The Garden of Last Days Read Online Free

under her own nose in this one and only day given her?
    Just before eleven, April walked down the outside stairs in her robe and flip-flops, carrying her coffee in a tall mug. It was a sound and image Jean had come to dread for they signaled the end of her morning with Franny, and nearly always it was the same: she’d hear the screen door above swing open and shut, then the dull thwock-thwock of her tenant’s flip-flops on the outside steps. Through the window she’d see April’s feet and bare calves, the hem of her robe. Some mornings April would pause and lean over the railing and peer into one of the front windows of Jean’s house. But even if she saw Franny drawing, or painting, or watching some PBS, she would keep going down and outinto the garden and sit in one of the Adirondack chairs in the shade of the mango. She’d sit there and sip her morning coffee in Jean’s walled garden where no one could see her.
    The first week or so of looking after Franny, if she wasn’t near the window Jean would call her over and point out her mother. But the little girl always dropped whatever she was doing and ran outside and that would be it; Jean’s time with her would be over. She’d stand there at her door and watch Franny climb up onto April’s lap where Jean couldn’t see her anymore. Standing there watching them, her time had never felt shorter; she could feel each slipping moment; she was seventy-one years old and came from a family line where no one made it past seventy-four. Not her mother or father. Not a grandparent, aunt, or uncle. And she was a large woman who labored heavily. Sweated a lot. Got dizzy. In her lonelier, weaker moments she saw the terrible unfairness of this: she had so little time left and she was finding this feeling only now ? Did April know how fortunate she was to be given it so young? This was a question rooted in envy, Jean knew, and she was ashamed of herself for even asking it.
    But then one Friday morning, just as April was raising her mug to her lips, Franny ran out and jumped into her mother’s lap and the coffee spilled and she pushed her daughter away from it and stood quickly, swatting at her robe, Franny sitting on the ground, her hair in her face, silent only a second before she let out a howl, then began crying. April picked her up right away. Jean ran cold water over a dish towel and rushed outside, April holding Franny close, explaining how hot the coffee was and how she didn’t want her to get burned and that’s why Mama pushed you away. That’s why.
    April’s long dark hair was tied up loosely in the back. In the tiny crow’s feet of her eyes was just the trace of the foundation she wore to her work. April began humming softly and Jean reached over and patted Franny’s small back, felt the pencil-sized ribs under her fingers, her shaky breath, but it was as if she were standing between two people in an intimate conversation and she pulled her hand away. Stood there feeling useless, the wet dish towel in her hand.
    After that she stopped telling Franny her mother was in the garden. She told herself she did this to give April some morning solitude, to protect her daughter from hot coffee, but she knew she was really doing it to prolong her time with Franny.
    They’d both been gone only a few minutes today when the pain began in her jaw. A bad molar? But then it was in her left upper arm, and this seemed strange to her at the time because she was spraying the hibiscus with her right so why would that one hurt? She shook it in the air, the flesh there waggling the way it did. The pain didn’t go away but she shrugged it off and turned the hose to the frangipani along the wall. She could still see the two girls as they’d looked when they’d left, Franny in her bathing suit under a Cinderella halter, her curly hair held back with a sun visor. She wore flip-flops like her mother, who held her hand and looked so young and lovely in her khaki shorts and purple T-shirt,