Front Yard (12 page)

“No!” said everyone in unison.

“Which means, what, they're getting foreclosed on?” said Nan.

“Precisely,” Jane said.

“Couldn't happen to a nicer couple,” said Nan. “They were the sourest, rudest, slowest, most un-neighborly people in the neighborhood.”

“Isn't that the truth,” said Jane. “When we went to the door last year campaigning for Pete Beinderschmidt, they just stood in front of the window staring out at us like that couple in the
American Gothic
painting. Then, unlike the couple in the
American Gothic
painting, old Grunion flipped us the bird. Can you believe it!”

The women tittered as the men almost instantly lost interest in the Grunions' problems and resumed their baseball chatter.

“I can believe it,” Juanita said. “When the kids went trick-or-treating there once, they'd posted a sign on the door. It said, ‘Trick-or-Treaters: Go to Hell!' Ha-ha!”

“And you know, now that I think of it, I haven't seen any lights on over there in weeks,” Nan said. “Just hadn't really noticed, we've been so busy with our yardwork.”

What followed was the typical detour into gardening talk that always happened around this time of year. Mostly, that involved Jane and Juanita fawning all over the Fremonts' latest efforts, which they could only hope to reproduce as poor facsimiles on a much smaller scale. George opened another bottle of Sagelands, which he duly poured out with that little twist of the wrist. Smokestack Gaines came off the bench to deliver a three-run, eighth-inning jack in a losing effort.

As the postgame analysis droned on, Nan brought out the ice water, and the men settled into their semi-silent disgust at having to digest another galling Muskies loss. The midsummer dusk began to settle over the backyard in its dawdling way. A few lightning bugs flickered. A cardinal perched on the telephone wire, delivered a few loud chirps, then settled in at the backyard feeder for a late-evening snack. Then, came the hems and exchanged glances that signaled it was time to go.

“Before everyone leaves and before we lose our light, we want to show you something,” said Nan. “This is truly weird.”

Never averse to seeing something truly weird before heading home for a late dinner and early bedtime, the McCandlesses and Winthrops rose slowly to follow Nan and George, who were striding purposefully toward their white oak.

“Oh, what's this?” said Jane, stooping over to examine the new fairy house as they approached the gate through the fence, and, in doing so, bringing the whole procession to a standstill.

“Why, yes,” said Juanita, kneeling to study the model structure. “Isn't that precious! A little bit of gardening potpourri you just added this year?”

The men, afflicted by various knee and back ailments, and generally unwilling to test out their muscular flexibility to indulge the odd points of interest so beguiling to the feminine eye, remained standing, silently shifting their weight from one leg to the other.

“Oh, ha-ha, that's our new fairy house,” Nan said. “Yes, a fairy house.”

“These are quite the trend these days,” said Jane. “I read an article on them in the
Inquirer
's variety section a month or so ago. Where'd you get it?”

“It was a gift from Dr. Phyllis Sproot,” said Nan tartly. “You might remember her as the fomenter of some of our troubles last year.”

Jane and Juanita laughed. “You're hoping to attract fairies this year?” Jane said.

“Yes, to keep your talking flowers company?” Juanita added.

Nan chuckled. “For the record, I do not believe in fairies, or any similar superstitions. We are good Lutherans, and don't subscribe to most pagan beliefs. Flowers and other plants, however, are living, sentient beings. Making contact with them is nothing more than trying to communicate with any other non-English speaking organism . . . somebody from Portugal, for instance.”

Juanita and Jane smiled. They supposed someone as adept at the craft of gardening as Nan Fremont was allowed some idiosyncrasies, even as they wondered whether it might be a sign of incipient mental illness. They had both pledged to watch Nan carefully for any telltale signs of any further deterioration.

“Well, if it's from that Dr. Sproot, you'd better watch out,” Juanita said. “It might be put here to collect little midget demons instead of fairies.”

Now standing at the foot of the white oak, the Fremonts, McCandlesses, and Winthrops stared up into a blizzard of falling, swirling, crinkled brown leaves.

“Musta been hit by lightning,” Steve said. “One strike is all it takes. You might not have even heard the storm. Man, that's a huge scar. Good thing you guys weren't standing here when
that
happened.”

“Well, then, that would have been the quietest thunderstorm in recorded history,” Nan said. “I always wake up to thunderstorms.”

“Me too,” said George. “Only thing I can think of is it happened last year. We've only had showers and gentle rains this year. Or maybe even the year before. But I would have noticed that a long time ago.”

