THE EXTINCTION OF FAIRYTALES

Jacob M. Appel

           Edie Crossgrove liked to say that she’d inherited Sammy from the previous owners of the house. That had been in the summer of (Good heavens! How time evaporated!) 1967, the summer the race war threatened to tear the very mortar out of the democratic brickwork. Edie had been on a stepladder in the breakfast nook—laying shelving paper in her new cupboards, mulling over a fresh theory regarding Old Mother Hubbard—when a lanky young black man appeared on the kitchen steps and rapped his knuckles on the storm door. He leaned forward at the shoulders in a permanent hunch, the sort of deformity a laborer might develop from years stooped over a vacuum cleaner, or a leaf blower, but that also might come from serving well-off white people. When he finished knocking, he removed his tweed cap and held it to his chest with both hands. Edie could not imagine what business this man had at her back door, but he seemed quite the opposite of the lanky young black men burning up Detroit and Newark, so she put on her slippers and steered her course between cartons of newspaper-shrouded glassware. Her baby-girl Rhodesian ridgeback, Hans Christian Andersen, lumbered after her. It was a torrid afternoon, matted with pollen and the scent of tea roses.  

            “Yes?” asked Edie, propping the storm door open several inches.

            “I’m here to mow the lawn,” said the young man.

            “Oh, I see,” echoed Edie. “You’re here to mow the lawn.” She’d been in the house only ten days, and it hadn’t crossed her mind that grass needed to be cut regularly, that it didn’t simply stop growing when it reached the appropriate height—like puppies or children. “Very well,” she said. “Mow the lawn.”

            The young man remained on the porch. He shuffled his feet nervously, his eyes downcast. The sun reflected off an unpleasant scar that ran from his Adam’s apple to the base of his left ear. He reminded Edie of a shy bellhop waiting for a tip—and that’s when she realized he wanted to agree upon the price. Of course. But what did one pay a grown adult to tend one’s lawn? Edie didn’t wish to appear cheap, but she’d just purchased a twenty thousand dollar suburban home on a freelance folklorist’s income. She had far more uncut grass than she had money to spare.     

            “I’ll pay you twenty-five dollars,” said Edie. “In advance.”

            Some of the tension melted from the man’s shoulders. “Mrs. Tidings, ma’am, she paid me fifteen.”

            “Well, I’m not Mrs. Tidings,” said Edie. “I’ll pay you twenty-five.”

            “Thank you, ma’am.” he said.

            “Let me just find my purse….”

            “That’s all right, ma’am,” he said. “Sammy trusts you. Nobody’s never run off on me with a lawn.” Sammy grinned. “Lawns don’t travel none too well.”

            Edie smiled back—to be polite, to seal the bargain. And that was that.

            Every other Tuesday, for thirty-seven years, Sammy’s van pulled up at the curbside, loaded with mowers and blowers and clippers. He’d gone through a series of used vehicles over the decades—first a taupe DeSoto with corroded bumpers, then a cortege of Dodges and Plymouths—but he never once skipped work on account of car trouble. (Although for a stretch he did squeeze his hand-mower sideways into a station wagon that he’d borrowed from his sister’s husband.) In the autumn, he cleared the leaves and helped Edie plant bulbs. In the winter, he shoveled snow. On those winter mornings when there was no snow, Edie wasn’t sure exactly what he did—but she paid him anyway, much like keeping a lawyer on retainer. 

           As the years passed, Sammy’s stoop grew increasingly pronounced. When Edie glanced out the kitchen window, her employee was often slumped so far over the riding mower that only the vehicle’s turns reassured her that he was still alive. What remained of his hair, a frail monk’s ring, faded to a ghostly white. While he didn’t smoke—or at least Edie had never seen him smoking—Sammy developed a deep, brassy cough that filled many a checkered handkerchief with phlegm. Yet he never phoned in sick. Not once. Nor did he excuse himself for deaths or illnesses in his family. As far as Edie knew, he’d never even taken a vacation, a suspicion at least partly confirmed after the terrorist attacks of 9-11, when Sammy admitted that he hadn’t ever flown in an airplane. (He called it an “aero-plane.”) But at twenty-five dollars per lawn—his rates never changed over a third of a century—who could possibly afford a vacation?

