“At the edge of the meadow is a giant cliff,” Grandfather warned, “with a hundred foot drop to the rocks below. Stay away. And don’t get within ten feet of that blasted garden, do you hear me?”
Grandfather stomped out of the room.
Peter looked back out the window and down at the garden.
If it didn’t belong to anyone…then who had replanted it after Dill burned it down?
*********************
After that, the old man disappeared down a hallway on the first floor and Mom went to fix something to eat.
Dinner was not in the giant room Peter had seen by the main hall but at a cozy little table in the kitchen, which ran along the back of the house. Unfortunately, the food wasn’t very good: canned peas, canned sauerkraut, canned beets. Beth was having fun, though, smashing everything flat like pancakes and then licking it off her palms. Grandfather was nowhere to be seen.
Mom watched him scrape at his plate. “I’ll get better food tomorrow, Pete, when I go into town. It’s all I could find in the pantry.”
“Why isn’t he here to eat this stuff?” Peter grumbled.
Mom sighed. “That’s just Grandfather. He’s probably in his study, reading away.”
“Mom, this place is weird.”
Mom smiled sadly. “Yeah, I know. I’d forgotten a lot.”
“What’s in all the locked rooms?”
Shrug. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? You lived here all your life and you don’t know?”
“One thing you’ll find, Peter, is that when your grandfather tells you not to do something, it’s best if you don’t even think about doing it.” She turned to Beth and forced a spoon into her fingers. “Honey, don’t eat with your hands.”
“What about the garden?”
Mom’s eyes got big. She acted scared but broke into a smile as she talked. “Ohhhh, don’t go into the garden! Whatever you do, don’t go into the garden.”
She stared off into the distance. “I think I was…five or six, maybe, and I went and picked some tomatoes for my mom? Put ‘em in my dress and held it out like this.”
Even though she was wearing jeans, Mom pantomimed holding out a dress by the corners to form a basket of sorts.
“When I brought the tomatoes in, my dad – Grandfather – he got so mad, he spanked me till I couldn’t sit down for hours. I cried and I cried…”
Mom snapped out of the daydream. Her face grew slightly angry, and she stabbed at her beets with a fork. “And I never went in that garden again.”
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