On his own, Larry wouldn’t be able to care for the plants. He could argue all he wanted, but she knew better. It was just too much work.
‘But I need them,’ he had told her, in tears, ‘to remember you by.’
She left him two: the potted fern he had given her on their thirtieth anniversary, and the little lemon tree that every year bore more than its limbs could sustain, and that, only because she couldn’t get it out of the ground.
Her neighbors took a great deal of them. What remained, annuals mostly, she carried in a black trash bag to the dumpsters at the far end of the complex.
She tried as she walked to put a figure on the plant’s value, determine what she might have spent over the years on their care. There was no telling. Thousands. They probably could have retired on the money.
She lifted the dumpster’s lid and hoisted the bag over the lip. The plants and loose soil made little noise as it fell in with the other trash.
A year and a half they had given her. Two Tops.
She closed the lid back, the sun bright and hot on her face, and it struck her as funny, to wonder when it would ever rain.
thank you
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