that usually go untouched. When my mom did bring home food, she tended to pick up chips, soda, and donuts. It’s the food pyramid of poverty-stricken neighborhoods. That’s true everywhere I assume, although admittedly I haven’t been everywhere.” I shot him what I hoped was an amused smile, but he didn’t smile back. I looked away. Why was I sharing this? At the blueberry festival? The warm, glowy, sun-drenched blueberry festival.
Because today of all days, it feels good to be known. Walking amidst all of these people who are connected to other people, feeling like you are too.
Was it really so wrong to want that, just for one day? In a couple months’ time, I’d never see this man again. Did it really matter?
“Is that why health food is so important to you?” he asked softly.
“I suppose. And I don’t want to give my mom too bad of a rap. She tried, you know, sometimes more than others, but . . . she was a product of her environment. She brought home food she thought we liked. Food we did like, but that wasn’t good for us.”
“How’d you manage to be different?”
“I stole a cantaloupe.”
“Aha. I knew the first time I saw you, you were criminally inclined.”
“I confess. Once upon a time, that was true. I was eleven, and one day I took an alternate route home from school, which took me past this Korean grocery store. There was a stand of cantaloupes. Well, of course, I’d seen cantaloupes on TV before, but we’d never eaten one. I lingered around that stand. I wanted one.” I recalled that moment of wanting. How it’d been a fierce thing inside that I had no way to explain. Maybe I just wanted to be different, to live a life I hadn’t been given, if only for a brief time. Long enough to eat a cantaloupe. “I wanted to experience a cantaloupe, just once,” I said, leaving out the rest.
I could feel Travis’s stare on the side of my face and I glanced at him. His expression was bemused, and something else I didn’t know him well enough to name. “So you stole it,” he said.
“I did. And I was caught immediately.”
“Oh no.”
My lips tipped and even I could hear the tenderness in my voice when I said, “Mr. Kim, the store owner, yelled and railed. I tried so hard not to cry, but I was shaking I was so scared. He marched me a block up the street to this door and this woman, all of four and a half feet tall, answered, and he said, ‘Here, this little thief tried to steal one of our cantaloupes. You deal with her.’” I smiled softly again. “She led me to the roof of her building and she didn’t exactly seem mad, and so I followed her. And there, she had this garden! All these perfectly organized plants and flowers in wooden boxes covering every square inch of that roof. It was a wonder. I’d never seen anything so beautiful. She told me if I spent the next hour digging potatoes out of the dirt, I would have worked off my debt and she’d send me home with a cantaloupe.”
“That was kind,” he said.
“Yes. Yes, she was kind. She and her husband both.” I cleared my throat when the final word of my statement came out scratchy with emotion.
“What happened to them?” Travis asked.
I took a deep breath, surprised that it still hurt to talk about the Kims, that the scar their loss had left behind still pulled tight sometimes. “Mr. Kim died of a heart attack when I was in middle school and Mrs. Kim went back to South Korea where she had family. I send her postcards.”
“But she doesn’t have a permanent address where she can write back to you,” he said.
I didn’t look at him. “No. Not right now.”
“How old were you when she left?”
“Sixteen.”
“And the garden?”
I paused. “The landlord let it remain, even after the Kims left. I replanted a few things in pots and brought them home. And I tried to keep the garden alive, but gardens take a lot of time and a lot of effort, and some money to maintain, and I . . . well, it died. At first it was slow, and I had hope, but then . . . but then, one day it seemed to die, all at once.”
“And the ones you brought home?” he asked, his tone gentle.