            So Sammy grew older. And Edie grew older.  Her ankles swelled; her joints throbbed. One night a clot of blood broke free from her heart-wall and plugged up the left side of her brain. Meanwhile, the row of black birches that Sammy had planted for her alongside the property line developed into saplings, then full-fledged trees, until one crashed onto Edie’s VW during a gale, and the rest acquired fungal cankers and had to be destroyed. The aging gardener (Who knew if Sammy were fifty-five or seventy!)—arrived each week in the same bib overalls, his massive hands sporting the same padded jersey gloves, his broad face smiling eternally like an early Christian martyr in pain.

            And then, one day, he didn’t show up.

~

            At first, Edie hardly noticed. She’d been so worn down after the stroke, so frustrated trying to write with her left hand, that it wasn’t until Wednesday afternoon that she realized Tuesday had come and gone without Sammy. But even then, she didn’t think much of it. Emergencies came up, after all. Tires blew out. Teeth chipped. Past sixty, if it wasn’t something it was something else. Besides, there was no denying that a single absence in thirty-seven years was a mighty fine track record—the sort of accomplishment you might phone in to one of those morning radio programs—so she wasn’t complaining. But when a second week went by without any sign of Sammy, Edie began to grow concerned. It dawned on her that he might be ill or incapacitated—or (God forbid!) something worse. She hoisted herself onto her newly-installed staircase lift, thinking she would telephone him from the extension in the kitchen. It wasn’t until she opened her address book that she grasped that she had no contact information for Sammy. No address, no phone number, nothing. They’d always conducted their business face-to-face—the old-fashioned way. As ridiculous as it seemed, Edie suddenly discovered that she didn’t even know Sammy’s last name.      

            She dialed the operator. “Operator? Yes, the surname is Tidings. Julius Tidings….Or possibly Jerome.” But Dr. Tidings had been pushing seventy when she’d bought the house from him—that would make him…one hundred seven years old. “Scratch that. Would you please try a Maggie Tidings, maybe Margaret….I honestly don’t know. Can’t you check the whole metro area?” Mrs. Tidings had been considerably younger, a fragile woman who wore her auburn hair up in a pompadour. If anybody would know about Sammy, she would. “Oh, you don’t,” said Edie. “I see. No, that’s all.” She hung up the phone, on the verge of panic. What sort of woman had she been all these years that she didn’t know the last name of her own gardener?  Had she really been so—oblivious?

            When Edie had purchased the house in East Salem, with the bulk of her father’s insurance money, her friends had scoffed. Back then, single women didn’t buy three-bedroom suburban homes on their own. But after her parents’ accident—they’d won a ski vacation in a sweepstakes and been crushed by an avalanche—she wanted to grow up quickly. Already, at Vassar, she’d found her life’s calling. Nursery rhymes. Fairy tales. Why not have a solid home-base from which to conduct her research undisturbed? So what if the neighbors though her peculiar. (And hadn’t they thought her peculiar!—Surgeons and orthodontists who reminded her of Charles Bovary.) It was only now, crippled, isolated, that she second-guessed herself. Why hadn’t she ever offered Sammy a raise? Why hadn’t she taken an interest in his life? She couldn’t let him disappear like her parents had—leaving all of those unanswered and unanswerable questions. Yet the more she though about it, the more she understood that she knew virtually nothing about him. She didn’t know where he lived. Or if he were married. All she knew was that he had a sister whose husband had once owned a weather-beaten station wagon.      

            During those early days of Sammy’s absence, Edie sat at the bay windows in the living room and watched the street for his van. Each approaching vehicle raised and then dashed her expectations, as though her mood were harnessed to a passing siren. She knew the situation called for action—drastic action—but what? Phone the police and tell them that her gardener had disappeared? They’d indulge her just long enough to stash their report in a cylindrical filing cabinet. She considered putting up flyers, wheeling herself door-to-door in the hope that Sammy had mowed other lawns in the area. Another possibility was placing an advertisement in the local paper. Yet each of these options struck her as somehow unacceptable—humiliating, quite frankly—and while she desperately wanted Sammy back, she wasn’t about to beg publicly for his return. Besides, what if he’d once committed a petty crime, like stealing a pork-chop, and had been on the lam all these years? Her advertisement might bring the law down on him. No, far better to wait. She would work on her manuscript and he would return.   