“Yes, George notices things like that,” said Nan. “Well, we'll have to cut it down. Can't be letting a dead tree spoil all our gardening efforts. Look at it this way: It's going to let a little more light in on the grass back here. Though I hope it won't let too much light in on the astilbes and Virginia bluebells. I just planted those this year. They like the shade.”

As they walked back toward the patio, George was worrying about the cost of cutting down a tree, dragging it down to the street, and disposing of it. Why, for a big tree like that so far from the street, it would probably cost $2,000, conservatively. And where would he come up with that kind of money? George glanced at Nan nervously. Too bad she didn't have the acumen to handle the family budget. About the only skill she had with money was spending it. And once he filled her in on the latest dire straits they were in, she would light into him like a lacewing larvae into a mealybug.

The ugly fact of the matter was that the Burdick's first-prize money was running out fast and the Fremont family finances had once again turned precarious.

George and Nan still had a few unreliable sources of income. George authored greeting card doggerel, with a special emphasis on deaths, terminal illnesses, and the loss of favorite pets. His work tended to rise and fall with the mortality rate. That would be supplemented on occasion by the need for something fresh and contemporary for the busy holiday seasons.

He was also an occasional inventor. His once-in-a-lifetime success was the Whirl-a-Gig Bubble Blower, which had a brief fling with fame in the last decade before being recalled because of a defective part that could painfully pinch a child's pinkie. No problem for George; he had already been paid $350,000 by Dum-de-Dum Novelties for the rights to the toy, which made a minor comeback once the defective part got glued on better.

That bonanza had allowed Nan and George to quit their jobs as an assistant librarian and suburban shopper editor, respectively, to concentrate on their gardening. That money was now gone.

As for Nan, she was a knitter of some note when she wasn't coaxing her little darlings up through the earth and into displays of floral magnificence. She knitted her own handbags, mostly in the winter as the gardens slept under a blanket of snow. She sold them through two major department stores—Cloud's and Deevers—which paid her a commission of 10 percent of their profit on the handbags. As Nan readily admitted, it was more a labor of love than anything else.

That $200,000 Burdick's first prize that was sustaining them now wouldn't last forever. In fact, it was in peril of barely lasting through another year.

The problem was the absence of anything approaching thrift in the Fremont family. There were the shopping expeditions immediately following the presentation of their check right there in the backyard by gardening mogul Jasper Burdick himself. Nan had considered their purchases to be restrained, but that word had a particularly subjective meaning when employed by the Fremonts.

There had been Nan's new blouses, skirts, pants, pantsuits, and shoes. This sudden interest in fashion baffled George, seeing as how he and Nan mostly dressed in an informal way suited for garden toil and patio lollygagging.

Then, there was the new garage, a real necessity considering they only had a one-car tuck-under. That had meant three cars had to be parked on the curb or on the little concrete slip that angled out from the driveway; not the sort of setup that was ideal when you had fabulous gardens to display. The new garage meant they could now hide Cullen's sunset-orange Camaro and Ellis's corroded Duster.

Mary now had to have transportation. George and Nan bought her a Ford 4x4 after she successfully argued that her newfound interest in gardening required a certain amount of hauling capacity. Then, they had splurged and bought the Avalon—brand new—for themselves.

Paying off their mortgage and its late-payment penalties cost another $30,000, but that almost didn't count because it saved them money in the long run.

There were college tuition payments for their eldest, Ellis, at Augustus-of-the-Prairies, which, though a nice college of a slightly-better-than-average reputation, still cost a bundle.

Now, there were Cullen's Dartmouth expenses. Another daunting financial prospect was on the horizon: Mary was headed to Stanford at the end of the summer.

Nan set Shirelle's stipend at $200 a week, which had made George cringe, but, heavens, wasn't she worth it?

Not counting forthcoming college payments, which generous scholarships had whittled down somewhat, that left them about $20,000 out of their original prize winnings.

There had been some extra money that George sometimes forgot to add to his haphazard and often inaccurate calculations. That was the $25,000 they had just earned for two garden-product endorsements. That lifted their total to $45,000, good enough for a year, George figured, especially with the mortgage paid off. Best case scenario: maybe even a year and a half.

Then what?

“One week till FremontFest,” said Juanita, as the two visiting couples began their descent down the pea gravel steps toward the driveway, then the street. “Can't wait!”

“We wouldn't miss it for the world,” Jane said.

“Yeah, what is this, George, the fifth year?” said Alex.

“Something like that,” said George, without enthusiasm, as he and Nan waved the Winthrops and McCandlesses into the gathering twilight.

