Lacy Eye by Jessica Treadway Read Free Book Online Page A

mother had always dreamed of cultivating herself. She never got the chance, because when my father moved us to Manning Boulevard, he insisted on hiring a gardener. As much as my mother had always told him she wanted to work in the dirt herself, I don’t think he actually believed her. She died before I met Joe, but I still liked to imagine that her spirit was in the air around me as I dead-headed my begonias or pruned my roses or fertilized my rhododendrons. Often, I paused on my knees just to turn my face up to the sun and breathe. Though I had been brought up going to church, working in my garden was the closest I ever came to what felt like God.
    Especially when the girls were younger, we ate dinners outside in the summer. Joe had never grilled before we moved to the suburbs, but he took to it right away. He loved to cook up a bunch of kebobs, different kinds of meat and vegetables in colorful combinations. Sometimes they were too fancy for Dawn and Iris, so he’d throw some hot dogs on the grill for them. One of my favorite memories is of the time Joe put one end of a hot dog straight into Abby’s mouth, the other in his own, then raced her as they both ate toward the middle until their noses touched. Especially because it was so out of character for their strict and sanitary father, the girls both laughed so hard they almost fell together off the bench.
    I’d always kept two bird feeders in the garden, one in a log-style and the other a netted onion bag filled with suet pudding. After Joe died, the police claimed the log feeder as evidence. I don’t know why they thought the attacker might have left fingerprints on a bird feeder, but I guess they were covering all their bases. As it turned out, the only fingerprints they found on it were mine.
    When I came home from the rehab hospital in March of the following year, I didn’t have the heart or the energy to tend to anything but getting myself out of bed every morning. That fall when Rud Petty’s trial started, I thought about trying to divide and transplant some of my perennials, but I just couldn’t seem to take the first step out the back door. Slowly, over the next months and through the winter, the garden faded into an ordinary yard. Where once the view from my kitchen window had been one of my greatest pleasures, eventually I kept the blinds closed even during the daytime, so I didn’t have to be reminded of how comforting it had once been.
      
    When Dawn called from Santa Fe the morning after my trip to the mall, I asked her, “Wait a minute, what day is it?” before she could even start talking.
    “Saturday,” she told me. “I know, I’m early. But I didn’t want to wait until tomorrow.”
    Since she’d left for college, we’d always spoken on Sundays. When I was growing up on Humboldt Street, my father had drummed it into my head that Sunday was the time for long-​d istance calls, because the rates were cheapest then. Of course that didn’t matter anymore, and all Dawn had was a cell phone, but I liked the comfort of our routine. Dawn seemed to, too. It was another thing we shared, while Iris called any time she felt like it.
    Dawn said she’d just wanted to hear my voice. She added, “All of a sudden I’m afraid of wildfires,” and I remembered, as I did every week, her tendency to jump from one subject to another without warning; you had to stay on your toes. “It’s like something’s creeping up on me from behind.”
    “It sounds awful,” I said, though I hadn’t seen anything about wildfires on the news and wasn’t exactly sure what she was referring to. Then I blurted what had been at the front of my mind since I’d received the information the day before. “He won his appeal. He’s getting a new trial. You know that, right?” I knew I did not have to identify who “he” was. Saying the name, I knew, would cause a cold clash of cymbals at the back of my neck.
    “Well, yes.” Dawn’s voice flickered briefly.
    The