            Edie was up to revising her chapter on “Lucy Locket”:

Lucy Locket lost her pocket,
Kitty Fisher found it;
There was not a penny in it,
Only ribbon round it.

When Edie was a girl, every school kid had known that verse—although probably not that Lucy Locket was a gold-digging English barmaid who’d passed her lovers onto actress-prostitute Kitty. Now, both rhyme and reason had been long forgotten. Or nearly forgotten, relegated to the memories of a few old souls like Edie. That’s what her book was all about—preserving these fading fables and rounds and limericks. A challenging enough project under the best of circumstances, not rendered any easier by the grief of Sammy’s disappearance. It became nearly impossible when that noxious woman next door—the same meddlesome creature who was always on her case about hiring a homecare attendant—began pestering Edie about the lawn.

~

            “—And I use the term lawn generously,” said Liz. “What you have now might properly be called a meadow. My husband says it’s a fire hazard—and he was trained as an engineer, so if anyone should know, he should.”

            Liz served as the language arts coordinator at a local elementary school—in theory a lover of words—but the similarities between her and Edie stopped there.  The program she administered taught American kids traditional African songs and Aborigine bedtime stories. To Liz Blatch, this multiculturalism embodied progress. To Edie, it was linguistic pollution by a saccharine name.  Not that there was anything wrong with African music or Aborigine bedtime stories—indeed, they ought to be preserved and treasured—but not scattered haphazardly like some sort of cultural seasoning. Liz’s work was the folkloric equivalent of spreading an invasive species, or of interbreeding purebred dogs. But what could you expect from a woman who wore maroon toe-polish and a medical alert bracelet shaped like a valentine?

            “There’s no need to exaggerate,” said Edie. “It’s only been a month or so.” 

            “It’s been at least six weeks,” retorted Liz. “I don’t mean to give you a hard time, Miss Crossgrove, but you could graze sheep out there. A child could trip and die in that grass, and nobody would notice.”

            Edie pulled her blanket over her knees. It was nearly ninety degrees outside, but ever since the stroke, she’d suffered perpetual chills. “I thought you didn’t have any children,” said Edie.

            “That’s not the point.”

            “By the time you have children,” said Edie, “I’ll have the lawn mowed.”

            They were in the parlor, a dimly-lit catacomb of curios and knickknacks gathered on Edie’s fairytale-hunting expeditions. Liz rose from the sofa and reseated herself on the sagging loveseat beside Edie’s wheelchair. She reached forward, as though to touch her hostess’s arm, but drew back. “I don’t want to sound presumptuous,” said Liz—in a tone she might use to warn a third grader who lacked permission to visit the restroom—“But don’t you think it might be better if there were someone to look after you?”

            “Are you volunteering?” snapped Edie.

            This caught the young educator off-guard. “Well, I could certainly help find someone….I mean….”

            “I’m doing quite alright on my own, thank you,” said Edie. “My only problem is that Sammy—the man who mows my lawn—has gone missing.”

            That perked Liz up. “That’s all. Why didn’t you say so? I’m sure if I spoke to our Julio, he’d be able to squeeze you in—and he’s not too pricey at all—”

            “I’m waiting for Sammy to come back.”

            Liz toyed with her wedding ring. “How long do you expect that will be?”

            Edie shrugged. “As long as it takes.”

            “Now, really, Mrs. Crossgrove—”

            “You heard me, dear. I’m waiting for Sammy to come back.”

            Edie considered trying to explain the matter further—but there was no way to teach the whole of life to a woman half her age. Anything she said would somehow make her relationship with Sammy sound illicit.

            “What’s Julio like?” Edie asked.

            “What’s he like?” repeated Liz. “I don’t know. I think he’s Peruvian….And very reliable….Are you sure you don’t want me to send him over tomorrow?”

            “Oh, absolutely not,” answered Edie—her tongue loosened by age and stroke. “I just wanted to check if you were sleeping with him.”