“You
have
made all the arrangements for next week, haven't you, George? I mean, everything'll be ready, right? I'd kind of lost track of it. You sent out the invitations, didn't you? Ordered all the food? Root-beer-float fixin's? Extra chairs and all?”

“Of course,” said George, who was now adding the cost of the Fremonts' annual neighborhood bash to that of cutting down a dead tree and pumping the equivalent of the Caspian Sea on to their flowers and lawn over the course of the summer. “That's not the problem. The problem is, how the hell are we going to pay for it?”

“Oh, no,” moaned Nan, her shoulders sinking into a deep slouch. “Not again.”

“Yes, I'm afraid so, Nan-bee. We might actually start having to look for real jobs again sometime soon.... Oh, and Nan-bee?”

“George?”

“Next time you're by the tree, look about twenty feet up the trunk. There's a little protrusion there that kind of blends in. It's not part of the tree. It's the old, rusted clothesline hook Miss Price assumed broke off when she didn't see it lower down. She forgot to take about forty years of vertical growth into account.”

16

T
here's nothing like a good root beer float to perk you right up. Or to take your mind off an approaching insolvency crisis. George and Nan were never quite sure what it was that set Peter Sunset's Brew apart from so many other plenty-tasty root beers.

There were three varieties—Honey Calm, Greased Wheels, and Yellow Jacket. George and Nan stocked up on all three, though their personal favorite was Yellow Jacket. It had that bite that left you shaking your head and extremities involuntarily after each quaffed draft. Toss in a couple of gobs of Sandy-town coffee/vanilla ice cream, and the buttery-rich semi-soft chocolate chunks mixed with nuts made locally by the Wasserman sisters, and you had a confectionary delight that would send you soaring heavenward.

George and Nan made their first floats. Why stand on politeness and wait for the first guests to arrive? They then toasted each other on the successful preparations for the fifth annual FremontFest, their neighborhood fete held on whatever Saturday coincided with Nan's or George's birthday—July 1 and 7, respectively—or, barring that, on the Saturday that came between those two dates.

Guests were arriving. Here came those wonderful contrarians, Mitzi and Howard “Frip” Rodard. George and Nan chuckled watching them walk up the steps toward the patio, chattering away, contradicting each other, no doubt, at every step. They rose from their chairs to meet their first guests and lifted their frothy-topped plastic cups to them in salute.

“Root beer floats again, no doubt,” said Frip. “Don't you folks ever change your routine?”

“What routine?” said Mitzi. “There's no root beer routine. The routine around this place is wine, wine, and more wine, and gin, gin, and more gin. Root beer's non-alcoholic the last I heard. And at least it gives them a chance to steer away from incipient alcoholism.” George and Nan smiled as they gestured to the tapped kegs of root beer and ice-packed cartons of ice cream.

“What!” said Frip. “Are you implying that George and Nan are alcoholics? Well, that's not a very gracious way of greeting your hosts.”

“I'm implying nothing of the sort,” Mitzi said. “I'm saying it outright.” George and Nan drained their root beer floats with moans of satisfaction. “See what I mean? Listen to that. We're consorting with people who are instant-gratification, pleasure-seeking malachites.”

“Malachites?” said Frip.

“Malachites.”

“Ha-ha. I don't think that's the word you intended to use. You mean sybarites.”

“It is
exactly
the word I intended to use,” said Mitzi, turning for support to George and Nan, who just shrugged as they headed back to the kegs for refills. “What's so funny?”

“You are,” said Frip. “You're what's so funny with your malapropisms.”

“My
what?
”

“Your
mal-a-prop-isms.
Usage of the wrong words, usually with comic effect.”

“How dare you hold me up for ridicule! How dare you! My own husband! And in front of our dearest friends!” Here came George and Nan charging to the rescue, handing Frip and Mitzi root beer floats smoking and bubbling with foamy goodness.

“Ah, just what the doctor ordered,” said Frip after a long, head-tipping draft. “Do your stuff, magic brew!”

“What magic?” said Mitzi. “No such thing as magic.”

George and Nan sighed contentedly. They were accustomed to this Rodard routine, and, in the presence of the right crowd, it was quite harmless. Frip and Mitzi had been married as long as they had—twenty-three years. They had been married on exactly the same day, in the same year, in the same city, at churches two blocks apart, and had never even come close to divorcing as far as George and Nan could tell. Indeed, each one's contradictory nature seemed to complement the other's, strengthening the bonds of their union. Had one of them been cooing, agreeable, and ceaselessly pleasant and deferential, the marriage wouldn't have lasted three months.

