SYMPATHY
Jordan Castillo Price
ISBN: 978-1-935540-01-4
Smashwords Edition
All rights reserved.Copyright ©2009 Jordan Castillo Price
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This story is for my editor, Emilie.
I strongly suspect she talks to her plants.
-ONE-
There was a time when I would’ve been able to carry the biggest shrub in the yard without breaking a sweat. The yew I was currently loading up was big, no doubt, but I was only bearing half the weight. My brother Chip had the other end of the root ball. And even so, the strain of maneuvering that damn bush into the back of the van just about killed me.
“God damn it, Tony, pull.” Chip gave the root ball a shove that crushed my hand against the door hinge and I saw stars. I lost my grip for a second and lurched to recover, even though moving fast under all that weight was gonna come back to bite me in the ass later. I couldn’t just drop the yew on Chip—it’d squash him. And then I’d never hear the end of it.
I tried to brace my good leg and pull harder, get the lousy root ball up over the bumper, but it was no use. Leaves slicked the bottoms of my boots and I had no choice but to catch myself with my other leg—the useless leg—and the pain that shot up my spine was a cold, relentless kind of pain, nothing at all like the pain of my skinned knuckles. It was a pain that promised to linger. For days.
My good leg caught on the lip of the corrugated bed and finally I had leverage. I hauled one more time, and the burlap cleared the bumper.
I let go and wiped my forehead on my sleeve. I was drenched. Even my upper lip was wet.
“If you can’t cut it,” Chip said, “maybe you re-think selling your third of the business to Sal and me.”
Sal and me, Sal and me…. It never ended. “Maybe Sal and you should have been the ones out here loading the truck.”
Of the three of us, I was the youngest brother, and the biggest. And I figured I’d done a lifetime’s worth of hauling for Sal and Chip in the years before the accident. I’d never said as much out loud—but I’d done my damnedest to convey it with looks that were nasty enough to peel paint.
Not that Chip noticed. He liked his beer cold, his TV loud, and his dinner on the table when he came home from work. It took more than a pissy look to let the air out of Chip’s tires. “Alls I’m saying,” he rambled on, “is you take your cut, maybe you can go to school.”
“Oh God, not this again.”
“You don’t wanna go to Penn State? How ‘bout the community college? I heard you can bring in forty, forty-five grand a year with a two-year degree.”
“What the hell do I want a degree for?” Potosi and Sons. That was all I’d ever wanted to do, from the first time Dad let me work the backhoe.
“Don’t be stupid—you could figure out a way to get some kind of desk job.”
“I don’t want a desk job.”
“I’d think you’d jump at the chance…since your back didn’t heal right, and whatnot.”
My back. A daydream that featured a yew with a three-hundred-pound root ball falling on Chip—ideally from about ten feet off the ground—gave me something to almost smile about. It wasn’t my back that’d been broken. It was my pelvis. Apparently the two-syllable word was one syllable too many for my Neanderthal brother.
I wiped my hands on my jeans and headed back toward the office, and did my best not to limp. It cost me. But everything in life has a cost, doesn’t it?
The phone was ringing when I came through the door, and I heard a series of sounds that had grown so familiar to me I could picture them without even poking my head around the doorframe. The clatter of computer keys—my brother Sal finishing a thought. A sigh—he hates being interrupted, unless the customer happens to be both female and available. A squall of old metal as he leaned back in the ancient office chair—a piece of furniture that weighed as much as a yew, with horsehair stuffing hanging out the splits in the leatherette seat, a holdover from dad’s regime that Sal, the oldest, claimed as his birthright. The thunk of his boot heels on the desk as he prepared to do business. Then a moment of silence as the ringing stopped and he raised the receiver to his ear. “Potosi and Sons.”
They were just phone-words, as empty as “hello” and “how are you” and “have a nice day.” But after the buyout conversation in the back of the van, the greeting rubbed me the wrong way.
