Lilian

When I first got out of college, it was mid-winter. Six months ahead of schedule, I was tired and I wanted out, so I gathered up my credits, changed my second major into a minor, and headed home to Seattle without a cap or gown.

About a month later, my mom's sympathy was worn out and I had to find some way to “contribute,” as she put it. I told her that I was sending out resumes and I'd eventually find something -that I'd heard of people submitting thousands before they heard back from anyone, and that I was still burnt out and just wanted to rest up a bit and get my head on straight.

“You need to cover your loan payments plus gas and internet,” she told me. “I won't be your landlord, but come on.”

And that was fair.

Finding a job outside of my field wasn't particularly difficult, as it turned out. I searched Craigslist for all of ten minutes before spotting a “Caretaker- Help Wanted” posting that described an opportunity a few miles down the road for fifteen dollars an hour (to start) which required the ability to lift fifty pounds and operate motor equipment. Thirty days indoors hadn't quite sapped me of the former capability, and I'd mowed lawns and maintained gardens in high school.

I responded.

A week later I was pruning pear trees and clipping ferns, hauling the debris up a steep incline to the compost heap at the north end of the property with a rusty John Deere riding tractor that creaked its way up the slope and rumbled violently back down after every deposit. One day, with a resounding crack that sounded like a gunshot and set my hair on end, the drive belt snapped and I had to meet with my employer to get a new one.

I'd never met Carl in person before that. He'd communicated clearly and eloquently that his old caretaker had resigned and he needed someone who knew “what's what” and “where to put things,” but the dialogue was always through text. On my first day, he'd left the clippers out with a neat, handwritten note beside them detailing how to start the tractor, but I'd never seen him, apart from a shadow moving around the upper floor of the house from time to time, when the sun shone through the windows just right.

I'll admit I was nervous when I trundled down the slope -the broken belt in hand- and rapped on his double oaken front door. I was sure I'd done nothing wrong, but I still felt responsible, somehow.

I stood there for a moment alone before the three-story Colonial house, the shade of Pacific pines hanging dread over me as I pictured the coming scolding. But none came. My anticipation was misplaced; Carl -frailer than I'd imagined, and shorter- opened the door, glanced once at me and then at the belt, grunted as though he'd half-expected this, and said: “Wheelbarrow's around the side.”

“Is it fixable?” I asked, before I could help myself.

Carl cocked one eyebrow. “It'll take a week or two. It happens.”

“Oh, okay.”

He took the belt gingerly from me and stepped inside again and that was that. I found the wheelbarrow tucked beneath a tarp beside the house and resumed my task: cutting, piling, hauling.

That went on for a week until, behind the scenes, the repairman came and sorted the belt out. A new note met me as I arrived one day, handwritten: Fixed. And it was like no accident had ever happened.

Carl had twenty-seven pear trees around the yard, and it took me two more weeks to trim them all. When I'd finished, and when I'd run out of ferns to manicure, I shot him a text asking what new work needed my attention.

“Clean out the rosebushes,” came the command. “Don't kill the new ones, just clear out the dead.”

And I got to it. My predecessor had done a good job in years past of manicuring the roses that ringed the house around the back, and it wasn't hard to sort out the old, browning stalks from the living green ones. I pricked myself a few times, trying not to swear too loud as I was within Carl's earshot, but before long, I was almost done.

As I worked around to the last set of bushes (right beside the house at that point; I had to bite my tongue once or twice when my hand slipped), I came to a spot beneath the kitchen window where the roses stood over a small indentation in the ground. A few pipes rose from gravel there to a gas meter, and I was careful not to disturb it. But as I was leaning over to cut a particularly pesky stalk, something caught my eye.

There, discarded in the indentation, was a little notebook, black and bound in leather -peeking out, half-buried.

I glanced around, suddenly feeling as though I was somewhere I shouldn't be, and that this was a forbidden discovery. But Carl was either out or sitting somewhere upstairs in silence, and I was alone. So, careful not to get stabbed again, I leaned around the bush and, straining as far as I could reach, dug the notebook out.

I was surprised at just how intact it was. I guess between the indentation and the angle of the roof overhead, not much rain trickled down to damage it. The paper was water-stained, but thumbing through it, I found writing very much intact: pages and pages of the same neat font through which I'd been receiving my instructions. I flipped to the front page and found Carl's written dedication: “To Lilian, the flower of my garden.”