“It's just an expression, dear,” Frip said. “A manner of speaking.”

Mitzi shook with contrarian ire, then knocked down a big slug of root beer.

“Ah,” she went, wiping the foam off her mouth with the back of her hand. “This has got to be the best root beer float I've ever tasted.”

“I would suppose,” said Frip. “Considering how this is the only place you've ever tasted root beer floats, and the last time you would have tasted one was right here, almost exactly a year ago, which is to say at this same FremontFest celebration.”

At this point, George and Nan were laughing out loud. Mitzi and Frip, baffled, stared at them. Then, in unison, they took long, Adam's-apple-bouncing draws from their cups. A couple of car doors slammed shut. George and Nan could see new cars parked along the Payne Avenue curb. Figures were making their way toward the patio. Some of them were approaching in a civilized manner up the pea gravel steps. Others baldly traipsed up the slope of the yard itself. Mitzi and Frip would have to find a new audience for their contrariness now. Within an hour, they would be stomping back down the steps toward home, having offended at least a dozen people and making their continued presence at FremontFest untenable.

Here were the Mikkelsons, warily ascending the steps. Their faces were etched with concerns that trickled up from some deep, unfathomable well of inexplicable woe. Deanne was carrying their ten-month-old, Sievert, Jr., as if he were a bundle of jeweled Fabergé eggs.

The Mikkelsons, modest and quiet folk even in the most engaging of circumstances, approached with solemn deliberation.

“How nice of you to come! And here's little baby Sievert. How are you, little baby?” Nan cooed and played with baby Sievert's wrinkled fingers as he did nothing but look down forlornly at the cement patio. A true Mikkelson, thought Nan; no need to worry about true parentage here.

“How's it going there, Sievert?” said George, pounding Sievert's shoulder in a show of excessive camaraderie he always thought necessary to bring the shy chap out of his shell.

“Okay, doing okay,” said Sievert with a meek smile.

“Well, that's great, Sievert, just great. Gee whiz, this is you guys' first time here at FremontFest, isn't it? Well, there's pulled pork sandwiches and lots of chips, and snacks, and some fruit over there. We've also got our patented root beer floats, and you're welcome to indulge yourself. Right over there are the kegs and taps. Plastic cups, spoons, and napkins on the table, and there's the ice cream. We had to pack it hard in ice on a warm day like this. It'll stay cold and hard for a couple more hours.”

Sievert nodded, and tried hard to smile. He leaned close to George.

“You don't happen to have some of that special wine of yours lying around, do you?”

George squinted and knitted his brow. “Special wine? Now what special wine is that?”

Sievert looked distressed. “Don't you remember?” he whispered. “That special wine made from coast-of-Oregon grapes? So strong that you don't really notice how strong it is? And the amazing thing, it doesn't make you sick or act like a complete drunken fool?”

George couldn't remember how long it had been since the Mikkelsons had asked for their “special wine,” though no one could forget their introduction to it. He smiled at the recollection of that first encounter. The introverted Mikkelsons had become alarmingly drunk, boisterous, and, even threatening on that day he and Nan had invited them up to the patio for a glass of Sagelands. After they'd glugged down three filled-to-the-brim servings, then demanded—yes, demanded!—more, George had been forced to improvise for the sake of everyone's safety. He had switched them over to Cranberry PowerPressPlus, Cullen's power drink, and pretended it was wine so potent that it didn't even taste like ordinary wine. Advertised as having “three times the caffeine and twice the sugar of a regular Coke,” it had made the Mikkelsons rambunctious, but saved them from what could have been an ugly scene that day.

“Hmmm, well, we might have some left. But you know, Sievert, this is a non-alcoholic event. We don't want you and Deanne running naked through the woods and leaving little Sievert Junior to be eaten by raccoons and opossums. Ha-ha!”

Sievert blushed and looked down at his sneakers, which George noticed were decorated with pictures of babies in cowboy and astronaut outfits.

“You know that wine doesn't make you do that,” Sievert said shyly. “Otherwise, we wouldn't dream of taking so much as a sip. What it does is make you more sociable. Don't you remember? That's such a good thing for us in a setting like this. And we'd like to get to know some of our neighbors a little better.”

George stroked his chin and pretended to give the matter careful consideration.

“Well, okay, I'll see if we have some. I'll just put it in regular cups for you so the other guests don't come asking for it. Okay?”

Luckily, there was plenty of PowerPressPlus in the refrigerator. George emerged from the back door with two brimming cups.

