Dante Johnson's Arc

Chapter 6 of 7

The photograph sat on Dante's kitchen table all week. He had cried for his mother in the plaza. He had spoken the words. But he still had nothing to hold the grief, no place to set it down. Each morning he looked at the photo and felt it float loose inside him. A wound opened was not a wound healed. He needed to mark her death with something real. Charity knocked on Saturday with coffee and a question. "You've been weird," she said. "Weirder than normal. Talk." Dante set the photo in front of her. "I never buried her anywhere I can visit. Her ashes are in a box in my closet. I kept telling myself I'd do it right someday." He stopped. "I don't even know what right means." Charity studied the photo, then him. "So pick a spot. Something that lasts." She drummed her fingers once and went still. "What did she love?" "Her garden. She grew everything." His throat tightened. "She said a tree outlives the person who plants it. That's the point." "Then plant one." Charity said it like it was simple. Maybe it was. They drove to a nursery outside town. Dante walked the rows twice. Then he stopped at an old olive tree, its trunk twisted and gray, its roots thick as rope. The leaves showed silver when the wind turned them. It looked like it had survived things. "This one," he said. They planted it in his yard that afternoon. Dante dug the hole himself. His hands blistered and he did not stop. Charity held the trunk steady while he filled the soil. When the tree stood on its own, he went inside and brought out the box of ashes. His hands shook. He watched them shake and did not hide it. He poured the ashes into the soil at the roots, a slow gray stream. The old reflex rose, the joke, the smile. He let it pass. "Her name was Ruth," he said. "She liked loud music and bad weather. She held my hand in that clinic and told me not to be scared." His voice broke clean through. "I'm sorry I never did this. I'm doing it now." Charity stood beside him. She did not fill the silence. She took his blistered hand in hers. Hers were steady, like always. Dante pressed the last of the soil flat. He breathed, and the grief that had floated loose for six months finally settled somewhere. It had a place now. He could come stand here. He could talk to her. "It'll be here longer than me," he said. "Yeah," Charity said. "That's the whole idea." Dante looked at her. He had shown her the wound, then let her watch him tend it. There was no hiding left between them. And he understood, standing in the dirt, that she was the one he wanted to tell everything. The whole story. Even the person he pushed away before her.