I'm still not sure why I pocketed the notebook that day. I should have just walked over and knocked on Carl's door again rather than make off with a piece of his privacy. But I think I was afraid I'd get in trouble for having found it -that somehow it'd be my fault it was lost in the first place, or something, and so I didn't. I took it home.

I got back a little after six that evening. Mom was still at work, and I poured myself a bowl of Special K and went upstairs.

By that point, I'd spent far more time at college than “home.” My mom had moved out here along with her job mid-way through my sophomore year, and I'd stayed with her in the summers and over winter breaks, but overall, my dorm was my real room; here I was on vacation, some kind of lonely sabbatical.

I sat at my desk for a little bit, enclosed within four white walls -the only color in the space straining through my laptop screen- and then, eventually, curiosity won me over. I opened the notebook again.

It was a journal, more or less. An old one. The earliest entry I found was dated 3/27/83, describing some workplace dispute which was later resolved, and how Carl had felt the need to write about it.

But most of the entries had to do with Lilian.

4/16/93

Happy Birthday, sweetheart. 50's a big one, and I'm scared to say it to your face, so I figured I'd write it here for when you dig through this over the weekend to find out what I said about you.

It might be a bit much to ask for 17 more years of being yours, but I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Most of the entries were regarding some kind of landmark event: a note to Lilian on their fifth anniversary; an entry dated 8/16/87 that described relocating from Long Island to our dream home here; a passage about the birth of their first grandson. It was all personal, and sincere, and I felt strange reading it, but oddly not unwelcome; most of it was written as though in letters, and I found myself their audience.

7/5/01

Lauren and David and the kids just left. Carter's getting so tall, and Ashley reminds me of you. I know I've said that to you about a hundred times by now, but I'll put it here permanently, so there's no confusion.

9/15/03

I watched you plant the tulips this afternoon when you thought I wasn't looking. I was not grumpy. I've come to expect the Giants losing by now, and I'm sorry I snapped at you. I didn't mean it.

I could never be grumpy with you around, even if I'm not always good about it. I used to wonder if I'd ever be happy, and then I met you.

A tear slipped down my nose and added a new water-stain beside the final line as I wiped my eyes. I hadn't noticed I was crying until then. I sniffed and turned another page.

5/24/06

Happy Anniversary. I never thought any of this was in the cards for me, and I'm so happy every day that you keep proving me wrong. I love you.

I felt like I knew what was coming. There weren't many entries left. And then:

2/16/10

I said goodbye to you today.

I don't know what else to say.

And that was it. Seven years and a few empty pages afterward. One or two scribbled-out lines, like he'd tried to start another entry, but there it stopped.

I sat for a while, afterward. I was ashamed I'd read it, and also not. It felt like I was supposed to. I'm still not sure.

At seven-thirty, mom got back and I went downstairs and we ate dinner quietly together, and I didn't mention it.

The next day, I deliberated over explaining how I'd found the notebook. I had to give it back. I wasn't going to hide it.

I decided to keep it vague. I knocked on the door and muttered something like “I found this over there” when Carl answered. And he looked at me and I'll never forget how his face broke in front of me, like he was a different person, and how tears welled up in his eyes and how he seemed embarrassed and how I tried to calm him down and promised that it was okay and that I understood even as he repeated “thank you, thank you, thank you.”

I never let on that I'd read any of it, but I think he assumed I had. We talked a lot over those next few months, about a lot of things. He mentioned Lilian and the grandkids, and I even met a few of them one weekend around the 4th when they came to visit. And we talked about my dad.

And then I got an office job in September, and I left. We said our goodbyes, and I stayed long enough to train the next kid he found to help out, and that was it. I kept his number, and we ran into each other once or twice in town and talked like we weren't fifty years apart.

And Carl died last summer, and I went to the funeral. It was calm and graceful, and his son David delivered a hearty epitaph about his father's sense of humor and how he'd never met a better man. And there were tears shed, and mine among them, but mostly it was a warm occasion, full of a family I'd found myself attached to out of circumstance -a little knob on a tree-trunk that'd been growing years before me and would continue upward long after.

And when his estate -the total of his firm he'd divvied up- was calculated, my name was on the ledger. Carl left me twenty thousand dollars for taking his job and finding Lilian where he'd misplaced her. And I was happy doing it for just fifteen.