The Footpath
(First published short story)

(in Avalon Literary Review, summer 2014 issue)

     The weeds by the footpath had grown intolerable.  It was the heavy rains that did it.  Would they never end?  Today, at last, that magnificent sun.  Blinding!  Gwen actually could not look up.  She repositioned her visor.  She found the visor utterly inadequate, though without it where would she be?  Head bent she studied the pansies, gazing at them as if through a thick, frosted glass.  They were all but shredded now. Their floppy, sad, scratched little grape and ocher faces half-buried in the dark dirt. Their poor little necks strangled by Buttonweed and Touch-me-nots.  Well, she conceded, that’s what you get.  She had been warned.

     At the plant store two months earlier Gwen had eyed the clerk.  She was the kind of woman men found wildly attractive.  That had bothered Gwen.  The clerk was tall, well, taller than Gwen, and had blue, no violet, no, well… What color were her eyes?  Gwen just couldn’t land on it, but they were unusual and beautiful.  Of that she was certain.
     “I’ve started on a project.  I’m constructing a footpath down to a creek,” Gwen had explained perusing the petunias and snapdragons situated at the far end of an aisle. “It’s a wonderful creek, but you just can’t get down there unless…”  She turned.  The clerk was so close, the aisles notoriously tight.  “Unless you don’t mind being covered in nettles and sticker bushes.”  Gwen giggled, and, trapped at the end of the aisle between the clerk and a cart of Dusty Miller, she blushed.
     “I understand,” the clerk said and smiled.  Then, she graciously stepped back, maneuvering a large forsythia just enough so as to free them both from their predicament. 
     The clerk had very white teeth and she was very attentive.  Gwen liked that.  She was not one of those people distracted by other customers - always in a hurry to move on to the next.  She had such wave in her hair.
     “And of course then I’d like to do some plantings along the border.  You know, brighten it up.  Make it stand out: really pop.  I was thinking of those pansies.”  Gwen indicated the lovely gold and purple pansies stacked high in pallets and shimmering in the afternoon sun.
     “The soil by a creek is always heavier than soil in a garden.  Would you consider something hardier?  Wild flowers maybe?  They’re very strong,” the clerk asked. Gwen tried to imagine but just couldn’t.  Wild flowers made no picture in her head at all. 
     “No.  No, I’ll stay with the pansies if that’s all right.   I have my heart set on them,” and she offered the woman a smile of vast conviction, which was returned by a quiet, conciliatory one.  Well, Gwen was only being honest.  She had noticed the pansies the moment she arrived. They were the brightest, healthiest looking flowers in the whole nursery.  She’d been coming here for years after all and always selecting smartly for her various beds.   I wonder when she was hired.  I’ve never seen her before.
     “The soil is different.  That’s my only point.   Can I at least suggest a pair of sturdy gloves if you’re going to be working around all those nettles?” The clerk spoke with levity in her voice and for no reason at all, truly no reason whatsoever, Gwen giggled again.  She had the oddest sensation.  A little out of my head, I think.
     “Very well, then,” Gwen said.  She smiled a large, large smile.  Deep breath in…and out. She is polite, yes.  And helpful.  That’s it.  She is pleasant.  Yes. Very, very pleasant.  “Sturdy gloves it is,” and with steps of commitment she walked with the woman so that, together, they might locate the very best.

     “They look like men’s gloves.”
     “Why?  Just because they’re thick?”
     “Why so thick?”
     “There are things in there, Michael.”
     “Really?  What sort of things?”
     Michael mocked her.  He had mocked her her whole life it seemed. It used not to bother her so much.  Now, his comments sliced deep; irritated her beyond measure.  Bruised.  How had it happened?  How had he gotten the upper hand?  When they were younger, it was she who mocked him, though he never managed to take the hint. He had pursued her until she had no choice, really!

     Gwen gathered the perished pansies with her now only slightly frayed, thick, mannish gloves and tossed them in the red wheelbarrow.  Cruelty, she thought, as she made her way back up toward the house, is a horrendous expression of love. 

     It was some fifteen years ago that Michael had told her, “I intend to marry you.” 
     He had been so matter-of-fact.  A soldier.  Of course that was his style.  Gwen had examined his full lips as he spoke.  They were one of his best features.  Michael was a handsome guy.  Everyone who knew him agreed. 

