Tommy had kept the family farm going with a fence-building business. A little over a year ago, he’d sold the business, planning to settle into a sort of retirement, just him and the wife, their garden and the cattle. His wife was dead before the summer was out. Sandy’s friendship with Tommy had most often been carried out away from his farm. Tommy would roll up the driveway in his red truck for one reason or another, or they’d talk window-to-window, their pickups stopped beside each other in the road, pointed in opposite directions. You could carry on a conversation from the cab of a pickup truck for a good long while on Willard Road. Sandy’d had only the most cursory encounters with Tommy’s wife. She was a quiet, retiring woman, marked, in Sandy’s estimation, by a certain timidity. According to Tommy, she’d never really rebounded from their son’s death, had withdrawn still further into the quiet of her house and garden. “Never could really dig out from under that one,” Tommy had said. “Not sure that she wanted to.” In keeping with her reticence, she’d kept whatever complaints she had to herself. By the time the cancer had been discovered, hospice was the only option. Sandy had come down to the farm to help from time to time, especially to tend to the delicate cleaning necessary for the failing body of a woman, which Tommy’s sausage-like fingers and broken heart could barely manage. Sandy had even helped some around the house and garden. She’d been out in the garden, on her knees, pulling weeds from around the cabbages, when Tommy stepped out onto the porch of his house. Sandy had seen the look before. Brushing the dirt from her hands onto her jeans, she’d walked to him and folded her arms around as much of his rotund body as she could, but all she’d been able to muster to say was “I’m sorry, Tommy.” She’d wished that Margie had been there then. At these moments, Margie knew exactly what to say. Always. At the funeral, Tommy had sat stunned, looking like a cow the moment after the maul strikes. Perhaps for the occasional help she’d given, perhaps because she’d been there at that moment, Tommy accorded Sandy a sort of reverential gratitude. Now and then, in his simple way, he brought her little offerings of that gratitude.
“What’s in the bag?” Sandy asked.
“Strawberries are coming in. I got more than I know what to do with.” Tommy held out the bag. Sandy took it and looked inside.
“Oh, they’re beautiful. And so many. Thank you, Tommy.”
“I got strawberries coming out my ears. Thought maybe you’d like some. Maybe bake a few pies. They’re mighty good for that.” Sandy had never baked a pie in her life.
“They look wonderful.” Sandy motioned toward her back door. “Come on in. I’ll get us something to drink.”
“Just as soon sit out here, if it’s okay with you.” Tommy lowered his girth into the one flimsy lawn chair behind Sandy’s house. “Spring’s fading out, and summer’s on the way in. Air’s too sweet to go in just yet. Would like a cup of that herb tea of yours. Gotten kind of partial to it. If you don’t mind.”
“It’d be my pleasure. Let me get a kettle on and get out of this gear. I’ll be right back.”
“Don’t take too long,” Tommy said, “or that damned dog of yours is liable to chew me all up.”
A few minutes later, Sandy returned, dressed in jeans and a dark green blouse with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. She carried two mugs of chamomile tea. After giving a mug to Tommy, she settled onto the low concrete stoop at her back door. Tommy sipped at his tea and looked up the slope behind Sandy’s house to the twilight sky above the ridge.
“This stuff tastes like grass. And damned if I don’t like it. Spending too much time with them cattle. Starting to eat like them now.”
Sandy smiled and dipped her lips to her mug of tea. They sat quietly for a few minutes, drinking their tea, watching the darkening light in the sky, and listening to the faint snarl of Stink in his tractor tire.
“Haven’t seen you in a couple weeks,” Sandy said. “How have you been?”
“Oh, I been plumb crazy. Still just don’t know what to do with myself sometimes.”
Tommy wore the weight of his grief like a second belly heaped onto the already prodigious one that pushed his T-shirt to its limits.
“I keep the garden going, but mostly because she set such store in it. Like it’s, well, sort of part of her still there.”
Sandy held her mug in both hands and nodded as she listened.
“When the strawberries come in, she always put up a load of them in preserves. Best you ever tasted.” Tommy’s chest heaved as he choked back a sob. He washed it down with a swallow of his chamomile. “Thought it might be better if I made her preserves for her, do the things she used to do. Well, what a hell of a mess I made of that. Thought I’d best bring you some of the berries before I ruined the whole lot.”
Sandy reached out and softly squeezed Tommy’s forearm, all she could think to do. Again, she wished Margie was there to say something, the right thing.
“I just can’t get my head around it. She was always so quiet. Never made a fuss. Barely made a peep when she did talk.” Tommy sucked down a huge gulp of tea. “Her such a quiet woman and all, so how come the place is so all-fired noisy now that she’s gone?”
A hawk rode the air above the ridge behind the house, dipped into a wide spiral, then dropped behind the tree line. “There goes a red-tail,” Tommy said. “Hope he’s headed down to my place. Some days, seems I’ve got more rabbits and groundhogs than I do strawberries.”
SOME nights, if the weather was good, Stink would still sleep outside inside his tractor tire. But most often these days, he preferred to be with Sandy. And since the cow ticks on Willard Road seemed to have a special preference for Stink’s flesh and blood, Sandy had to check him regularly for the parasites. She hadn’t examined him in over a week, and she was certainly going to do so before he climbed up into bed with her tonight. Under the bright fluorescent lights in the kitchen, Sandy sat cross-legged on the floor and placed a lit candle and a square of tinfoil beside her. In her hand she held the forceps from her fishing vest.
“Stink. Come here, baby.” Sandy could hear a huff of expelled air from the dog’s lungs as he slid from the sofa in the living room and walked slowly into the kitchen. “That’s a good boy,” she said, and patted her thigh. Stink took two more steps and lay down beside her, resting his head in her lap. Sandy set the forceps on the floor and began to run her fingers meticulously through the dog’s fur, starting at the ruff of his neck. Right away, in the thick muscle and bone behind one of his ears, she found a particularly swollen tick. With her forceps, she pinched the tick at the head and tore it from Stink’s skin. The tiny tips of the arachnid’s legs wiggled around the edges of its distended, blood-sodden body. Sandy held the tick in the candle flame until the bloody bag of its body popped and shriveled to a charred nugget. She dropped it onto the square of tinfoil and turned back to her dog. “That’s one,” she said, and continued her examination.
Shortly after the hawk flew over, Tommy had finished his tea and followed it home, but the density of his grief had lingered with Sandy. Of course, as a nurse, she had seen the outpouring of grief on many occasions, but she’d always observed it from a well-schooled distance. The weight of loss that Tommy Akers toted around in his vast belly was nothing new to her. She’d seen his relentless pain before, felt genuine pity for him, but when she reached out to embrace him, to touch his forearm, she reached across an inviolable gulf. His loss was a private agony, and nothing of hers. Her own mother’s death had left no recognizable track. Where nothing had been given enough to leave a mark, there had been no hurt to heal. Tonight, something
