Violet Evergreen's Arc

Chapter 9 of 11

Violet drove back to the motel with dirt still under her nails. She turned on the radio for the weather. The voice said a hard frost was coming down out of the north tonight. Twenty-eight degrees by dawn. She pulled off onto the shoulder and sat with the engine running. The beds were exposed. The basil would blacken in an hour. The beans would go to slime. Danny would walk out in the morning to a garden his mother had planted, and he would find it dead. The one thing they had between them was those beds. She called him. He picked up on the fourth ring. "There's a frost tonight," she said. "We have to cover the beds. All of them." "Cover them with what?" "I'll bring what I have. Do you have old blankets? Sheets. Anything." "I have blankets." "Pull them out. I'm coming back." She drove to the hardware store on the edge of town and made it in ten minutes before close. She walked the aisles until she found what she wanted: a tight roll of pale garden cloth, the kind she stocked at her own greenhouse every October. She bought two. She bought clear plastic sheeting and a bundle of stakes. Danny met her in the driveway. He had a stack of quilts under one arm. The sky was already cold. She handed him a roll and kept one. "Frost cloth," she said. "It breathes. Plastic alone will burn them where it touches." They worked the beds in order. She showed him how to drive a stake at each corner so the cloth stayed off the leaves. He held the roll while she cut. They laid the pale cloth over the basil and the beans and the carrots and the dill. They tucked the edges under the wood and weighted them with stones from the fence line. Over the cloth they spread the quilts and the clear plastic. Her fingers went numb. His did too. They came to the weedy bed last. Nothing in it worth saving. They covered it anyway. By the time they finished, the grass crunched under their boots. Danny stood at the end of the row and looked at what they had done. Six long white shapes in the dark, staked and tucked and weighted. "Come inside," he said. "You can't drive back in this." She followed him in. He put a kettle on. He set out two mugs without asking what she wanted. He pulled a folded quilt off the back of the couch and handed it to her. "Spare room's made up," he said. "It has been since yesterday." She took the quilt. She did not ask him what he meant by since yesterday. She sat on the couch and held the mug in both hands and felt the heat come back into her fingers. Outside, the beds held. Inside, she was staying the night.