~

            Sammy had only been inside Edie’s house once. She’d come back early from swimming at the municipal pool—it must have been that first summer after she moved in—and he’d just finished trimming the weeds that were continually poking up between the flagstones on the patio. Maybe because he knew she wasn’t home, Sammy had taken off his t-shirt and tied it around his neck like a bandanna. His chest hairs were coarse and irregular. Edie wore only her bathing suit, a two-piece she’d purchased in college on a whim. While they stood together, appraising Sammy’s handiwork, the sky went overcast. A hard breeze raised the gooseflesh on Edie’s arms. Then rain started falling in enormous beads, splattering on the deck like bird eggs dropped from a height.     

            “My heavens,” exclaimed Edie. “We’re in for a show.”

            The clouds pulsed with light and—after a short interval—rolled with thunder. Hans Christian Anderson yelped and cowered in the privet.

            “Two miles away,” said Sammy.

            “What’s that?”

            “Don’t you know about thunder-counting, Miss Crossgrove? You take the number of seconds between the lightning and thunderclap, and you cut that number in half, and half-again—and then you know how far away the storm is sitting.”

            “I didn’t know that,” said Edie. “You’d better come inside before you get soaked.”

            She darted up the kitchen stairs. Sammy held back. He stood just beyond the porch eaves, getting whipped by wind and water.

            “Come on,” called Edie.

            Sammy looked up at the sky and wiped a sheet of water off his brow. “I suppose that would be okay.”

            Inside, Edie handed him a bath towel and poured him out a cup of tea. She slipped into her bathrobe. “You might as well hunker down until it blows over,” she said. “No use catching pneumonia.”

            Sammy waited awkwardly beside the table. The tea cup stood untouched, sending off a brew of vapor.

            “You all right?” she asked.

            “Sure thing, Miss Crossgrove. I just—well—some folks wouldn’t want me in their house like this.”

            Did he mean shirtless? Or did he mean as a black man?

            “Oh,” said Edie. “Wouldn’t they?”

            The words sounded wrong as soon as she said them. Either naïve or flirtatious, somehow the opposite of reassuring. Luckily, Sammy caught sight of the books on the table and diverted the conversation.

            “Baby books,” he said.

            He tentatively leafed through the topmost volume.

            “Not mine,” objected Edie. “Or, rather, they’re mine—but not in that way.  It’s what I do for a living.”

            Sammy looked up curiously. “You’re a writer, Miss Crossgrove?”

            “Oh, no. I study children’s stories—fairy tales, nursery rhymes. They’re going extinct, I’m afraid. Each generation knows fewer and fewer….I’m tracking their disappearance.”

            Sammy nodded. She sensed he had absolutely no idea what she was talking about—that she might just as well have said that she earned her keep by weighing angels.

            “Do you know any nursery rhymes?” she asked.

“Miss Crossgrove?”

            “Like Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater,” she suggested, “or Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross?”

            He returned the book to the stack. “I’m sure I don’t remember.”

            “How about fairy tales?” persisted Edie.

            Sammy shrugged. “I’m too old for fairy tales.” Their eyes met and then he looked away quickly. “I think I’m through for the morning, Miss Crossgrove….”

            “Oh, certainly,” agreed Edie—rummaging through her “business cabinet” for the envelope with his twenty-five dollars .

            She had the good sense not to invite him inside again.

~

            But now she wished she had. Her inability to connect with Sammy—to transcend race, class, whatever—now struck her as one of her greatest failures. What made it worse was that in the field, on a fairytale hunting mission to Micronesia or Kamchatka or Appalachia, she’d have culled his childhood memories out of him over the course of hours, pressed him politely but firmly until she wore down his defenses. Yet in her own home, at her own kitchen table, she’d accomplished nothing. After thirty-seven years, she hadn’t learned enough about Sammy to fill an index card. Or maybe she’s learned a great deal about Sammy, everything she needed to know, but none of it was the sort of tangible knowledge you could catalogue like a nursery rhyme or make use of in a missing-persons search.

