The Summer Garden Read Online Free PDF Page A

dollars.”
    “No!” Tatiana quickly lowered her voice. “You work plenty. You do plenty. No. Anthony and I play all day anyway.”
    “That’s good,” he said. “Play.”
    “We’ll have time for everything. He and I will be happy to help her. And besides,” said Tatiana, “she is so lonely.”
    Alexander turned away. Tatiana turned away.
    The next day Alexander came back from the boat and said, “Tell Nellie to stuff her two dollars. Jimmy and I worked out a deal. If I catch him over a hundred and fifty legal lobsters, he’ll pay me an extra five dollars. And then five more for every fifty legals above one fifty. What do you think?”
    Tatiana thought about it. “How many traps on your trawl?”
    “Ten.”
    “At two legal lobsters per trap…twenty at most per trawl…one trawl an hour, hauling them up, throwing most of them back…it’s not enough.”
    “When it comes to me,” he said, “aren’t you turning into a nice little capitalist.”
    “You’ve sold yourself short, Alexander,” Tatiana said to him. “Like a lobster.”
    Jimmy must have known it, too—the market price for lobsters increasing, and Alexander receiving many job offers from other boats—because he changed the terms without even being asked, giving Alexander five dollars extra for every fifty legals above the first fifty. At night Alexander was too tired to hold a glass of beer in his hands.
    Tatiana marinated Nellie’s tomatoes, made Nellie potato soup, tried to make tomato sauce. Tatiana had learned to make very good tomato sauce from her friends in Little Italy, almost as if she were Italian herself. She wanted to make Alexander tomato sauce, just like his Italian mother used to make, but needed garlic, and no one had garlic on Deer Isle.
    Tatiana missed New York, the boisterous teeming marketplace of the Saturday morning Lower East Side, her joyous best friend Vikki, her work at Ellis Island, the hospital. The guilt of it stung her in the chest—longing for the old life she could not live without Alexander.
    Tatiana worked in the fields by herself while Nellie minded Anthony. It took her a week to dig up Nellie’s entire field—one hundred and fifty bushels of potatoes. Nellie could not believe there was so much. Tatiana negotiated a deal with the general store for 50 cents a bushel, and made Nellie seventy-five dollars. Nellie was thrilled. After twelve hours on the boat, Alexander helped Tatiana carry all hundred and fifty bushels to the store. At the end of the week, Nellie still paid Tatiana only two dollars a day.
    When Alexander heard this, his voice lost its even keel for a moment. “You made her seventy-five dollars, we carried all the fucking bushels down the hill for her, and your so called friend still only paid you your daily wage?”
    “Shh…don’t…” She didn’t want Anthony to hear the soldier-speak, kept so carefully under wraps these days.
    “Maybe you’re not such a good capitalist after all, Tania.”
    “She has no money. She doesn’t make a hundred dollars a day like that Jimmy does off you. But you know what she did offer us? To move in with her. She has two extra bedrooms. We could have them free of charge and just pay her for the water and electric.”
    “What’s the catch?”
    “No catch.”
    “There’s a catch. I hear it in your voice.”
    “Nothing.” She twittered her thumbs. “She just said that when her husband came back, we’d have to go.”
    Across the table, Alexander stared at Tatiana inscrutably, then got up and took his own plate to the sink.
    Tatiana’s hands trembled as she washed the dishes. She didn’t want to make him upset. No, perhaps that was not quite true. Perhaps she wanted to make him something. He was so exceedingly polite, so exceptionally courteous! When she asked him for help, he was right there. He carried the cursed potatoes, he took the trash to the dump. But his mind was not on the potatoes, on the trash. When he sat and smoked and watched the