Jim was thick as old-growth timber, and Camerin danced around something while he hung his work shirt in the mudroom. I had no faith he’d catch what she was trying to say. None.
Jim had to meet the crummy at three in the A.M., and, though dense, he was not one to be caught off guard by an early morning. I’ll confess I had him pegged for getting caught off guard by what Camerin had to say, but then, he seemed too ignorant to put two and two together.
Perhaps it was jealousy—jealousy that my own kid would go to a stepparent before me, her biological mother—that kept me from interfering, or seeing what Jim saw. I focused on scrubbing dishes, but I heard Camerin inch to the point of no return, then back off. Then Jim, right on cue, launched into one of his stories. Jim barely passed high school, but he could tell a good story.
“I ever tell you about the first watermelon I tried growing?” he said, squinting kindness into my daughter’s eyes.
“Watermelon don’t grow well up in the mountains,” she said, perhaps disappointed at the turn the conversation was taking. “Not enough heat.”
“Funny enough,” he chuckled, “your mom told me the same thing. See, your daddy before me—we’d just gotten our first single-wide together. Felt like kings in it that first winter. Spring came though, and while the valley below us blossomed in soft sunlight, your daddy slunk into one of his funks. For better or worse, I decided the thing for us to do was to start a garden. A man has a reason to keep on if he’s got something depending on him—that’s how I figured it then.”
Camerin sat on the mudroom sink while Jim scraped muck off his cork boots and carried on:
“Well, at that time I knew next to nothin about gardenin. You know me—I never cared much for rabbit food. So I says to myself, ‘get the beans, tomatoes, onions, and carrots started for Bucky. Once he’s feelin’ better, turn those over to him and you focus on something you can take pride in growin’ en eatin.’ Sure enough, tending to them plants pulled your dad out of the dark, for a while there. I went into town and got a packet of watermelon seeds from Bi-Mart cause—God be damned in his sandals—if you can’t get it at Bi-Mart you don’t need it, and made a nice foot-by-foot hill in the west corner of our garden. I planted the whole pack.
“One week went by, then two, and not so much as a weed had started to sprout from my hill. I got discouraged, and next time your mom came by to see Bucky, I made sure to ask her for tips on growing watermelon. She said Oregon rain would stop falling before I had any success growing a watermelon up there in our garden. What’d I do then, hon?”
“How’d you know I was listening?” I said, and I felt Camerin’s blush rise in the kitchen heat. Jim put her back at ease, the way he always did.
He chuckled, “I’ll tell you what I did—I set about being the first man in the Tyee Mountains to grow a big-fat watermelon. I watered that barren mound of dirt twice a day, once right before the crew came out to get us in the morning, and again when loggin’ was done. Then I rigged up some reflectors, so as to maximize that high elevation sunlight. The day after those reflectors were mounted on the garden gate, I woke up early as usual to water my hill, and sure enough I seen a stem and two leaves poking off it real proud-like.
“It was a dandy sprout, but I tried to be careful about counting up my chickens afore they was hatched, and I kept quiet about my success with your mother and Bucky. Figured I’d wait ‘til I had a big ol’ watermelon cut up before I commenced with the bragging.”
Wait indeed—I remembered how that goofy plant wasn’t more than a month old when the boys came by peacocking about it.
“I kept shut up about my watermelon until it was about two feet tall. Then I couldn’t help it, that sprout was looking so strong and sturdy. I blabbed to Bucky about it, and he ran his mouth to your mother, tellin’ her I’d learn her a thing or two about gardenin. Next time she came by she informed me the two-foot-tall plant growing in my hill was not a watermelon, and I was a blasted fool.”
“What the hell was it then?” Camerin said, her lips rising in a confused grin.
“A sunflower. Twist my arm and give me a diet chocolate milkshake if I wasn’t tickled with it all the same. I kept on putting love into him, and he was near ten feet when he finally unfurled a yellow crown of petals.”
We all laughed then, because of Jim’s good-natured self-deprecation, and his omission that Bucky had taken his life around the time those petals greeted their first Tyee Mountain morning.
“Anyway,” he said, “I don’t know exactly what you were trying to tell me there, kiddo, but I’ve a hunch. I won’t pressure you into saying anything till you’re good and ready, but I do want you to know this—if I’ve been mistaking you for a watermelon this whole time, and it turns out you are a sunflower, I won’t love you any different.”
Camerin cried then, and I did too. Jim put his bear paws around my child—Bucky’s child, our child, and she told him everything she’d been feeling, and what scared her, and what her new name and pronouns were. It took twelve years of marriage and some time before that, but Jim won my love, along with my daughter’s, for good with his watermelon story.
Ian Patt (he/him) is a writer and educator living in a small Southern Oregon town where cows outnumber people. His work has appeared in Coffin Bell, Sheepshead Review, and other publications. When he’s not writing, he teaches English and coaches wrestling at a local high school.
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