May Flower

I told Lidia I was only here for the week.

She lives two doors down in Lakewood, the house with the blue shutters that never shut right. She stopped me on the hill with my groceries and asked if I knew how to plant tomatoes.

I said no.

She said perfect.

We did it on Tuesday because the nursery in Cleveland had the seedlings in. San Marzano, she told the boy, like she was ordering wine. She carried them home in a grocery bag and set them on her kitchen table next to a bowl of lemons.

Her forearm had a bruise the size of a plum. Purple at the center, yellow at the edges. I stared too long.

She caught me. "Look," she said. "My May flower. It blooms every year when I start the garden."

I asked if she fell.

She waved me off. "Blood gets thin. My husband used to say I bruise like fruit."

He's been dead eleven years. She still says "used to say" like it's present tense.

We knelt in her little plot behind the house. The soil was cold and smelled of iron. Lake wind came over the wall and made the young leaves shiver. She showed me how deep, how to pinch the lower leaves, how to pat the earth down firm but not hard.

"Like tucking in a child," she said. "You don't smother."

She talked the whole time. About the year the lake froze, about her son in Columbus who calls on Sundays, about how tomatoes need swear words to grow sweet. I laughed and got dirt under my nails.

When we finished, six plants in a crooked row, she sat back on an overturned bucket and looked at her arm again.

"It will turn green before it goes," she said.

I thought she meant the bruise. Then I realized she meant her.

I came for a week. It's Thursday and I'm still watering her tomatoes. I don't know how to tell her I'm leaving on Saturday. Maybe I won't.