My father let out a deep sigh and whispered, “We've discussed this so many times, Trina. In the end you always agree that keeping him at Greenhaven is the right thing to do.”
I wanted to say, Wait! What are you talking about?
Who
are you talking about? But the conversation was flying so fast and furious that I couldn't seem to break in, and it wasn't long before they were bickering so badly that it was almost like I wasn't there.
Then in the back of my mind, it clicked. Everything clicked. It was my dad's brother they were talking about. My uncle. David.
To me Uncle David was only a name. Someone my parents had explained to me, but not someone I'd ever actually met. And even though I knew my dad visited him, I never knew exactly when. He never talked about it.
Dad also thought we shouldn't talk about Uncle David to others because David was retarded. “People jump to conclusions,” he'd told me. “They assume that, by association, something must also be wrong with you. Trust me, I know.”
So we didn't talk about it. Not at home, not with friends. It was almost like there was no Uncle David.
Until now. Now he felt larger than life, and I could tell from their argument that he was the reason we didn't have our own house; he was the reason we didn't have nice cars or fancy things. He was the reason there always seemed to be a cloud of weariness hanging over my parents.
Why did I have to bring up the yard in the first place? I'd never seen my parents fight like this. Ever. I wanted to grab them and say, Stop it! Stop it! You love each other! You do! But I just sat there with tears streaming down my face.
My mother stopped suddenly and whispered, “We should not be doing this in front of her!”
“I'm sorry, Julianna,” my dad said, then reached over and held my forearm. “Don't cry. None of this is your fault. We'll work it out, I promise we will.”
My mother tried to laugh through her tears, saying, “We always have, and we always will.”
That night my parents came into my room and talked to me, one at a time. My father talked about his brother and how much he loved him and how he'd promised his parents he'd always take care of him. My mother talked about how much she loved my father for his strength and kind heart, about dreams and reality, and the need to count your blessings. And she made me cry all over again when she kissed me goodnight and whispered that of all her many blessings, I was her best and brightest.
I felt sorry for my father. I felt sorry for my mother. But most of all I felt lucky for me that they were mine.
And in the morning, as I rode my rusty bike out the driveway to school, I promised myself that when I got home, I'd tackle the yard. Rented or not, this was our home, and I was going to help make living here better.
As it turns out, this was easier thought than done. First it took me half an hour of rummaging through the garage to find a hammer and a box of nails, a saw, and some pruners. Then it took another half hour of standing around to figure out just
where to start. The actual yard was just clumps of weeds, but what about the bordering shrubs? Should I dig them up, or prune them way back?
Were
they shrubs, or just overgrown weeds? And what about the fence? Should I knock it down, or rebuild it? Maybe I should take out the front end entirely and use the wood to fix up the sides.
The longer I looked around, the more I felt like forgetting the whole thing. Why bother? It wasn't our property. Mr. Finnegan should be the one making repairs.
But then I remembered my mother's words from the night before. Surely, I thought, a few bushes and some dilapidated wood couldn't stop someone's best and brightest blessing! Surely not!
And with that, I picked up the clippers and got to work.
Half an hour later I was keeper of the knowledge that one bush equals many branches, and that the volume of a bush increases exponentially as it's cut and tossed into the middle of a yard. It was ridiculous! Where was I going to
put
all this stuff?
Mom came home and tried to talk me out of my mission, but I'd have none of it. Oh, no-no-no! I'd already pruned two bushes down to a respectable size, and before long she'd see— the place was going to look just dandy.
“You didn't get that stubborn streak from me,” she said, but came back outside with a glass of juice and a kiss for my cheek. Good enough for me!
By the end of that first day, what I'd made was a big mess. But if chaos is a necessary step in the organization of one's universe, then I was well on my way. At least that's what I tried to tell myself when I flopped into bed that night, dead tired.
And the next afternoon I was busily expanding the chaos of my little universe when I heard a deep voice say, “That's quite an undertaking, young lady.”