“Oh, wonderful!” gushed Sievert. “You have some!”

“Yes, we do,” George said. “But this is all you get. Be very careful about mixing this with the root beer floats. I'd say limit yourself to one each. Otherwise, I'm not responsible for your behavior. And, if people ask, tell them we gave you some grape juice.”

“Yes, George, will do, though that would be telling a lie, and we're not very good at that. In fact we're awful at telling lies.”

“A couple sips of that and you'll get much better. Trust me.”

Sievert marched off with the sloshing cups to Deanne, who was talking very quietly to Nan as Nan played with an unresponsive baby Sievert.

“Our special beverage,” said Sievert, holding up the cup for Deanne to inspect as if it were a gemstone of incalculable value. “You know, the one we liked so much when we used to come here.... Sorry to interrupt, Nan.”

“Oh, no,” said Nan, whose exchanges with Deanne were falling well short of anything you'd worry about interrupting. “Not at all, Sievert.”

Deanne's eyes lit up.

“Oh, yes,” she cried. “Oh, heavens yes. Would you please hold Sievert, Jr., for me for a minute, Nan, while I take a couple of sips of your wonderful drink?”

What wonderful drink? thought Nan. She took the baby, who looked at her with a witless, uncomprehending expression, and turned toward George, who winked and smiled at her. It took ten seconds for the Mikkelsons to glug down their drinks and sigh almost orgasmically. They looked at George pleadingly.

“Oh, okay, but just one more. Our supplies aren't limitless, you know.” The refills went down in five seconds flat.

“Watch it now,” George warned.

“Don't worry about us,” Deanne said. “We can hold our booze, can't we, dear?”

“Of course, sweetest. Well, newly fortified as we are, shall we go and mingle?”

“Let's go mingle till the cows come home,” said Deanne, yanking baby Sievert back from Nan. Then, off they went, accosting everyone they came across with a surfeit of bonhomie that had the neighbors talking about them for months.

“Cranberry PowerPressPlus,” said George to Nan once the Mikkelsons had gotten out of earshot. “Turns the meek into the mighty. They needed a booster shot to be able to function here.”

Nan laughed.

“Ah, yes,” she said. “Our special Mikkelson drink. Maybe they ought to start giving that to baby Sievert.”

The yard was starting to fill up with guests. Here were the Winthrops and the McCandlesses, and such lesser, though still considerable, friends as the Davieses, the MacDonalds, the Brittles, and the LeBlancs. Some folks new to the neighborhood—the Spinozas, Jon Warneke and Geoff Beadle, the Rodriguezes, and the Singhs—were here, mostly oohing and aahing over the gardens. Jon and Geoff were showing signs of being future, though smaller-scale, competitors if they expanded what they had growing in their yard. What was there now was already beautiful—especially the resurgent peonies, which had been left in a rather dire state by the previous homeowners—though they used too much Dusty Miller in their borders. And here were the Fletchers, plowing straight through the thick underbrush tangling up the strip of woods. There was the usual complement of neighbors, barely known acquaintances from the world of education, politics, religion, and the Livia Athletic Association, and the occasional complete stranger drawn by the now-well-known glories of the Fremont gardens. In fact, the Burdick's sign was still up, with one week left before it was to be taken down. Probably as a result of that, the number of strangers in attendance seemed to be greater this year than last.

“Some people must figure this is a public tour-the-Fremont-garden day,” Nan said to George. “I've picked out at least a dozen people here I've never seen before. Mostly in the front yard.”

“Me too,” said George. “And after what happened last year, I can't help but get a little nervous about it.”

Nan snorted.

“Oh, don't sweat it, George. There's no contest this year. No reason for gardening saboteurs to be casing the grounds like they did last year. I just hope they don't all discover the root beer floats, or we're gonna run out pretty quick.”

Nan sauntered off to greet the Boozers, who would stay for one quick root beer float only, then leave. She was soon back at George's shoulder, surveying the crowded yard to make sure the children weren't trampling through the flowers, and to spot newcomers who might merit a personalized greeting.

“There's that idiot, Merle Pressman, on the school board,” said Nan, pointing her float toward a clot of visitors who were standing in one of the hosta beds. “Amazing how people feel that they can just stand right on top of somebody's hosta as if it were some kind of rubber plant that can spring right back up after you grind it down good. Of course that's where the stupid politicians are, since that's where they can do the most damage. I see Richard Mellon and Lucia Everett. Aren't they running for their House and Senate seats again?”