     “Popular.  Very popular.  And pretty,” she’d gone on to say.
     “Pretty?”  the clerk had enquired. 
     “Yes, Lily.”  And to think, she works in a garden store!  Asking the clerk to lunch was bold.  She was a stranger, but it seemed natural.  They were hungry.  It was just one of those things.  And now here they were, enjoying a conversation as if they had known each other for many, many years.  “He was unraveling the hose,” Gwen continued.  “It was a Sunday.  I remember because he still had his church clothes on.  He was dragging the hose past the hydrangeas, out to the fountain bed trying not to mar his pressed khakis.”  The sun. It was so very bright that day too.  
     Gwen worried about the pansies in the trunk of her car and chastised herself for not parking in the shade.  Then she noticed the slightest, errant curl beside the clerk’s, Lily’s, ear.  For a moment considered reaching out and folding it into place.  Instead, she returned her hand to her teacup.  The tea was still too hot to drink. 
     She thought again of that day back among the hydrangeas.

     “I’ve already told you,” she had said to Michael as she continued to busily deadhead the marigolds. “I have no intention whatsoever of marrying you.”  She was annoyed.  Marriage?  I’m eighteen!  She held out her hand, indicating again that she wanted the hose.  She noticed greenish juice had become embedded beneath her thumbnail.  She tried to remove it, but the greenness just spread.  “Hose, Michael,” but he would not relinquish it.  Leverage, she surmised.
     “Why not marry me?  What’s so bad about me?”  His fluffy blonde eyebrows, truly the wildest thing about him, flicked high on his ruffled brow.  A large brown smear had found its home across the plane of his thighs.  Later, Gwen predicted, his mother would admonish him for it then tousle his neatly combed hair.  He had loads of pressed khakis.
     “I just don’t love you is all.”  Gwen could be matter of fact too.  She shoved both hands at him, palms up as if waiting impatiently for her communion wafer and finally she won use of the hose.
     “Well, how do you know?” he continued.  Gwen was surprised to discover that this normally well-groomed boy-man (who was clearly set on tailing her from one end of her young life to the other) was becoming less and less attractive by the second.
     “Because I don’t feel it.”  She watered the flowers.
     “You don’t feel it?”
     “No.”
     “How do you know?”
     “How do I know what?”
     “That you don’t feel it.”  Michael was leaning against the fountain bed’s stonewall, appearing either injured or on the verge of being sick.  He is under the delusion that we are inevitable.   Gwen adored that word:  inevitable.  God love Carson McCullers.  God love Frankie!  Ever since she played that splendiferous Frankie in the eight-grade play, she’d never look at that word the same. 
     
     “I realize now he thought I must have had some unique insight on the matter of love.”  Gwen sipped her tea.   It had cooled.
     “Did you?” Lily ‘s gaze upon Gwen held fast, even as Lily came upon the loose curl herself, tucking it behind her own small ear.
     “I only wish I had.”  Her eyes, how they glow.

     “Love feels different, is all,” Gwen explained to Michael.  Again, she watered the flowers.
     “Who says?” he returned.
     “I say.  Everyone says.  Don’t you read?  You’re supposed to feel, well...” Gwen paused.  She stopped watering then started again.  “Different,” she concluded and squeezed the hose nozzle with such force the blast of water sheared a half-dozen American Beauty roses of their petals. 

     Gwen placed her teacup down.  She fingered a small sapphire pendant that hung from her neck.  “My mother gave me this,” she said.  “It was all different back then.”
     “Something borrowed.  Something blue?” Lily asks.
     “Yes.  Yes, something blue.”
     They said they would see each other again, certainly at the nursery.  Two months, however, can pass so quickly.

     Gwen gathered the limp pansies in her arms and dumped them in the composter, then returned the red wheelbarrow to the shed.  She removed her gloves and placed them neatly on a shelf.  She walked toward the house not noticing a thing along the way.  On the porch she removed her visor and entered the house through the screen door.  Michael was on the couch, watching hockey.  She never knew why.  He had never played.  He made small talk, stole a kiss or two trying to wrestle her on the couch but she was not in the mood.  He had not shaved that morning and his beard scratched.  She went to the bedroom, stood in front of her long mirror and cried.  
     When she was done crying, she fixed her hair, dabbed cool water beneath her eyes and changed her clothes.  It took her some time to decide what to wear.  She decided on jeans, the ones that fit her best, and her new, pale blue fleece.  It was light enough.  There was still a chill in the air.  She snipped off the price tag and held the small rectangle of paper in her hand.  Cornflowers, she decided.  Lily’s eyes are the color of cornflowers.
     “Michael.  I’m going to replace the pansies.”  And out she went.