Smoke Rings and Pinkie Promise Tomatoes

It’s been a month since the funeral, and Marisol’s garden is in the most primitive form of existence possible. Swallowed by the North Texas dust, the jumble of leaves and stems are coated in gray shades of dissipation and loss. Vines creep over planter boxes like slimy snakes; dried stems stick out like pins and brush your leg when you walk by. The topsoil is pressed down hard, unforgiving to touch, like last Christmas’s fruitcake hiding in the pantry. The garden wastes away, and I hate to think of what Marisol would say if she saw the disaster.

 __

“I wish this dusty old town would blow away with everyone in it.” Marisol puffed on a cigarette and let the Paducah wind blow the smoke onto the freeway. “There’s nothing here, Leah, just oil pumps and empty roads.”

“Then leave for college, and you’ll be out of here in a year.”

“I don’t have the money for that, and neither do you.” Marisol stuck her foot upon the dash and leaned back, turning up the radio. Madonna crooned about heartache and pain, and I could taste one of Marisol’s laments rolling out of her mouth like a tornado.

“I’m not sure how much more I can take of this, Leah.” 

I didn’t see her statement as a warning, but as a side effect of monotony and long, deserted roads swirled in gasoline fumes.

“Hey, Leah.”

“Hey, what?”

“Promise me that you’ll help me plant my garden."

"What?" 

“On the first day of spring. It's the perfect time to garden. The sun is out, there’s a chance of rain coming up, and the ground is practically begging for love after a long nap. Promise you'll help me."

“I don’t like dirt.”

“Come on, it's too much work for one person. Promise me.” She held out her left hand to seal the deal with a pinkie promise.

“I’ll think about it,” I said, knowing I wouldn’t. No way, José, I was not going to garden and get elbow deep in manure, soil, and earthworms. Marisol let her raised pinkie fall.

We kept on driving until the sun melted the sky like Crayons. Marisol sang her way through an entire Madonna album before I dropped her off at her house for the night. That was the 4th of February, 1984. 

__

I’m sitting at her mother’s table, eating lunch with Marisol’s parents for the first time since her memorial service. Her mother tries to make light chit-chat while her dad crunches on kale salad and uses discarded chicken bones as toothpicks. 

After the plates were cleared and cleaned, I walk out to the garden to think about the pinkie promise Marisol offered, the one that I rejected. Crows caw from the roof. I don’t like crows. Those eerie birds reek of misfortune.

__

Everything in the church was black, save the silence, which was tinted a minty-gray that smelled like mothballs. 

Her casket lay by the alter, next to her weeping mother and stoic father, his facial lineaments unchanging. She never got along with her father. 

They asked me to speak about her. How was I supposed to stand at the pulpit, flanked by splendid lilies arranged in a bouquet, and tell these people about Marisol? How was I supposed to explain to them why she left and the cigarettes she smoked while she was here, without trading away our memories and making her mother cry?

So I said what I could, standing there next to flowers not bright enough to overcome the black shades of hurt. 

Marisol liked to drive and listen to Madonna. 

She liked to smoke, too. 

She kept a garden each year, of flowers and tomatoes and squash and peas. She tended the ground like it was her child.

And now, they’ll bury her in it, six feet under. 

That was the 18th of February, 1984.

 __

 If only Marisol would've remembered that winter is always followed by a spring. 

Spring. Next week, spring comes rolling into Paducah on the 28th, as the newspaper reminded me this morning. The first day of spring, when Marisol does her gardening.

A thought nudges its way through the numbness I feel, even a month after the funeral.

There's always a spring after a winter, and there's still a chance for Marisol's garden.

I hold up a feeble pinkie to the sky, and I promise. To myself, to Marisol, to this stinky, dust-covered wreck of a garden, to make it up to her.

That was the 21st of March, 1984.

__

Today is the first day of spring, the 28th of March, 1984. 

When the ground is practically begging for love after a long nap.

I show up to Marisol’s house while her mother is doing the dishes. She waves me inside. I have no time to waste, the first day of spring only happens once a year. 

“Could I plant Marisol’s garden this year?” Her mother smiles, assures me that this is a marvelous idea, and leads me to the garden shed.

I throw off my shoes and get to work. I pull out limb cutters, shovels, hoes, and rakes from the shed. My knees nestled in the dirt, I clean the flower beds until the jungle is cleared and the soil peeks through. I break up the dried chunks with a hoe, the seams of my dress straining as I beat away at the fruitcake earth. I drag the green hose with the chipped blue coating over the flower beds and douse the beds in treacly, clear water. I sort seed packets of geraniums and zinnias, Better Boy tomatoes and straight neck squash.

And finally, I plant until the sky and sun join as one.

My knuckles and the folds in my knee are creased with dirt. My shirt is flaked with fertilizer, but it's done. Marisol’s garden is finished, pinkie promises fulfilled, and Mother Earth satisfied. In months, maybe even weeks, Marisol’s garden will grow up, reds and pinks and greens splayed among the once death-tinted dirt.

I trickle hot hose water down my face suddenly it all comes rushing back: Madonna, smoke rings, and a girl enclosed by the confines of nothingness. And here I sit, a girl gleaming under the sun, knee deep in the dirt, planting Marisol's smoke ring and pinkie promise tomatoes.