’t keep this.”
The One on Top
I didn’t take them. Not at first.
I’m a claims adjuster. Twenty-two years at Midwest Mutual. When somebody hands me paper, the first thing my eyes do is find the date, and I couldn’t stop them doing it now. The top envelope was soft as cloth. The postmark said MANSFIELD OH, MAR 9 1979.
The return address was a number. Not a name. A number, and then Mansfield Correctional Institution, and a P.O. box.
“Open it,” Brenda said. “I already did. All of them. I’m sorry. I sat up all night.”
She’d untied the ribbon once already; it slid off like it wanted to. I unfolded the letter right there on her lawn with my car door still hanging open in my mother’s driveway, the dinging getting fainter as the battery decided it didn’t care.
The handwriting was square and pressed hard, like the pen had been a bad one.
Joycie,
They let us have paper on Thursdays now. Guy in the next bunk thinks I’m writing a girlfriend and I let him think it. How is Sarah’s ear. Did the pink drops work or do you need to take her back to Dr. Albrecht. Don’t tell Kevin anything about me, he’s too little to keep it. Tell Sarah whatever you already told her and stick to it.
I meant what I said in the car. I’d say it again. Don’t you dare come up here.
R.
I read it twice. Then I read the signature a third time like it might turn into somebody else’s initial.
“My father died in 1978,” I said.
Brenda didn’t say anything.
“In a car accident. Before I was three. He’s buried in Columbus with his people. Mom said the drive was too hard on her.” I heard myself and I sounded like I was reading a policy summary to a customer who wasn’t listening. “We never went. I asked once, in high school. She said Columbus.”
“Sarah,” Brenda said. “Come sit down.”
Forty-Six Years of Leaves
Brenda Pruitt’s porch had two lawn chairs and a coffee can full of clothespins and a dog bed with no dog in it. I’d never been on it. Not once in my whole life, and I grew up forty feet away.
She went inside and came back with two glasses of water and set one by my foot. Her knees were caked. She’d been digging, she said, since a little after five.
“She told me under the roses,” Brenda said. “That’s all she said. Under the roses. She didn’t say which one.”
I looked across at the six holes.
“It was the fifth,” Brenda said. “Of course it was the fifth.”
That should have been funny. It almost was. She sort of breathed out through her nose, and I sort of did too, and then neither of us could hold onto it.
The roses weren’t gone, it turned out. They were lined up along the side of her garage in burlap, root balls wet, every one of them. She’d wrapped them like a nurse. I could see the tag on the nearest one, the little aluminum tag my mother had wired on years ago: Souvenir de la Malmaison. My mother couldn’t pronounce it. She called it “the French one” for thirty years.
“I’m putting them back,” Brenda said. “Today. I wasn’t going to let them die. I’m not a monster.”
“I never said…”
“You came across that grass like you were going to hit me.”
I had. I’d have liked to.
Here’s what I knew about Brenda, before that morning. She complained about our maple. She called the township on us in 1991 about a fence post. She did not wave. When my brother Kevin threw a baseball through her storm door when he was nine, she didn’t yell, which was worse; she just stood there holding the ball until my mother came out, and the two of them looked at each other across the yard for a long time, and then Brenda set the ball down on the step and went inside. Kevin had to pay for that door out of his paper route. Eleven weeks.
I knew she’d had a son who died young. Everybody on Garber Road knew that much. Nobody said anything else about it, and we were kids, and kids don’t ask about other people’s dead.
“His name was Danny,” Brenda said, like she’d been following my face. “He was fifteen. He was riding his bike home from the Sohio station on Route 9 with a carton of milk because I’d asked him to. June 17th, 1978. It was a Saturday.”
The back of my neck went cold.
“They got the driver,” she said. “Drunk. He did six years at Mansfield. His name was Raymond Hatch.”
What She Said on the Phone
I want to be honest about what I did next, because I’ve thought about it a lot.
I asked her if she was sure.
Like the problem was the paperwork. Like if I could find the discrepancy, the clerical error, I could close the file. She just looked at me. She had very pale eyes, Brenda. I’d never been close enough to notice.
“I’ve been sure for forty-six years,” she said. “I sat in that courtroom. He pled guilty. He didn’t even make them do a trial. He turned around once, at the end, and looked at me, and I wanted to kill him with my hands.”