The man standing on our sidewalk was Bryce's grandfather, I knew that much. But I'd only ever seen him outside one time. All the other times I'd seen him had been through windows— either one in their sitting room or one in their car. To me he was just a dark-haired man behind glass. Having him appear on my sidewalk was like having someone from TV step through the screen and talk to you.
“I know we've seen each other from time to time,” he was saying. “I'm sorry it's taken me over a year to come introduce myself. I'm Chester Duncan, Bryce's grandfather. And you, of course, are Julianna Baker.”
He stuck out his hand, so I took off my work glove and watched my hand completely disappear inside his as we shook. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Duncan,” I said, thinking that this man was way bigger than he looked from the sitting-room window.
Then the strangest thing happened. He pulled his own work gloves and a pair of clippers from a back pocket and said, “Are you pruning all of these to the same height?”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, yes. That is what I was thinking. Although now I don't know. Do you think it would look better to just take them out?”
He shook his head and said, “They're Australian tea shrubs. They'll prune up nicely.” And with that, he put on his gloves and started clipping.
At first I didn't know what to say to this man. It was very strange to be getting his help, but from the way he was acting, it was as though I shouldn't have thought a thing of it.
Clip-clip-clip,
he went, like this was something he really enjoyed doing.
Then I remembered what Bryce had said about our yard, and suddenly I knew why he was there.
“What's the matter?” he asked, throwing his clippings into my pile. “Did I cut it down too far?”
“N-no.”
“Then why the look?” he asked. “I don't mean to make you uncomfortable. I just thought you might like a little help.”
“Well, I don't. I can do this by myself.”
He laughed and said, “Oh, I have no doubt about that,” then got back to clipping. “You see, Julianna, I read about you in the paper, and I've lived across the street from you for over a year now. It's easy to see that you're a very competent person.”
We both worked quietly for a minute, but I found myself throwing the clippings into the pile harder and harder. And before long I couldn't stand it. I just couldn't stand it! I spun on him and said, “You're here because you feel bad about the eggs, aren't you? Well, our eggs are perfectly fine! We've been eating them for nearly three years and none of us have gotten poisoned. Mrs. Stueby and Mrs. Helms seem in good health to me, too, and the fact of the matter is, if you didn't want them, you should've just told me so!”
His hands fell to his sides and he shook his head as he said, “Eggs? Poisoned? Julianna, I have no idea what you're talking about.”
Inside I was so angry and hurt and embarrassed that I didn't even feel like me. “I'm talking about the eggs that I've been bringing over to your house for more than two years— eggs that my chickens laid that I could've sold! Eggs that your
family has been throwing away!” I was shouting at him. Shouting at an adult, like I'd never shouted at anyone in my entire life.
His voice got very quiet. “I'm sorry. I don't know about any eggs. Who did you give them to?”
“Bryce!” My throat choked closed as I said his name again. “Bryce.”
Mr. Duncan nodded slowly and said, “Well,” then went back to pruning his bush. “That probably explains it.”
“What do you mean?”
He sighed. “The boy still has a ways to go.”
I just stared at him, not trusting myself with the words sizzling on my tongue.
“Oh, he's a very handsome boy, there's no denying that,” he said with a frown. Then he snapped a branch and added, “The spitting image of his father.”
I shook my head. “Why are you over here, Mr. Duncan? If you don't think I need the help and you're not feeling bad about the eggs, then why would you do this?”
“Honestly?”
I just looked at him, straight in the eye.
He nodded, then said, “Because you remind me of my wife.”
“Your wife?”
“That's right.” He gave me a little smile and said, “Renée would've sat up in that tree with you. She would've sat there all night.”
And with those two sentences, my anger vanished. “Really?”
“Absolutely.”
“She's … she died?”
He nodded. “And I miss her terribly.” He tossed a branch into the heap and chuckled. “There's nothing like a head-strong woman to make you happy to be alive.”
The last thing in the world I expected was to become friends with Bryce's grandfather. But by dinnertime I knew so much about him and his wife and the adventures they'd had together that it seemed like I'd known him for a very long time. Plus, all his stories made the work seem easy. When I went in for the night, the bushes were all pruned back, and except for the enormous heap in the center of the yard, things were already looking a whole lot better.
