6. Broken Ivy (Bertholet, Sebastian Kamae, Joshua J)
“He said there’s another garden opening this coming summer,” uncle Thomas said. “Said one of my colleagues got the idea after I told them about the veteran’s garden.”
Uncle Thomas was obviously devastated and I felt for him. We had all been drinking and I’m sure that the influence of the alcohol made the emotions more potent.
“Did he think you stole his idea?” I asked.
“He accused me of stealing it and using my colleague as cover, but I don’t even know who’s doing this. He either wouldn’t or couldn’t give me a name. The worst part…” his voice broke and he looked away from me. I saw him wipe his face with his forearm and then he turned back. “He was obviously really hurt. I could hear it. He said he was really looking forward to spending more time with me. He said he really liked me.”
He wandered to sit in a lawn chair and held his head in his hands. He wasn’t crying, but his face was still in agony and shock. It dawned on me how much this friendship actually meant to my uncle; the way he’d described the relationship the day before, it seemed that they were more casual acquaintances than his emotions after the phone call suggested.
“Y’all out of cigarettes?” my brother Ced, asked, surprising both me and my uncle who hadn’t noticed him and my sister approaching us from the house. “That’s why unk upset?”
“It’s not a good time to be a ass,” I said. “Unk just had a bad phone call.”
My sister and brother tried to get my uncle to explain the situation, and even though it was clear that he didn’t want to talk about it, Ruby managed to convince him.
“After yesterday,” she explained, “you gotta see the benefit in being open with the people who love you.”
Uncle Thomas looked at her, then at me and my brother, and he nodded.
“Finally,” Ced said, mostly trying to be funny to lighten the mood, “we finally get to hear more about Unk’s dude.”
“Chuck has been working really hard to get his garden started and honestly, I was excited to make it happen, to work with him. It’s not even about money, you know? When Chuck and I were hanging out, making plans, it was fun. Like our minds melded. It’s crazy how you can meet someone randomly but it feels like you’ve known them forever. And his idea was so good, he only wanted to help people that might be struggling like he had. He genuinely wanted to help. It wasn’t about what he would gain from the whole thing, how much money can you really make with a veteran’s garden? There’s just a lot of unmet need in the veteran community, and the help that is there is only about what somebody else can gain by seeming to care about this group of people who were wounded in service to our country. Chuck told me that people like that, usually politicians, like to throw money at the problem, it’s easy for the public to understand sympathy paid in dollars. But it takes more than money. After you experience the trauma of being wounded in a war, you usually end up with a very different life than the one you had before the injury. You kind of have to relearn how to live in the world. Chuck said it wasn’t just about getting used to not having his leg and learning to cope with his injury and how to use his prosthetic leg. That stuff is hard enough, I couldn’t imagine it. But he said the world treated him differently and he had to figure out how to live with that. Talking to Chuck and hearing about his struggles made me excited to volunteer. I was looking forward to helping him out, but apparently there’s a new garden being fast tracked that’s so much like his plans. Chuck was probably a couple years away from being able to open. Now I guess he won’t get to at all.”
Uncle Thomas was clearly upset and we all said words to try to console him.
“Who else know about the garden?” Ruby asked.
“I don’t know,” uncle Thomas shook his head helplessly. “I told the owner of my restaurant about it, I wanted him to know that we should have a new, reliable source of unique produce soon enough and I was curious if he wanted to give money to help Chuck get things started.”
“And you told him what Chuck wanted to grow and everything?” Ruby asked. “It gotta be him. He must have realized there was some money in it or something.”
It made sense to me, and I saw it dawn on my uncle’s face.
“He gotta know I would be mad about this,” he said and excused himself to make a phone call.
“That’s a shitty way to end the best Thanksgiving I think we ever had,” Ced said.
He was right. The conversation we’d had the day before had made us all very open and appreciative of one another, and that closeness had flooded Thanksgiving day with warmth and togetherness. We’d cried and laughed, but there had definitely been more happiness than heartbreak.
Uncle Thomas left shortly after, and soon we all left my grandfather’s house and returned to our lives. I was worried about uncle Thomas and I was eager to talk to him again. I hoped that everything would turn out alright for him and Chuck.
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