“And my mother just… stayed. Next door to you.”
“Your mother stayed. I stayed. It was Danny’s house.” She drank some water. “I told myself she was too poor to move. That she had nowhere to go with two babies. I told myself a lot of things. I hated her for staying and I’d have hated her worse for leaving.”
So the leaves. The fence post. The not waving.
It wasn’t about leaves.
“She called me at nine-forty at night,” Brenda said. “From St. Vincent’s hospice. I didn’t even know she had my number. I almost didn’t answer. And she said, ‘Brenda, it’s Joyce,’ like we talked every week, and then she didn’t say anything for so long I thought the line went dead.”
I waited.
“And then she said, ‘It was me. I was driving. Ray was too drunk to stand up and I said I’d drive us home and I hit your boy.'”
Brenda put the glass down on the porch boards very carefully, like it was full to the brim, which it wasn’t.
“She said, ‘Ray put me in the passenger seat before anybody came. He said if it’s you they take the kids, if it’s me they only take me.’ And then she said, ‘There’s letters. Under the roses. Please get them before Sarah does. Please burn them. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Brenda, I’ve been sorry every day.'”
“And you said?”
“I hung up on her.”
A truck went by on Garber Road. Somebody’s radio, a song I almost knew.
“I hung up on a dying woman,” Brenda said. “And she died at six the next morning. And I didn’t go to the funeral. And then I couldn’t sleep for a week, so last night I came over here at five in the morning with Danny’s old shovel and I dug up your mother’s roses in the dark.”
The Fifth Hole
There were forty-one letters. I counted. It’s what I do.
Brenda had them in order. She’d sorted them by postmark on her kitchen table sometime in the night, and you could tell; she’d retied the ribbon around the whole bundle but the dates ran clean. 1978 to 1984 from Mansfield. Then a gap. Then they started again in 1986 from an address in Galion, which is half an hour away. Half an hour. I used to drive through Galion to get to my sister-in-law’s.
I read the one from 1984 on her porch while she watched me.
Joycie,
You keep writing that you’ll tell them. You won’t, and you shouldn’t, and I’m asking you to quit saying it because every time you say it I have to talk you out of it all over again by mail and the mail in here is slow.
I did the six years. They’re mine now. You don’t get to take them back. It was simple math. If it was you, they’d have put the kids in a home and you’d have done longer than me because you were the sober-looking one and they’d say you should’ve known better. If it was me, they’d only take me. I’d do it again tomorrow.
I am getting out May 2nd. I’m not coming home. You already buried me in Columbus and the kids already cried over it and I’m not going to walk in your door and make them do it twice. And I’m not going to be the man who killed the Pruitt boy living next door to the Pruitt woman. She doesn’t deserve to look at me across her yard. You know she doesn’t.
My mother left me her roses. They’re the old kind. I’m going to bring you six slips. One for each year. Put them under the kitchen window where I can’t see them from the road.
R.
The simple math thing. I read that line until it stopped being words.
My father did a calculation. He did the same thing I do eight hours a day, assign a value to a loss, figure out who carries it, and he decided it was him. He was twenty-six.
“He planted them,” Brenda said. “Spring of ’84. I watched him do it.”
I looked up.
“At night. I couldn’t sleep back then either. I saw a man in her yard with a flashlight in his teeth and I almost called the police, and then he stood up, and I knew who it was.” Her mouth did something complicated. “I thought he’d come back to her. I thought, of course, of course she gets him back and I get a headstone. I went in and sat on the floor of Danny’s room until it got light.”
“You never said anything.”
“To who? To her?” She laughed, short. “We didn’t talk, Sarah. We hated each other for forty-six years over the wrong thing.”
Route 9
I’m going to put down a few of the other letters, because I think they’re the part that matters most and I don’t trust myself to describe them.
1989: Saw Sarah at the county fair with her school friends. She’s got your walk, that thing where she leads with her shoulder. She bought a lemonade and I almost said something and I went and stood behind the cattle barn for an hour.
1993: I was at graduation. Back row on the visitor side. Don’t be mad. I wore a hat. Kevin’s getting tall. Is he still mean to the cat.
2001: Got your card. No I don’t need money. Quit sending money. The shop is fine, I’m the only guy in Galion who can fix a Kohler engine and they all know it.