~

            It wasn’t quite true that Sammy had never been inside the house again. He’d been in the vestibule briefly, on that morning fifteen years later, when Edie had come down the stairs to find Hans Christian Anderson curled up dead beside the umbrella stand. She’d opened the front door and waited in the entryway, her entire body quivering. It wasn’t just the loss of the dog that unsettled her—as horrid as that was—but somehow also the reminder that the ridgeback was all she had. No husband. No children. (By choice, of course—Who wanted to spend a lifetime changing diapers and washing laundry and shaking out rectal thermometers?—But still!) All Edie had now was a puppy who was now seventeen years old and lifeless. She leaned into the open closet, hiding herself among the heavy old coats as she’d done as a girl. The scent of her Mama was still trapped in the faux-fur linings. “I want her back,” she screamed into the fabric.  She wasn’t sure whether she was thinking of her mother or her dog. Edie was still screaming when Sammy stepped into the foyer.

            “Miss Crossgrove?” he asked tentatively.

            He removed his cap and stashed it in his pocket.

            “Oh, Sammy,” she said. “Do you know how Chicken Little feels when the sky starts falling? I feel like that now….”

            Sammy turned on the hall lights and spotted the cadaver.

            “It’s gonna be alright, Miss Crossgrove,” he said. “Sammy’s gonna take care of everything.” He scooped the dog up in his arms and carried her limp body across the threshold with all the tenderness of a bridegroom. Edie followed him, almost robotically. “Do you have anything to wrap her up in?” asked Sammy.

            Edie didn’t answer. She realized she was still wearing her nightgown. It didn’t come halfway down her thighs, but Sammy wasn’t looking.

            “I know what we’ll do,” he said. “I’ve got just the thing.”

            He carried the lifeless form to the curbside and deposited it gently on the grass. Then he slid open the side-door of his van and started removing books from a wooden crate. “Bibles. For my church,” he explained. “But if they’re good enough for the Good Book, I suppose they’re good enough for Miss Andersen.” (Only Sammy could call an old, dead dog by her last name!)

            “Thank you,” said Edie—her voice barely audible.

             “No need to cry,” soothed Sammy while he set the body into the makeshift coffin. “Miss Andersen’s done her duty. She’s earned her rest.” He replaced the lid of the crate. “Miss Andersen—she’s in dog heaven. Surrounded by meat-on-the-bone and all those toys she done buried. Ain’t that right, Miss Andersen?”

            The idea of dog heaven had never entered Edie’s mind, but she found the prospect surprisingly reassuring. So much more plausible, somehow, than an afterlife for humans. Yet it also had all the makings of a fairytale. While Sammy dug a grave beneath the wisteria arbor, laboring in determined silence, she reflected on the ease with which he spoke of a paradise of dog toys. As much as she loved stories, her talent was for cataloguing them, never creating them. She admired—even envied—those who could shape a fantasy out of inchoate nothing. 

            “Would it be alright if I say a psalm?” asked Sammy.

            Edie nodded.  She watched his lips move, but didn’t absorb the words. After that, he filled the grave quickly.

            “You’ll get a new dog,” said Sammy. “You’ll feel much better.”

            “I hope dog heaven is a nice place,” said Edie.

            “You know it is,” he answered. Then he patted her on the side of the shoulder, very hesitantly, as though touching a scalding object. “You take good care of yourself, Miss Crossgrove,” he said. “I’ll be seeing you in two weeks.”                                           

            “But I owe you—”

            “Not for today,” he said. “I’m no undertaker.”

~

            Each passing day brought more resolution to Edie’s memories. She uncovered new ones too, like hidden markers at the corner of a cemetery:  The morning Sammy had wished her a happy July Fourth, the occasion she’d seen him tuck a sprig of forsythia above his ear when he thought that nobody was watching. Daydreaming had never come easily to Edie—particularly after her parents’ deaths, she hadn’t allowed her thoughts to drift—but now she found her mind chasing every last wisp of fancy. Her writing fell by the wayside. Some days, she didn’t bother to dress until the afternoon. Often she’d be seized with an idea—maybe that Sammy had left a glove in the mismatched clothing bin—and she’d dig through the mounds of socks and slippers in search of a traceable label. None of these efforts ever panned out, of course. Sammy hadn’t left so much as a photograph or a footprint. One night, Edie woke in a dreadful panic, afraid she’d imagined him entirely. It took a lengthy inventory of her own memories to convince herself otherwise.

