Travis(36)

“I suppose. And I don’t want to give my mom too bad of a rap. She tried, you know, sometimes more than others, but…she was a product of her environment. She brought home food she thought we liked. Food we did like, but that wasn’t good for us.”

“How’d you manage to be different?”

“I stole a cantaloupe.”

“Aha. I knew the first time I saw you, you were criminally inclined.”

“I confess. Once upon a time, that was true. I was eleven, and one day I took an alternate route home from school, which took me past this Korean grocery store. There was a stand of cantaloupes. Well, of course, I’d seen cantaloupes on TV before, but we’d never eaten one. I lingered around that stand. I wanted one.” I recalled that moment of wanting. How it’d been a fierce thing inside that I had no way to explain. Maybe I just wanted to be different, to live a life I hadn’t been given, if only for a brief time. Long enough to eat a cantaloupe. “I wanted to experience a cantaloupe just once,” I said, leaving out the rest.

I could feel Travis’s stare on the side of my face, and I glanced at him. His expression was bemused and something else I didn’t know him well enough to name. “So you stole it,” he said.

“I did. And I was caught immediately.”

“Oh no.”

My lips tipped and even I could hear the tenderness in my voice when I said, “Mr. Kim, the store owner, yelled and railed. I tried so hard not to cry, but I was shaking I was so scared. He marched me a block up the street to this door and this woman, all of four and a half feet tall, answered, and he said, ‘Here, this little thief tried to steal one of our cantaloupes. You deal with her.’” I smiled softly. “She led me to the roof of her building and she didn’t exactly seem mad, and so I followed her. And there, she had this garden. All these perfectly organized plants and flowers in wooden boxes covering every square inch of that roof. It was a wonder. I’d never seen anything so beautiful. She told me if I spent the next hour digging potatoes out of the dirt, I would have worked off my debt and she’d send me home with a cantaloupe.”

“That was kind,” he said.

“Yes. Yes, she was kind. She and her husband both.” I cleared my throat when the final word of my statement came out scratchy with emotion.

“What happened to them?” Travis asked.

I took a deep breath, surprised that it still hurt to talk about the Kims, that the scar their loss had left behind still pulled tight sometimes. “Mr. Kim died of a heart attack when I was in middle school and Mrs. Kim went back to South Korea where she had family. I send her postcards.”

“But she doesn’t have a permanent address where she can write back to you,” he said.

I didn’t look at him. “No. Not right now.”

“How old were you when she left?”

“Sixteen.”

“And the garden?”

I paused. “The landlord let it remain, even after the Kims left. I replanted a few things in pots and brought them home. And I tried to keep the garden alive, but gardens take a lot of time and a lot of effort and some money to maintain, and I…well, it died. At first it was slow, and I had hope, but then…but then, one day it seemed to die all at once.”

“And the ones you brought home?” he asked, his tone gentle.

I paused, a sharp pain cutting through me. “Well, those died eventually too.” Later.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and the empathy in his voice was so very clear that a lump formed in my throat.

I managed what I hoped was a bright smile and shrugged. “Anyway, gardening wasn’t really a possibility anymore, but I did get this job at a health food store. It was halfway across town, so I had to take three buses there and back for every shift. But…like I said, we didn’t have stores like that in my neighborhood and regardless, without the garden, we couldn’t afford that kind of food. Even with the employee discount at the health food store, I still shopped off the discount shelves. I…got that job and I was able to bring home fruits and vegetables…eggs…so the commute was worth it.” Nourishing food. Food that made us healthy and strong, not sick and still hungry all the time. Food that I sometimes went without so my skinny little brother would thrive.

The group had come to a stop in front of what had to be Clarice’s booth, a rich velvet blue curtain enclosing the small space, gold moons and stars sewn onto the fabric. Travis and I joined them.

“Who’s up first?” Burt asked, and it had to be noted that his words were markedly slurred.

“I’ll go!” Betty said, pulling aside the curtain and heading unsteadily inside.

Travis raised his brows and gave me a look and I laughed, the heaviness of my memories about the Kims and the rooftop garden that died melted away by the warmth of the sun and the mildly numbing effects of watery beer.

A dark head of perfect hair came into view, moving above the small group he was walking with.

Gage stepped out of the crowd, a woman next to him saying something and laying her hand on his arm. He stopped and listened to her for a moment, his eyes meeting mine.

I smiled and so did he, even as the woman continued to chatter, oblivious of anything except him. Gage’s gaze moved to Travis and he gave him a small chin lift, his brows lowering slightly as he looked between the two of us.