2011: You can’t keep coming up here every month, Joycie. People in Galion have mouths too.
2011, three weeks later: Fine. Second Tuesdays.
Second Tuesdays. My mother got her hair done on second Tuesdays. For thirteen years she got her hair done on second Tuesdays and it never once looked any different.
I said that out loud and Brenda said, “I always wondered,” and that was the closest we came to laughing again.
There was a letter in there from 1980 that was mostly about a mouse in his cell he’d named Gerald. Two full pages about Gerald. I don’t know why she kept that one, or why I’m telling you about it. It’s just in there.
And there was the one I think broke Brenda, the one she’d laid on top before she retied the stack and then moved back to its place in order because she’s that kind of person.
1998. The Pruitt woman’s flowers are in the paper this week, I saw it, first place in the county for the irises. Good. I’m glad she has something. I pray for her boy every night, Joyce. Every single night. I don’t believe in it but I do it. I’d have given anything for it to have been me on that bike.
“I won that ribbon,” Brenda said. “The irises. I don’t even like irises. They were Danny’s. I just kept them alive.”
She stood up, then, and walked to the edge of the porch, and stood there with her back to me looking at my mother’s yard and the six holes, and I didn’t go to her. I didn’t know how. I’m not proud of that either.
The Last Envelope
The last letter was postmarked August 14th. This year.
The return address wasn’t the shop in Galion anymore. It was Cedar Ridge Care Center, Rm 112.
The handwriting had gone loose and huge. Half a page.
Joyce,
Nurse says you came Tuesday and I was asleep. Wake me next time, I don’t care what she says about my pressure. Saw in the Mercury that Sarah’s girl got married. Pretty dress. She looks like my mother.
Your roses doing okay? You never say.
R.
My daughter got married in July. Megan. They ran the announcement in the Mercury because my mother insisted, she paid for it herself, she called the paper twice to make sure they spelled the groom’s name right. I thought she was just being my mother.
She wanted him to see it.
August 14th. My mother went into St. Vincent’s on August 30th. She didn’t go back to Galion after that. She couldn’t.
“He doesn’t know,” Brenda said. She hadn’t turned around. “Nobody would’ve called him. Who would call him? He’s nobody to anybody. He’s been dead since 1978.”
My hands had gone stupid. I tried to fold the letter back the way it came and folded it wrong, along a crease it had never had, and then I couldn’t get it to lie flat, and I just held it.
“She wanted me to burn them,” Brenda said. “So you’d never know your father was alive and a convict. So I’d never have to know it was her. She was trying to be decent at the end, I think. In her way. Keep everybody’s story the way it was.”
“So why didn’t you?”
Brenda finally turned around.
“Because he’s in room 112,” she said. “Because he did six years in Mansfield for my son and then he did forty more out here by himself fixing lawnmowers. And I spent all of it hating him. I’m sixty-nine years old, Sarah. I can’t keep that. I don’t have anywhere to put it.”
I got my phone out. It took three tries; my thumb kept landing on the wrong thing. I looked up Cedar Ridge Care Center in Galion and the number was right there in blue like it was nothing.
Brenda sat back down next to me. She picked up her water glass and didn’t drink from it.
It rang four times.
“Cedar Ridge, this is Pam.”
“Hi,” I said. “I’m calling about a resident. Raymond Hatch. Room 112.”
“Okay, sure, hon. And what’s your relationship to Mr. Hatch?”
Across the yard, the burlap was still dark and wet around my mother’s roses. The French one was on the end. Somebody would have to put them back today, or they’d die.
“I’m his daughter,” I said.
There was a little pause on the line. Keys clicking.
“Huh,” Pam said. “He’s never had a daughter call before. Hold on, let me see if he’s up.”
And then hold music. Something with a flute in it. Brenda reached over without looking at me and put her muddy hand on my knee, and left it there.
Would you have made that phone call? I’d honestly like to know.
For another story where a neighbor’s actions uncover a surprising family secret, read “I Found My Neighbor’s Grandfather’s Signature in My Dad’s Lockbox”. And “The Recluse on Our Corner Had My Daughter’s Hospital Bill on Her Table” is another moving tale of a neighbor who wasn’t what anyone expected.
