Garden States

In winning the SJWG Fall 2021 Contest, Judge James Carpenter (19 to Go: A Peace of Farce; No Place to Pray) commented “‘Garden States’ is a deft and succinct coming of age story that likens the shifting generations to the recurring states of a flower garden: growth, blossoming, decline, and reseeding. Over and over and over. The story itself is tight and direct, a commendable effort.”

I am very proud, and incredibly happy to present to you:

Garden States

By: A.J. Charles

You always remember your first job. My inaugural day at Hill's Pike Garden and Nursery Center was like countless others before it, marking a lifetime of employment that sludged its way uphill and barefoot, both ways in a foot of snow, until it ultimately led toward a final, unfulfilled conclusion. I made sure to let my mother know my thoughts, if only to be difficult.

"I don't understand why it's such a big deal, Nancy."

"I told you to stop calling me that, I'm your mother, and it's about time you got out and did something other than sit around playing Nintendo."

"It's called Playstation," I droned.

"Still, you're going to be a senior this year, and you certainly didn't spend any free time on your grades last year. You should be excited to start making some money. Are you excited?" She took her eyes off the road for a moment and gave me a smile I knew was more than capable of landing a boyfriend for her or a future stepfather for me, if she ever had the time or felt the need.

I stayed ornery, although in the deep recesses of my teenage brain that allowed for some form of rational, calculable thought, I began to tally up what I knew my hourly rate would be and multiply it by the hours worked. I bit down a smile, far too young and naive still to understand the pillaging the government would yank away from my wages. "See ya, Nance," I joked as I jumped from the passenger seat.

"Pick you up at seven. Make sure you're nice to Mr. Hill and do everything he says," I heard her call as I shut the door.

I walked through the parking lot and into the wooden structure with the large, worn Hill's Pike Garden and Nursery sign. Mr. Hill's wife saw me as she worked behind the counter and guided me towards the office.

Strange the notions you get on your first day of work. I remember feeling so old signing documents for taxes, being able to see areas only employees could access. I remember the self-importance I felt as Mr. Hill handed me an apron. As he walked me around the grounds, I saw other employees going about their business. I laugh recalling my thoughts as I saw them. Am I supposed to make friends with these people? She's cute, is she single? Even the idea of coworkers had been a foreign concept to me an hour prior.

"Don't worry, it'll all make sense soon enough," Mr. Hill said after guiding me through rows of herbs, vegetable plants, shrubs, garden sculptures, and soils. "Ah, here he is. Bobby, I want you to meet Mitch. He'll take over from here. Mitch, this is Bobby."

"Greetings, grab a bag," Mitch said with nary a movement from his lips, as he loaded a large plastic bag of mulch onto a cart.

According to my seventeen-year-old inner monologue, Mitch sucked the big one. His hair was white as fresh snow, and he wore the kind of blue jeans only men over the age of seventy-five seemed to find fashionable. Everything about him was dated, including the t-shirt that declared: PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES, 1993 NATIONAL LEAGUE CHAMPIONS. What was that, ten years ago?

I spent my first day in misery, lugging, lifting, shoveling rocks, and scooping mulch with this old man who clearly had no tastes for my youth, while the coworkers I had yet to meet rolled their eyes as I labored away under the weekend summer sun. I hadn't felt that uncomfortable since the day Sarah Turner declined my invitation to the sophomore soiree. At least she finally accepted my invite to the junior prom, so there was that. I could have spent my time with her during my summer break, but no--Nance felt my summer was best spent with this old man instead. Either way, I was more than happy when I got picked up that evening, even if home was its own separate hell.

Nancy--I mean Mom, her new job brought us to Rosebush Gardens after her state job offered a minuscule promotion that didn't justify the move, but according to her, it was a step in the right direction, even if that direction was the wrong one to be near any of my old friends. She gave me the "you'll understand when you're older" speech. Thankfully, I had a cell phone and she let me borrow her car on occasion, which allowed me the sporadic date with Sarah at the movie theater twenty minutes away from each of our respective towns.