I hit the work sink to splash off some of the sweat, but even over the thunder of the water into the deep metal basin, I could still pick out Sal’s voice. “You want what? Really? But you’ll want to transplant hazel in the Spring. I got some hostas you can fill in with, half off…uh, yeah, sure, we got it. Uh-huh. Youse got a truck, or you want it delivered and installed? Okay, gimme the address.”
The cold water felt good on my hands, my face, but the whole core of my body throbbed where I’d caught that yew the wrong way—and yeah, even my back would be aching well into the night—but my knees too, and my hips, especially my hips.
I pulled some rough brown paper from the dispenser and blotted my face. I could take stock for the rest of the day—Sal and Chip hated dealing with numbers that didn’t have dollar signs in front of them, so when I pulled out the inventory sheet they gave me plenty of room. I’d go through our evergreens for the rest of the day, drive home with a hot pack against my lower back, and settle in with some Vicodin when I got back to my apartment. No problem.
“Tony, we got another one of them chump-changers.” Unless you were willing to drop a grand to have your yard graded or your perfectly good old growth replaced with new hybrids that looked just like your neighbors’ azaleas and forsythias, you were chump change to Sal. “You want to do the dropoff?”
Maybe—if they weren’t in the market for yew. I wouldn’t mind getting in my truck that much sooner and breaking open the heat pack. “What’re they…?”
“Hazel, three units. I think we got some leftover stock in Greenhouse Four.”
I did the inventory, not Sal. Corylus americana. Greenhouse Two. Maybe forty pounds each—a lot more back-friendly than the yew. I’d manage. I turned toward the door carefully, so as not to aggravate my aching hip.
“And get this,” Sal went on. “It’s at the Hook House.”
I almost stopped mid-turn, but as I paused, a pain shot down my thigh and up my spine that kept me going until I was facing the door. The Hook House—was he kidding? Some joke.
The Hook House wasn’t what most people would think—a piece of property owned by a family named Hook. The Hook House was a teetering old Victorian about half a mile away from our Grandpa Tito’s old apartment—God rest his soul. When Sal was twelve, Chip was ten and I was seven and not yet bigger than the two of them, we used to jimmy loose a rusted picket of the wrought iron fence and dare each other to get closer to the house, which was obviously cursed, haunted, or filled with axe murderers.
On the day the Hook House got its name, we were maybe a dozen yards or so away from the east side of the building, shivering in the shadow cast by the single turret, when Chip launched into the re-telling of a yarn he’d picked up at camp. Chip’s not what I’d call a gifted storyteller, so at ten he couldn’t have spooked even our wimpy cousin Carl. But right as he fumbled his way to the money shot—the bloody hook dangling from the car door—I caught a glimpse of something in the overgrown weeds, a patch of moss, emerald green, against milky gray stone. I inched forward, and it took me a minute to register the stone was man-made, that it had letters carved in it, and dates.
That we were standing there on top of graves.
They both thought it was Chip’s dumb story that’d sent me hurtling back toward the broken fencepost, back to Grandpa Tito’s kitchen that smelled like gravy and pipe tobacco. They had a good laugh at my expense, and ever since then, the old house was “Hook House” to them.
I’d gone back myself a few years later, after the growth spurt that’d left me towering over every other member of my family, when I was a badass fifteen-year-old who’d forgotten the meaning of fear. The Hook House looked more spindly than I’d remembered it, more decayed, but just as imposing. The picket was still loose, but I was too big to cram through the gap.
Maybe I was relieved.
Even so, I sat there on my idling dirt bike and smoked through half a pack of Marlboro Reds and just watched. The grass rustled once, and an albino squirrel darted up an old Sugar Maple. That was all.
-TWO-
I don’t think I’d ever understood déjà vu before, not deep down in the pit of my gut, but staring at that gate from the cab of the Potosi Brothers van—and wanting a smoke, needing a smoke, for the first time in years—suddenly, I did.