            But so what? So Sammy had existed. The problem was that she had absolutely no claim on him—no recognized right to pursue him. They hadn’t been friends, even implicitly, not like Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman in Driving Miss Daisy. And she hadn’t been secretly in love with him like that butler character was with the housekeeper in The Remains of the Day. Most certainly not. Their relationship was far simpler than that: Professional. Employer and employee. But not in the way Ray Crock and the fry cooks at McDonalds were employer and employee. She wanted to tell people that he was the man who’d buried her dog, but that sounded absolutely nutty out-of-context. There was the problem with human relationships—you could never really explain them. Sammy had simply been Sammy. Why wasn’t it enough of a claim on him that she cared what had happened to him? Obviously, it wasn’t.

~

            The second time Liz Blatch came over to complain about the state of Edie’s yard, she brought along her husband. Ted Blatch was a short man with a long face. He traded currency on Wall Street—but his bachelor’s degree had been in chemical engineering, which somehow made him an authority on lawn care. 

            “I’m not a lawyer,” he explained. “But I’ve done some extensive research and I know full well what I’m talking about.”

            “I’m sure you do,” agreed Edie.

            The last time Ted Blatch had been in her parlor, he’d explained to her the advantages of resurveying the property line. He’d wanted to split the costs. Before that, it had been an overhanging crabapple limb.

            “This state has something called an attractive nuisance doctrine, Miss Crossgrove,” said Blatch. “And what you’ve got out front—that pasture of yours—is unquestionably an attractive nuisance.”

            Edie surveyed the backs of her hands, wishing she might read the liver spots like tea leaves. “You know what that reminds me of?” she asked. “That scene in that picture, you know which one, where Marlon Brando explains the Napoleonic Code….to Vivian Leigh….What was the name of that picture?”

            Liz glanced pointedly at her husband. He cupped his fist in his palm.

            “Please try to focus, Miss Crossgrove,” he said. “Nobody’s talking about Vivian Leigh.”

            “I thought I was,” answered Edie. “I’ve got it. On the Waterfront.”

            “You’re not listening to me, Miss Crossgrove,” insisted Blatch. “A homeowner has responsibilities. You’ve got to think about safety….and, to be honest, property values….You’ve got no right to grow a forest on your lawn.”

            “What’s wrong with a forest?” snapped Edie. “It was a forest before it was a lawn, wasn’t it? And it’s more natural this way—better for the environment.”

            “So you’re just going to let it keep growing?” demanded Blatch.

            “Until Sammy comes back,” answered Edie. “Then, we’ll see….”

            “Please, Miss Crossgrove,” interjected Liz. “This is an untenable situation. We’re not the only other people on this block. Seymour Klein is going to come over here one day this week and mow the place himself.”

            “I warned him about the liability,” added Ted. “But he doesn’t care. He says he’s an OB-GYN and he’s had it up to here with liability….”

            Edith removed her glasses and cleaned them on her quilt. “I wouldn’t do that if I were Dr. Klein,” she said. She didn’t remember Klein ever moving in, but she was willing to concede his existence—for argument’s sake. “That would be a grave error in judgment.”

            “But what other choice does he have….Do we have?” asked Liz. “You’re painting us into a corner. We’re on your side, Miss Crossgrove….”

            “Oh, there are sides now,” said Edie. “Well Sammy’s on my side and Sammy doesn’t like strangers mucking about with his lawn.”

            “I guess that’s his problem,” said Blatch.

            “He killed a man, you know,” continued Edie. “About fifteen years ago, in North Carolina. He caught a fellow mowing one of his lawns—a Mexican, I think—and Sammy pumped him full of buckshot….”

            “That’s just awful,” cried Liz. “A man like that has no business in East Salem. He should be in jail.”    

            “He was. Nearly six months. But he was a World War II vet and the other guy was illegal, so they gave him a break….In any case, I wouldn’t go cutting one of Sammy’s lawns without permission. He’s very possessive, proprietary—like a coyote. It wouldn’t surprise me if there weren’t booby-traps in that grass, even landmines.”

            Edie enjoyed watching the color rise in Liz Blatch’s bony face. Making up Sammy’s life was like writing a fairytale. It was genuinely fun. Deep down, it also left her a bit uneasy—akin to lying about a death in the family—but who was to say that Sammy wouldn’t kill the obstetrician if he ever caught him on Edie’s lawn? After thirty-seven years, people developed attachments.