The next day he was back. And when I smiled and said, “Hi, Mr. Duncan,” he smiled back and said, “Call me Chet, won't you?” He looked at the hammer in my hand and said, “I take it we're starting on the fence today?”
Chet taught me how to plumb a line for the pickets, how to hold a hammer down on the end of the handle instead of choking up on it, how to calculate an adjusted spacing for the pickets, and how to use a level to get the wood exactly vertical. We worked on the fence for days, and the whole time we worked we talked. It wasn't just about his wife, either. He wanted to know about the sycamore tree and seemed to understand exactly what I meant when I told about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. “It's that way with people, too,” he said, “only with people it's sometimes that the whole is
less
than the sum of the parts.”
I thought that was pretty interesting. And the next day during school I looked around at the people I'd known since elementary school, trying to figure out if they were more or
less than the sum of their parts. Chet was right. A lot of them were less.
Top of the list, of course, was Shelly Stalls. To look at her, you'd think she had everything, but there's not much solid underneath her Mount Everest hair. And even though she's like a black hole at sucking people in, it doesn't take them long to figure out that being friends with her requires fanning the flames of a wildfire ego.
But of all my classmates, the one person I couldn't seem to place was Bryce. Until recently I'd have said with absolute certainty that he was greater—far greater—than the sum of his parts. What he did to my heart was sheer, inexplicable magic.
But inexplicable was the operative word here. And as I looked across the room at him during math, I couldn't help feeling crushed all over again about how he'd thrown out my eggs. What kind of person would do that?
Then he looked my way and smiled, and my heart lurched. But I was mad at myself for it. How could I still feel this way after what he'd done?
I avoided him the rest of the day, but by the end of school there was a tornado inside me, tearing me up from one end to the other. I jumped on my bike and rode home faster than I ever had before. The right pedal clanked against the chain guard, and the whole bike rattled and squeaked, threatening to collapse into a pile of rusty parts.
The tornado, however, was still going strong when I skidded to a halt in our driveway. So I transferred pedal power into painting power. I pried open the gallon of Navajo White my dad had bought me and started slopping paint around.
Chet appeared about ten minutes later. “My,” he laughed, “you've got an enviable amount of energy today, don't you?”
“No,” I said, brushing back some hair with the back of my hand, “I'm just mad.”
He produced his own brush and an empty coffee can. “Uhoh. Who at?”
“Myself!”
“Oh, that's a tough one. Did you do poorly on a test?”
“No! I …” I turned to him and said, “How did you fall in love with your wife?”
He poured some Navajo White into his can and smiled. “Ah,” he said. “Boy problems.”
“I do not have boy problems!”
He hesitated but didn't argue. Instead, he said, “I fell in love with her by mistake.”
“By mistake? What do you mean?”
“I didn't intend to. At the time I was engaged to somebody else, and in no position to fall in love. Fortunately for me I saw how blind I'd been before it was too late.”
“Blind?”
“Yes. My fiancée was very beautiful. She had the most magnificent brown eyes, and skin like an angel. And for a time all I could see was her beauty. But then … well, let's just say I discovered she wasn't a fraction of the person Renée was.” He dipped his brush in the coffee can and stroked a picket with paint. “It's easy to look back and see it, and it's easy to give the advice, but the sad fact is, most people don't look beneath the surface until it's too late.”
We were quiet a minute, but I could see Chet thinking. And from the furrow in his brow, I knew it had nothing to
do with my problems. “I'm … I'm sorry I brought up your wife,” I said.
“Oh, don't be, that's all right.” He shook his head and tried on a smile. “Besides, I wasn't thinking of Renée. I was thinking of someone else. Someone who's never been able to look beneath the surface. At this point I don't suppose I even want her to.”
Who was he talking about? I wanted to know! But I felt it would be crossing some line to ask, so we painted pickets in silence. At last he turned to me and said, “Get beyond his eyes and his smile and the sheen of his hair—look at what's really there.”