- Sheri McGuinn
- Feb 28, 2019
- 5 min read
Updated: Dec 14, 2020
Warped Tales – be warned. As a child I read piles of books filled with short stories – the complete works of Poe, stories from the Twilight Zone, collections from Hitchcock, etc. As an adult, thrillers rule. This is that kind of story, in six parts.
Anne Davenport’s home was going to be put on the market in June.
John started fixing things before his March retirement, then they had to “de-clutter” to satisfy the realtor and down-size dramatically because the Arizona cabin he’d bought without consulting Anne was a quarter the size of their house in New York. By the end of May, they’d had four garage sales and donated $17,000 of unsold items to charity. Some were family heirlooms that had been sitting in the attic since his mother passed away. Anne had never dared get rid of them before, but John was ready to get rid of everything now. He was ready to move on to a new life.
Anne Davenport, however, did not want to leave the garden that defined her after more than two decades of work, the garden where she could still feel the presence of their deceased son.
When she realized John’s decision was final, she considered filing for divorce. Carefully vague questions led her to volunteer at a woman’s shelter where there were books she could read without any record of her borrowing them. Her problem was that John had done nothing that qualified as “fault” and would never agree to a “no-fault” divorce. She knew this without asking. He’d spoken scornfully of workmates who divorced.
And even if he did agree, everything she read and heard indicated that divorce was a financially disastrous move for both parties. Since John had always handled everything to do with finances, she’d have no clue if he hid assets, either. Her only hope was that the house would not sell and John would let her continue to live in it while he went off to Arizona.
Unfortunately, the realtor caught on to Anne’s subtle attempts to scare off potential buyers and refused to show the house in her presence anymore. So Anne was depending on prayer and a slump in the real estate market to keep her in her home. As a show of faith, she went ahead and planted a blueberry bush on John Jr.’s birthday – blueberries had been his favorite, and were small enough for her to plant on her own. When Memorial Day Weekend arrived with no offers in sight, she went ahead and planted her vegetable garden, even though that annoyed John.
Ironically, it was her established garden and the prospect of fresh tomatoes that made the buyers choose Anne’s home from dozens of houses they’d seen.
The deal closed in late July, so Anne got to harvest her early crops – asparagus, strawberries, rhubarb, peas, a few tomatoes and summer squash, and greens, of course. The best sweet corn was Silver Queen, though; it didn’t ripen until fall. Hopefully the new owners appreciated it. There was no way of knowing, really; those people would think she was odd if she wrote to ask about the corn. She’d left detailed instructions on the garden’s care. She hoped they maintained it as religiously as she had.
John sold his Toyota and wanted to sell her battered little pickup before they moved. “All we’ll need is the Mustang. There won’t be that much driving to do, and there’s a small local airport where we can park it safely and fly into Phoenix international whenever we travel.”
“You won’t want to carry plants and fertilizer in your car.” That ‘64 Mustang was his real baby.
“There’s no garden,” he countered. “I told you that. It’s tall pines and clay soil.”
“That’s all the more reason to have the truck. I’ll probably have to bring in some good dirt as well as fertilizer.”
“You’re not listening!” he shouted. “Since when did you get so stubborn and unreasonable? It’s not the least bit attractive.”
Would that qualify as verbal abuse? Maybe all she had to do is show some backbone and he’d give her grounds for divorce – even if that meant moving to Arizona. She’d checked. Their laws were similar. But she needed to know how much money there was, whether it was enough to make divorce an option.
At least the truck was hers. The title was in her name; he couldn’t make her sell it. She’d still have the freedom to come and go as she pleased, without having to beg permission to take his car.
The calendar turned to August as she drove her pickup to the White Mountains of Arizona, following John as he drove a small rental truck with the few pieces of furniture they’d kept, towing his vintage Mustang on a trailer. Anne had never been west of the Mississippi. She’d wanted to stop in St. Louis, to go up into the great arch there and get closer to the mighty river, but John had no interest in wasting time sightseeing.
As they got farther west, the vast empty spaces loved depressed her.
But she cheered up when they got to the cabin. It was actually a small house with a deck that made it look like a cabin, and it was on the edge of town, not in the middle of nowhere as she’d expected. It looked cozy and it was on a large lot with Ponderosa pines and scrubby little trees that had to be some kind of oak, based on the shape of their leaves. There was no lawn, just dirt, rocks, and weeds.
She envisioned transforming it as she had their huge yard back home.
The first full day there, she discovered she could walk downtown to the Safeway supermarket, the library, the movie theater, and the chamber of commerce. She got a library card and borrowed the book the reading club was reading. She asked for directions to a nursery and found there were two close by – she visited both and asked a million questions.
John had never been a joiner. He spent much of his time fishing or hunting, and he made a short list of minor repairs and maintenance the cabin required. The lack of a lawn under the tall pines was one of the features John had found most attractive. The small oaks created piles of leaves to burn, but that was something they did together. Anne roped him into helping her build her raised beds – the timbers were too large for her to handle alone, but he certainly didn’t want her wasting money hiring someone when he was right there.
She’d rather hoped he’d be loudly abusive about it where neighbors could hear, but he just grumbled, “Anything you plant will die when we travel.”
“I won’t be planting anything in these until spring, but it’s easier to build the raised beds now, while the ground is dry and firm. The only things I’ll plant this fall are roses and berries along the front fence.”
“Why do you want to mess with all that?” he’d complained. “As soon as I get this place patched up, we’re going to do some traveling. That stuff won’t survive if we’re gone half the time.”
“They should get plenty of water from winter snows, even when we travel. That’s when you want to travel, right?” she asked sweetly, but tuned out whatever he said next.
She waited patiently for the right time for her next step.