            Ted Blatch stood up swiftly. “I don’t like being threatened, Miss Crossgrove.”

            “I’m not threatening anyone,” said Edie. “I’m just looking out for your safety….I’d hate to see someone injured over a few blades of grass.”

            “Come on, Liz,” said Blatch. “We don’t need to take this.”

            Liz rose reluctantly. “If you reconsider, Miss Crossgrove….”           

            “I have reconsidered.”

            “You have?”

“It wasn’t On the Waterfront. Most certainly not. That wouldn’t make any sense at all. It was A Streetcar Named Desire—The picture had to take place in Louisiana, dear, because that’s the only state they have the Napoleonic Code.”

            Liz shook her head, as though reprimanding a child.

            “Enough, honey,” Ted said sharply. “She’s doing this on purpose.”

            Edie also wanted the Blatches to depart. She looked up at Liz and asked: “Tell me something.  How is Julio in the sack?”

            That was the one advantage of growing old—it let you be nasty with impunity.

~

            At first, Edie felt relief. But then an intense despair overtook her. She watched the Blatches retreating up the front walk—they were arguing something fierce now—and she was reminded of her own powerlessness. What could she do if this alleged obstetrician really did attempt to mow her lawn? She knew the answer to that question all too well: Absolutely nothing. She might craft up any stories she wanted about Sammy, but talking didn’t make it so. At the end of the day, she didn’t have so much as a guard dog to protect her. Not that Hans Christian Andersen had been much of a guardian….but at least she’d had a powerful yelp. In the high grass, the obstetrician might have mistaken her for a pit-bull or a German shepherd.

            Edie laughed. That anybody could mistake her ridgeback for an attack dog! A retreat dog was more like it.  But Sammy had been wrong about one thing—she’d never replaced the animal. If there really were a dog heaven, it might well be contiguous with human heaven, and Edie didn’t like the idea of walking more than one dog at a time. So she was a one-dog woman—and that dog was in a crate under the arbor.

            The crate! Where the idea came from, Edie didn’t know—but it came. Hadn’t the crate contained Bibles from Sammy’s church? And possibly an address label? Under the circumstances, Hans Christian Andersen would forgive her.

            Edie wheeled hard toward the side door, forgetting there was no lift at the entrance to the garage. Then she backtracked through the kitchen and into the sunlight. She hadn’t been outside in months—not since she’d started having the groceries delivered—and she was shocked at how high the grass had grown. The hedgerows were creeping into the flowerbeds, and maple saplings had sprouted up willy-nilly. Beside the driveway, where the ridgeback was buried, the arbor had collapsed under the weight of the lilac and wisteria vines. Motoring across the undergrowth was like riding on horseback over a mountain range. Twice, Edie nearly fell out of the chair. When she finally reached the gravesite, she realized that she didn’t have a shovel. She had no choice but to lower herself to the ground and to burrow through the dirt by hand.

            The earth gave way with surprising ease. It had rained the night before, leaving the soil soft and damp and cool. Crabgrass tickled Edie’s ears, but she didn’t bother to scratch them. All that mattered was finding that crate—before time and the elements might do any further damage. If only she could remember precisely where Sammy had lain the animal to rest…..

            Tears of frustration trickled down Edie’s cheeks. She’d dug a long trough, and several craters—the arbor looked like it had been shelled by cannon—but she’d uncovered not so much as a splinter. Was it possible the box had decayed entirely—that other animals had scavenged the bones? And then she hit wood! A solid thump. Edie used a stone to scrape away the earth until the address on the crate was clearly visible, lacquered in transparent tape and preserved for the ages.  

            That’s when the first paroxysm seized her. The numbness lay in her left side now, her good side. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t scream. She was lying on her front lawn, but the grass was far too high for anybody to see her. Edie thought all was without hope when she spotted Sammy, smiling, chugging over the rise on his mower. He was slashing the grass, plowing a path toward her rescue. But he was a young, robust Sammy, wearing sunglasses, whistling—mounted atop a shiny red chassis—and even as Edie reached out toward him, she saw that he wasn’t coming any closer. Soon the distance between them started increasing, slowly at first, then faster, like a locomotive pulling away from the land of fairytales.
    

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