Leota's Garden Read Online Free PDF

quilt around her, Mama had touched her cheek, her blue eyes rheumy with tears. “You’ve been good to my family, Leota.” Kind words after so many years of misunderstandings. Mama died a week later.
    Leota found it odd that she should remember those words now while watching the three neighbor children file solemnly down their back steps and across the yard. The boy carried a small shovel, the older girl a shoe box. The smaller girl was crying in abject misery. No one spoke as the boy dug a hole. He had just set his shovel aside when their mother came out the back door. She went to them and spoke to them briefly, holding out a square of pretty, flowered cotton. The older girl took it and knelt down on the ground as her sister took something limp from the box. A dead sparrow. The mother took up the empty box and walked back to the garbage can, tossing it in while the youngest girl folded the pretty cotton around the tiny bird, then placed it tenderly in its small grave. They sang a hymn, one that touched off Leota’s memories of church services long ago: “Rock of Ages” . . .
    But what were they doing to the song, adding notes and warbles? Why couldn’t they just sing it as it was written?
    As the first small scoop of dirt was carefully shaken into the hole, the little girl jumped up and fled to her mother, clinging to her long, zebra-print skirt. The woman lifted her and held her close, turning away to the house as the boy finished the burial.
    So much pomp and ceremony, so many tears for a single sparrow.
    Oh, Lord of mercy, will anyone care when I’m gone? Will anyone shed a single tear? Or will I lie dead in this house for so many days until the stench of my decaying body brings someone to check on me? She had tried so hard to keep her family together and had failed in all attempts.
    The older girl stuck a hand through Leota’s fence and broke off a few daffodils, volunteers that had naturalized from long-ago plantings. Leota wanted to slide the window up and shout at the child to keep her thieving hands off the few remaining flowers in her garden, but just as quickly as the anger came, it dissipated. What did it matter? Could the child reattach them to the broken stems? She watched the little girl place the flowers on the fresh grave, a last offering of love to the departed bird. As the child turned, she spotted Leota framed in her kitchen window. Uttering a startled cry, the child fled across the backyard, leaped up the few steps and disappeared inside, the door slamming behind her.
    Leota blinked, hurt deeply. The look on that child’s face had been like a slap on her own. It hadn’t been guilt at being caught stealing two daffodils that had made that child run so fast. It had been fear.
    Have I become the witch in a child’s fairy tale? Why else would such a look come into a child’s face unless the poor dear thought she’d seen an ugly old crone who meant to do her harm?
    Tears prickled Leota’s eyes, blurring her vision. Her heart ached.
    God, what did I do to bring things to this sad end? I always loved children. I loved my children best. I love them still.
    Yet Eleanor called infrequently and managed to visit only a couple of times a year. She never stayed longer than an hour or so and would spend most of it looking out the front window, fearing some hooligan would steal the hubcaps from her Lincoln. Or was it a Lexus? And George was just too busy to visit, too busy to call, too busy to write.
    Turning away from the kitchen sink, Leota took a few steps to the table by the back window. Bracing herself, she sat down slowly, wincing at the pain in her knees. The glass was stained from years of rain pouring down, trailing dust and grime from the clogged roof gutters. The lasttime she’d climbed the ladder to clean them out was ten years ago; the last time she washed her windows was last spring. It rained the day after, and she hadn’t done it again since.
    Beyond that cloudy window was her