"Could you drop off the check at the rental office when I'm gone, sweetie? Enjoy your morning, and I'll pick you up on my lunch break," she said.

I walked to the office and dropped off the monthly rent, exiting into the courtyard where the worn and cracked statue of a smiling girl and boy stood, stoic with their creepy grins in the middle of what probably held a running fountain decades prior. As I exited, my stomach dropped when I saw Scott Walker, his hair slicked back at sharp angles, leaning against the fountain-that-once-was, smoking a cigarette down to the filter.

Scott flicked the butt into the barren wasteland where the smiling statues stood. "What's up, shithead?"

I tried to ignore him; I did. It was what I was taught, and in a way, it may have been a metaphor for what my mom had dealt with all those years. I blocked it out somewhat, as teenagers tend to do with negative experiences, but Scott had taken offense two months before when Sarah was allowed to come over. We went on a walk, and as many teenagers tend to feel after a five-minute make out session in the woods that felt like a lifetime with the joy it brought, I felt bold. Too bold.

My mom would never see the black eye in its rawest form after I convinced a neighbor to drive me to work. Mom heard the worry in my voice when I called to tell her I had the ride handled, but I was correct in assuming she would concede if her schedule became less strained.

I returned to Hill's Pike Garden and Nursery Center for my second day, thankful for an hour with an ice pack and a few embarrassing dabs of my mother's cover-up. Mr. Hill gave no indication he could see the black eye when I arrived. I got passed off again to Mitch, who I now assumed worked there every day, and the old man wasted no time boring me in new and uninteresting ways.

"Youth," he grumbled as I followed him along the rows of plants he watered and pruned methodically. I thought I even detected a hint of a smile. "Been a while since I was in my own sort of brouhaha."

I made no reply. Hell, I didn't even know what a brouhaha was. Mitch didn't care.

"Thirty-eight or thirty-nine, probably. Guess I was about thirteen--Tad, Sticks, Jack, and I on the baseball field, went on down there with a badminton racket and a few twigs to meet up with the Richie boys all over a girl named Maggie."

I wasn't interested but asked anyway out of what politeness I had left. "What happened?"

The old man gave me his first genuine smile. "Got my ass kicked." Then he pointed at my eye. "Just like you."

I wasn't interested in hearing about his bygone age or a chauvinistic era where he probably untied a damsel from railroad tracks on a weekly basis for fun, but he peaked my anger. "What happened with Maggie? Left you for the varsity quarterback? Ran off with the Richie boys?"

Mitch only chuckled. "Married her in fifty-one and stayed married exactly fifty years. Even waited for me to return from the military." He may have looked at me, but I refused to meet his gaze. Of course he married her. That was how all the old stories went, wasn't it?

"She was a great woman," he said with a satisfied sigh. I didn't care enough to comment on his past tense. I should have.

I kept following on behind him without any shade to provide relief from the heat. Mitch just kept watering plants, the sad old man and a random black-eyed, seventeen-year-old that had better things to do than hang out with someone's grandfather.

Mitch expected the conversation to be carried over from his anecdote about Maggie and the Richie boys, but I hadn't been willing to budge. He finally broke the silence. "So, who was she?"

Bored to the point of exhaustion, I answered. "Sarah."

"The other guy?"

"Scott. Scott Walker."

"What did you do to him?" Mitch asked. The drooping balls this ancient sack of flesh had on him to insinuate that I was at fault over getting a fist into my orbital socket.

I was over it and I seethed. Simmered and bubbled until the pot boileth over. "Nothing, I did nothing. My mom took a new job, moved me here away from my girlfriend, forced me to get a job, and Scott Walker is an asshole." My chest heaved and I waited for the old man to backhand me. I would have backhanded me.

"Come here," Mitch said, and for the first time I noticed just how steely blue his eyes were against the pure white of his hair.

I stepped forward, wondering if I had awoken the sleeping soldier in him.

