Todd came around.
I want to be fair to him. He did.
He came around the way people come around when they finally understand they’ve been careless with someone they can’t replace. Slowly. With some stumbling. With a few setbacks. But with real, genuine effort.
He started calling me on Tuesdays. Just to talk.
Not every single Tuesday. But enough of them that I started looking forward to Tuesdays. I’d catch myself checking the clock around seven in the evening.
He’d tell me about his work. A bridge project he was designing. A coworker who microwaved fish in the break room every single day. I’d tell him about the food bank, and about the books I was reading.
One Tuesday in March, he said, “Mom, I’ve been thinking about Riverside Park. Do you remember the herons?”
“I remember.”
“I took Penny there last weekend. She loved it. She asked me how I knew so much about birds.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her my mom taught me.”
I had to sit down.
One Saturday in April, he brought his daughter over. My granddaughter, Penny. He dropped her at my front door and said, “Is it okay if she hangs out here for a while? I’ll stay too. I’ll be on the porch.”
Penny spent three hours in my garden that afternoon. She helped me plant tomatoes and marigolds. She found a toad under the hose reel and named it Gerald, after the food bank director, because she’d heard me talking about him on the phone.
Todd sat on the porch steps with a glass of iced tea and watched us.
When she got tired, she came and sat on the steps next to him. And the three of us talked about things that had nothing to do with money. Toads. School. Whether marigolds really keep the bugs away.
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