Since the last time I’d seen Hook House, someone had spruced up the old building with a fresh coat of lavender paint, white on the trim, and the vast fenced-in yard that had once gone to weed was different now—more meadow than vacant lot, with bursts of late-summer color. But even though the building looked different now, inhabited, and even though I couldn’t possibly be idling in that very same spot I’d smoked myself sick, I still expected to look down and see a pile of brown cigarette butts smoked all the way down to the filter littering the ground at my feet.
Except I was in a van. And I didn’t smoke. And there was nothing spooky at all about the Hook House.
Nothing but the burial plot.
The door of the detached stone shed slammed, and the noise was muted by the distance, and the grasses, trees and wildflowers in between, but I still heard it through the closed window. A tall man emerged and beckoned. I rolled down my window, and he called out, “Gate’s open,” then went back inside.
I’d kinda figured, given that he was expecting a delivery. It wasn’t any locked gate that had me glued to my seat, though. It was a bum pelvis and a heaping helping of been-here, done-that.
I could hardly turn around and drive back to the greenhouse with a truck full of hazel without having to answer to Chip or Sal, or worse, both of them, so I climbed out of the cab, hauled open the wrought iron gate, and pulled the van inside.
I left the gate open behind me and hoped they weren’t keeping anything important inside.
The pitted gravel driveway approached the Hook House at an incline, and I felt the stock shift in back as I climbed the hill. “Just a little ways more,” I told the plants. Yeah, I talked to ‘em, always had. I figured if they could hear Mozart playing, according to those studies they did a few years back, then there was a chance that talking nice might make one of us feel better.
A new door, bright red with leaded glass, jazzed up the front of the building. From up close it didn’t look like the Hook House, not anymore, and it didn’t really feel like it either. I glanced from the house to the shed, expecting to be hit with flashbacks of Indian burns and dangling loogies, but the shed had changed even more than the house. Instead of the weeds that once choked it, a border of barely controlled herbs and wildflowers wrapped around the old stone. Smoke poured through the old metal flue. I’d never even realized there was a stove inside—and it seemed like an awfully warm day to be running it.
I eased myself out of the van and approached the shed. “Hello?” I cupped my hands around my eyes to try and see through the screening, but the angle of the sun reflected off the metal and all I saw was my own shadow.
“Come in. It’s open.”
I flinched. I hadn’t realized the guy who lived there was standing right on the other side of the door. I swung it open and my eyes took a second to adjust to the dim interior of the old stone shed.
Once I got a look at him, I paused again. My type. I hadn’t been expecting that—not out here in the boonies. My type was usually checking his e-mail on an iPhone at Starbucks. Or maybe he owned the Starbucks. Or better yet, he owned the coffee shop that wasn’t yet a Starbucks, that had paintings by local artists on the walls and didn’t insist that their smallest size was a “Tall.”
My type was artsy without trying. He was pretty and masculine at the same time. He was confident, and he was complicated.
“Have we met before?” he asked.
Maybe I was staring, but I made like I was blinking the light out of my eyes. “Anthony Potosi,” I said, and I went for a handshake before I thought of making sure I didn’t have soil on my hands. It’s just a hazard of being a landscaper, but it tends to put off the type of guy who’d wear a scarf, or make a cappuccino, or hold season tickets to the Philharmonic.
“David Dean.” He took my hand and shook it before I could take it back. I glanced down at his hand—there was reddish clay worked into the creases of his knuckles. He noticed me noticing, and gave my hand an extra pump to show me that he knew. The corner of his mouth turned up. And his eyes—damn, his eyes were striking, not brown like mine, like most everyone I knew, but a greenish, brownish flecked gold. And his eyelashes, so long they were tangled, thick and black—like his hair, which kinda curled, or maybe it had just fallen that way when he wiped the sweat out of his eyes.
‘Cos it really was hot in there. Not just him.
“Where are you putting in the shrubs?” I asked—because I needed an excuse to end that handshake before I did anything crazy, like pull him toward me to double check if that lingering eye contact and that small, knowing smile meant what I thought it meant.