"This side," he said to me, and pulled the hose along a row of flowers. "Look."

He stepped away after watering a potted sunflower, large and majestic as it stood eye-level with me. I had little care for why Mitch had asked me to engage in a stare-down with a flower.

"Bobby, do you know that sunflowers produce toxins that kill all of the other plants around it?"

Of course I didn't know. I was seventeen and didn't care about girlish flowers. "No."

"It's true," Mitch said, "they're great against weeds, but look closer."

I looked closer. All I saw was a flower, a large one that I could pluck one day to give to Sarah. I huffed in annoyance as I stared at it, another of the countless plants my mother Nancy forced me to spend my summer with.

"Sunflowers may look like one flower, but look closer," he continued. "Each head is composed of hundreds of little ones. The florets, that's what is in the middle, they actually ripen to become the seeds. Like every single flower contains hundreds of more flowers within it, its own little world."

Work became better throughout the summer. Mitch, despite his ever slowing and methodical ways, continued to let me know random facts about the plants that surrounded us. Courtesy of Mitch, I now know that I could use onions as a sedative or the pods of an orchid for vanilla flavoring. He also told me that the smell of freshly cut grass, a smell that I love to this day, is actually a chemical distress signal to nearby animals. That little tidbit I still find incredibly interesting. He also intrigued me with stories about his youth.

By the end of my first summer at Hill's Pike, Mitch either let me do most of the heavy labor or had been pulled off jobs entirely. For a man hitting eighty years of age when I returned for the summer before my first year of college, I shouldn't have been surprised when Mr. Hill told me that Mitch had passed away.

I remember feeling strangely lost, upset at the loss of a friend sixty years my senior. I watered plants in a daze until I reached the potted sunflower.

This time I truly peered, looked at the bright yellow petals as they outlined hundreds of little seeds. As I looked at the red, brown, and copper florets, I saw his wife Maggie. Mitch and the petals he had cast around Maggie and her family. Tad, Sticks, and Jack too as they went into their childhood battles with the Richie boys. There was another sunflower next to that one, one that I saw my mother in, working hard to cultivate her future generation. Sarah and my friends were there, tucked amongst the middle of the beautiful yellow frame. Old friends, new friends, both friends and enemies I hadn't had a chance to meet yet. Coworkers I would reminisce about and coworkers I would get to know "when I was older." Even Scott Walker was hidden in there somewhere.

I cried. The same way I cried when Mitch had his small funeral, put together by the lone sister of Maggie and a cross-country cousin. I sat in the front row because it looked too empty. Mr. Hill gave me one of the potted sunflowers for free, so I brought it to the service.

I write this now, far older than I was when I first met Old Man Mitch, and far younger than Mitch was when he passed. My mother and I moved out of Rosebush Gardens two years later, after my sophomore year of college. I was wholly unaffected, more concerned with putting my time into school and finding ways to hang out with my new friends littered across the state. Sarah and I lasted nearly as long as my stay in Rosebush Gardens until we grew apart. Our schools were far away, and I think she started to date their third-string quarterback, which is fine, because Mitch once told me about the pheromones plants give off to attract other creatures. It worked, because my wife says she was immediately attracted by the way I smelled the night she met me. I even came across Scott Walker a decade later. Like many school-age fights, we were able to laugh it off and apologize with some level of adult maturity. He's still smoking though, so any damage he does to himself isn't my problem.

Hell, even Mom is in a perfectly happy relationship.

So here I sit in my 2008 PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES WORLD SERIES CHAMPIONS t-shirt, wondering why I feel the need to detail my recollections of Mitch. Perhaps I want to document it so there's less of a need for my own children to figure things out on their own. Unless that's the way it's supposed to be.

Either way, little Nancy and Mitchell will be fine. All I want for them is to create their own little worlds and shine their light around those among them.

Like a sunflower.

I hope you enjoyed. Feel free to say hello and let me know your thoughts below.