I watched for a minute or so, then started to help. With the two of us pulling, it was a little easier, and the secondweed came up quickly. We moved on to a third. Then a fourth. Then, somehow, an hour passed without a single word being spoken. Marian worked in another part of the garden, tilling a patch of already weeded soil. Beneath some of the weeds we pulled up were some asparagus and what looked like the beginning of a zucchini plant.
As the sun got hotter, Daniel took off his T-shirt and put it over his head like a turban. I rolled up the sleeves of my V-neck until I could feel the heat on the tops of my shoulders. I’m not sure how long we were out there, but eventually when we had half the garden weeded, and the sun was too much to bear, Daniel and I sat down in a small patch of shade nearby.
Marian ducked into the house and reappeared with a pitcher of lemonade. It was full of ice, and sweating on the sides, and it was the best lemonade I’ve ever had. I chugged my first glass, but then tried to savor the second. We sat there and drank until the pitcher was empty. Then, finally, Marian spoke.
“This was our project together,” she said. “Me and Jonah’s.”
Daniel and I both watched her.
“In high school he read this book about urban homesteading. The previous owners had a garden here. I wasalways too busy. But when Jonah got interested in something, he did not do it halfway. In weeks, he was trading seeds with people in the neighborhood. And guess who got conscripted to help? I did most of the planting actually. He made plans on his computer. This intricate blueprint with all the spacing mapped out.”
She smiled, but her eyes seemed to strain against it.
“He stopped asking about it after I took him to college, though. That was the first sign, I think, that things were going wrong again. I kept the garden up at first, so it would look good when he got home, but then when he didn’t seem to care, I let it go.”
Her gaze lingered on the plot of dirt and scrubby vegetables. Then it gradually turned back to me. She studied my face for a moment.
“You’re Tess,” she said.
“How did you know that?”
“He told me about you. He didn’t talk about girls very often, but he mentioned you. I knew it was you the moment you showed up. You’re just as pretty as he said.”
I felt my face turning red.
“And you’re Daniel,” she said.
He nodded.
“Where did you guys come from?” she asked.
“Minnesota,” I said. “And outside Chicago.”
If she thought anything of these places, she didn’t say. She just took one last drink from her lemonade and swirled the ice around in her glass.
“And you came here because you’re not sure you really knew him,” she said. “Is that it?”
We were both silent.
“Well,” she said. “You’ll have to join the club.”
She got up then to go inside. Daniel and I followed, and instead of shooing us away, she held the door open as we walked in. The inside of the house was cluttered, but not messy. There were books about fad diets and self-help stacked haphazardly on the shelves. It smelled like scented candles, something citrusy. It was all perfectly nice, but the living room felt spare to me for some reason. Eventually I realized it was because there were no family pictures.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Marian said after a moment. “I’m not sure I knew him completely, either. I still couldn’t tell you how things got so bad. He had the support of his family—his grandparents and me. He had counseling. He had medication. I made sure he saw someone at school. I checked in as much as I could. In the end, I think it was his own sense of shame more than anything else.”
“Shame?” I said.
“He felt like he was deficient ever since he got his diagnosis of depression and anxiety in the eighth grade. He used to lie to his friends when he missed school. He’d say he had other conditions. Mono. Asthma. The flu. He wanted to be cured. Just having a good day or a good week wasn’t enough. He was so hard on himself. Instead of learning to embrace who he was, he tried to be another person entirely. Someone flawless. If he was feeling less than perfect, he wouldn’t let anyone see him. His friends at school only knew him as this smart, funny guy. They didn’t know anything else.”
“Neither did I,” I said.
She nodded.
“It probably made him happy,” said Marian. “To be his best self with you. To be who he wanted to be online like that.”
She closed her eyes. And it seemed like she was about to cry. Daniel sensed this and I watched his body tighten up.
“What can you tell us about Sicily?” he asked quickly.
