The next morning I woke up at dawn, but Patsy still snored on her dog bed in my bedroom. Then she opened one eye, gave me a brief look, and went back to sleep. You’re a bum, I thought only half affectionately. I was still a bit peeved from her tricks the night before.
Betty and I had stayed up quite late, enjoying the cool evening, poking at the fire in the fire pit, and laughing at stories until our cheeks hurt. I’d woken up feeling a bit groggy with lack of sleep and too much food. So I was moving slowly, trying to be quiet and not awaken Betty, as I headed toward the sunny kitchen and coffee.
As the coffee was dripping into a big blue cup, I went out onto the front porch to look for the newspaper, and I could hear an early morning train clattering across town, interrupting the quiet in my gritty neighborhood on a weekend morning.
Back inside I put Patsy’s food down in her bowl, grabbed my strong coffee, and moved out onto the broad back steps to savor the brew, the view through the cottonwoods, and to browse the newspaper. I hadn’t been looking for it, but on a back section of the paper, I saw a short funeral announcement for Shannon.
SHANNON MARIE PARKHURST
February 9, 1982 – August 4, 2010
Gilcrest Church of the Lord, Saturday Service of Remembrance, 1 p.m.
Gilcrest, Colorado
We hadn’t planned on it for that day, but I thought I should go to the service. I imagined that Hannah might want to postpone her move for a day to attend and that Betty would want to go with us. Just then I heard the sounds of Betty in the kitchen, rummaging in the refrigerator for her morning diet Pepsi. She stumbled out onto the porch and squinted in the morning light. I knew she hadn’t had time to wake up, so I just handed her the paper and said, “I’m going to go. You and Hannah want to go, too?”
Betty took the paper, peered at it myopically, and eloquently replied, “Mmph? ... hemf ... phewmmng ... cawk?” Then she cleared her throat, coughed a couple of times, and rasped out, “I’ll call Hannah,” or something that sounded similar to that, and disappeared back inside, probably to look for her glasses, a Pall Mall, and then the phone.
As if summoned, out came Patsy, still chewing her breakfast and dropping several nuggets of food on the porch floor. If she’d been a human, she’d have been shuffling out in her boxer shorts, scratching her butt, and releasing a gaseous pssssh as she shambled down the steps. As it was, she moved past me and out to her spot in the back of the yard.
I headed to the garden to do some much needed weeding. The air was fresh and cool, not yet hot from the day. Sunlight streamed through the cottonwood and ash trees between the yard and the train siding beyond. In the summer I couldn’t see the tracks, since they were obscured by all the vegetation, but sometimes they were still used for boxcar switching and storage, and I had come home to some huge hulking cars sitting silently just on the other side of the tall fence and trees. Then they’d be gone, needed somewhere else.
As I worked in the garden in the dappled morning sunlight, my musings from the night before returned—a vague feeling that the Shannon Parkhurst I knew wouldn’t have committed suicide. If she’d started drinking again, I could see how the alcohol could convince her that death was the only way out; it had a way of making that message convincing. But something felt amiss in the information Hannah Huckleston had shared with her mother, something didn’t seem right, something didn’t make sense. For now, though, the niggling doubts were still bothering me. My distracted mind flipped around my thoughts like a cat playing with a mouse—luckily, my hands still worked at weeding without the benefit of a cognizant brain.
The soil in the garden was deep and rich after years of sheet composting and rototilling, and grew abundant vegetables and perennials. There were grapevines growing over a low fence beside the big shed, and apple, apricot, and peach trees. A large composting area was not only fenced off from the dogs, but the black gold was contained in large, rotating drums to keep out the marauding raccoons wandering up from the river. The present dog was on her morning inspection of the perimeter where she had worn a path in the line of duty. She came up to the garden fence for me to give her a scratch around the neck, and then went off again, her black fur glinting in the sun.
Betty came out, munching on a pastry she’d brought. She looked around for me and then came down the steps to the garden fence. “Hannah’s gonna meet us there. She said to tell you hi. When do we have to leave?” She finished the pastry in one final bite, licking her fingers to catch the last sweet crumbs of a crueller.
“Oh, in a couple of hours, I guess.” I wasn’t looking forward to going to a funeral, but who did? I stood up and stretched my back. “Hey, Toots—I’ve been thinking—”
“Always a dangerous thing!” Betty laughed. She tapped the unfiltered end of a Pall Mall on her cigarette case, stuck it in the corner of her mouth, and fired up.
“Tell me about it. No, really … I’ve been thinking about Shannon. The whole suicide thing seems, well, off—not right. It doesn’t seem like her. You really didn’t know her, did you? Maybe I should talk to Hannah about it this afternoon, see if she could find out more—”
“Oh, Lily, I wish you wouldn’t, not right now!” Betty broke in. “Hannah has so much on her plate with all the packing, moving, her new job. Could you just let it go for awhile? You could talk to her later. Just don’t bring it up now—she’d start worrying about that, too, on top of everything else! I think it’s hard enough to think about suicide without adding that it may be something else.”
“Sure, yeah, I understand. I realize Hannah has her hands full. Just some ideas on my part, that’s all. It’ll wait,” I said. But I knew my own mind wouldn’t wait.
“Thanks, Toots. I just worry about her, you know? So much is going on,” Betty answered as she gathered up the herbs and tomatoes I’d picked for lunch. I then made sure that I carefully secured the garden gate before heading inside.
A dog of mischief, Patsy Cline could not be trusted in dirt, particularly nice and soft garden dirt. Her history included digging up eight raised garden beds—destroying eight almost-ready-to-harvest raised garden beds—one night in Santa Fe when I was late coming home from the Opera. She seemed to have an internal clock that determined when I should be home, and if I wasn’t, she’d make me wish I had been. If she really wanted to, I was sure she could get in the present garden and destroy it, but she had decided that she would not, for now.
Betty set up lawn chairs under the trees while I cleaned the produce inside, and then I put on some Hoyt Axton and Doc Watson bluegrass, and turned up the outdoor speakers. I returned to the yard through an open garage door—one of four—that led from the house onto the back porch, a convenience left over from the old freight depot days. When they were all open, it was as if the outside was inside, and perfect for someone who preferred to be outside rather than inside.
We sat back and watched as the morning sun flooded the red brick walls of the depot with rosy light. An aggressive iridescent-green hummingbird buzzed us a couple of times on his way to nectar, and Betty whooped in surprise. A breeze blew from the river, and I could smell the damp soil of the banks, the verdant riparian vegetation. And we sat there and enjoyed it all morning, doing a bunch of nothing.