“You can bring them inside.”
“The shed?” Brilliant—you’d think I was trying to perpetuate the myth of all brawn, no brain.
David’s knowing smile deepened.
“Are you putting them in today?” I asked him. “They’ll dry out in here.”
“They’re not for the garden. They’re for the kiln.”
I glanced over his shoulder like I’d been cued, and maybe I had. The thing I’d taken for an oversized wood stove was a kiln. Something inside it popped, then let out a series of crackles that sounded like a dried-up wheeze.
“Oh.” Again, with the brilliance.
“I work with clay.”
Thus, the kiln. Right. “And the wood makes that much of a difference? I mean, it’s got to get expensive, ordering plants just to….” To kill them. I told myself to knock it off. If he paid for the shrubs he should be able to run them through a woodchipper for all I cared—but it still sounded screwy to me. “There’s wood everywhere—you’d think it grows on trees or something.”
He laughed, a sharp “ha” that bubbled up out of him before he could check it, and I got a glimpse of someone genuine beneath that carelessly handsome exterior…and I was such a goner. “Clay is like alchemy. Earth, fire, air—it all comes together. I think it makes a difference. Yes.”
“It’s your dime. Where do you want them?”
“Over there.” David pointed—and at first I saw a wall of clutter in the dimness, but as I looked closer it resolved itself into floor-to-ceiling shelves full of boxes and jars. I almost glanced right over them, but then I looked harder. Dried herbs and flowers? Yes. But other things, too. Shells. Stones. Rusty nails.
“When the heat gets high enough—if it’s a good day, and I reach temperature, which is always tricky in this kiln—metals and minerals vaporize. The colors they release are captured by the glaze.”
There had to be an easier way to color something—spray paint, for instance—but I sensed that wasn’t the point. “Oh.”
“Is that enough space for the plants, over there on the floor? I could stack some more boxes.”
My gaze dropped toward the floor. Crates, boxes and baskets filled with twigs, leaves and seed pods—all the crackly stuff that might normally litter the ground—were stacked three and four high, with a ring of less-dusty concrete floor indicating a spot he’d just cleared.
David propped the door open for me with a lump of charred clay about the size of a paving brick. At least I’d thought it was a just a lump, until I took a second look at it and saw it seemed to have a kind of face.
“He guards the studio,” David said. I think he was kidding. Probably.
I unloaded the truck, and he watched. And that was no different from any other customer. I was the landscaper; I handled the stock. Except it felt different from any other customer. His handshake lingered longer than your typical, polite how-do-you-do, and now I felt his eyes on me with something more than the idle curiosity I get from the average homeowner.
So once I apologized to the third corylus about its imminent fate, then wedged it into the spot that was the exact size it needed to be without an inch to spare, I wasn’t surprised to turn around—not too slowly, and favoring my bad leg—and find him right there behind me. I shifted my weight to avoid a flare of pain, and that motion brought our faces even closer together—like maybe I was a hell of a lot bolder than I actually was. Like I swooped in for the kill on guys I’d just met all the time.
I caught a hint of a smile—not the knowing smile this time, but something more pure, more like happiness. And David leaned in too and closed the rest of the distance.
Our lips brushed, and mostly I held still, shocked because this closeness could very well have been the first good thing the accident had ever brought me—and I didn’t want to ruin it by taking too much notice.
But then David’s earth-scented fingertips grazed my jaw, and his touch reassured me, somewhat, that maybe I was allowed to notice. Maybe he wanted me to notice.
One kiss ended, and David’s mouth hovered there as if the first brush of lips had just been a test to see how the water might be—and maybe he hadn’t quite decided whether or not he wanted to jump in.
No. It couldn’t just end. Not now, not after that first awkwardness was past. I wasn’t willing to let him back away now; that would be worse then having never kissed at all. I cupped the back of head and drew my fingers through his hair—not quite short, not quite long, and damp with sweat from the heat of the kiln.