The Fable of Us

  “Such a rebel.” I passed through the door and waited for him to close it once we were inside. “Who would have guessed you would have owned and run a place like this?”

  “No one.” Once he’d closed the door, he left it unlocked. “Not even I would have up until a few years ago.”

  “Let me guess—it came to you in a dream?”

  He shook his head as he flicked a light switch up and down a few times. The lights stayed off. There was enough light coming through the various windows spread around the old building for us to see clearly, but I didn’t have to check his face to know he was disappointed that where lights had once burned brightly, they now didn’t burn at all.

  “It actually came to me in the form of my sister stumbling into my place late one night, boozed up, bruised, and bloodied.”

  “Oh my God. What happened to her?” I knew that his younger sister, Wren, had been drinking alcohol for as long as she’d been drinking apple juice, but the bruised and bloodied thing hadn’t been such a regular occurrence back then.

  Boone had to work his jaw loose before he could reply. “Her boyfriend. That’s what happened to her.”

  I touched his arm. “He beat her?”

  Boone looked around the hallway, inspecting everything that wasn’t anywhere close to my direction. “He beat her. He’d been beating her. Just like most of our mom’s boyfriends had beaten Mom” He shook his head. “It was like I was watching my kid sister become my mom. Making the same mistakes. One bad decision at a time, paving her way into a living hell with her own hands.”

  I wanted to squeeze his hand or give him a hug or give him something to indicate his pain was evident and I was acknowledging it. My feet seemed glued to the floor though. “And seeing your sister like that made you think of creating this place?”

  He turned his back to me and shook his head. “No, not so much what had happened to her that night, but what had happened to her before to drive her to a place where dancing for dollars and dating guys who dealt with problems with their fists was all she expected out of life.”

  My back stiffened when he looked at me over his shoulder. I knew what he was getting at. “You mean what happened to her when you were kids?” I had to pause before I could say anything else. “Her . . . abuse?”

  Boone didn’t answer, and when he finally did, it was with a single nod.

  “You thought that if Wren had had a place like this, as a sort of refuge, she could have been saved from what happened to her?” The ceilings were high out here in the hall, making my voice echo around us, but the words I was saying I wanted to keep quiet.

  “No, I didn’t think something like this could have prevented what happened to her, or stop what happens to thousands of other kids. It just got me thinking how her life could have been different if she’d had something in her life that lifted her up instead of constantly tearing her down. If going somewhere and being around people and activities that made her feel good about herself could have . . . you know, changed how she ended up.” Boone angled around, more facing me than turned away. “I couldn’t save Wren or the other Wrens out there from what happened to them, but I guess I was hoping to even the scales. I wasn’t ignorant enough to believe I could erase the past with fresh cinnamon rolls and soccer games. I was just trying to make a difference in their here and now, and maybe give them a leg up when it came to their futures.”

  I couldn’t keep looking at him saying what he was saying without welling up, so I looked away. I still welled up, but at least he couldn’t tell. “You wanted to be a force for good.”

  Boone exhaled. “I think it had more to do with not wanting to be a force for evil. There’s enough of those already.”

  I continued to stare down the wall, dabbing at the corners of my eyes like I was trying to pluck out an eyelash that had fallen into my eye. “So are you going to show me around? Or are we going to keep discussing forces of good and evil in the entryway?”

  A chuckle vibrated deep in Boone’s chest. “Come on. Let’s get this over with before the police show up and charge me with breaking and entering in addition to vehicular theft.”

  “I’d get charged as an accomplice.”

  “Yeah, right. Your dad would tell the sheriff I kidnapped you, so I guess you could just add a third charge to my arrest.” When Boone passed me, he grabbed my hand and led me down the hallway.

  Instead of allowing him to let me go when we got to wherever we were going, I knit my fingers through his and held on tightly.

  “This is the dining room and kitchen,” Boone announced as we stepped into a large room at the end of the hall. From the way the inside had been framed and redesigned, once a person was inside, they never would have known they were in a church.

  “The most important room in any place, right?” I smiled at the dozen or so tables staggered around the room. They were all round, some lower to the ground than others, and in one of the corners was a pretend kitchen complete with an army of dolls and stuffed animals still propped into chairs and high chairs at their own table.

  Boone caught me staring at it. “Yeah, I just couldn’t find a way to tear it all down and tape it into boxes. I’m an idiot for leaving it all behind for the bank to own now too, but I think I’m deluding myself into believing someone else will step in, buy it, and keep things exactly the way they were, Tinkerbell and Winnie the Pooh dining side-by-side included.” Boone motioned at the table full of eclectic guests.

  “So what would you do in this room?” I asked, milling around and peeking into the kitchen area. It was a large, well-equipped commercial-grade kitchen from the looks of it. “I mean, other than the obvious.”

  Boone smiled at me. “If by obvious you mean we used to see how many marshmallows a kid could stuff in their mouth and still say chubby bunny, and wind up with more fruit smashed into the floor than in the jars when we’d teach them how to make jam, and we’d hold award ceremonies for who was the most brave when it came to trying new foods resembling a healthy, leafy kind of nature.” Boone rubbed at a handprint on the stainless-steel countertop with the cuff of his sleeve. “A few of the more unobvious things we used to do in here included prepping, preparing, serving, and eating meals.”

  I rolled my eyes at his smile. As difficult as it had been for him in the parking lot, now that we were inside and he was moving around the center, it was like I was with a whole different person. “How many meals did you serve on a typical day?”

  He didn’t have to narrow his eyes in concentration or crease his forehead to calculate. “Seven days a week, we served breakfast and dinner, and on the weekends, we also served lunch, so in total we were doing close to fifteen hundred meals a week. More in the summer when the kids were home from school.”

  My eyebrows lifted—I hadn’t guessed half that many. “We’re talking hot dogs, pizza boats, French fries, and canned vegetables, right? Think school lunch a rung or two better?”

  Boone’s gaze searched the kitchen, seeing something that was invisible to my eyes. “My goal wasn’t to give them what they expected. What everyone else thought they deserved. Food-bank quality meats and soggy peas from a can was not the environment I wanted to create here.”

  “So you went with frozen peas instead?” I tried to calculate how many pounds of frozen peas a person would go through weekly trying to keep up with fifteen hundred meals.

  “Fresh. Whenever we could get them. Homemade. Whenever we could. Fruit that was more than just a brown banana or a bruised apple.” Boone moved out of the kitchen into the dining room, his smile still in place. “You should have seen the kids’ faces when we served kiwi for the first time. Half of them tried eating it like an apple, fuzzy brown skin and all, and the other half wouldn’t dare take a bite until they’d watched someone else do it first.” Boone’s laugh echoed through the large empty room. “I wanted them to know that there was more to life than everyone else’s hand-me-downs and second bests. I wanted them to realize that they were worthy of the good st
uff in life, even if that lesson was subtly passed to them in the form of a glass of milk that had been poured from a carton instead of powder mixed into water.”

  I followed him into the dining room, wanting to say so much. Wanting to gush and praise and condone and compliment him until I was blue in the face. I wanted him to know that even though I knew in his eyes he failed because he’d lost the center, he’d succeeded.

  “How many people did you have working at any one time?” I asked, instead of going with the gushing thing.

  “There were usually three people working the kitchen at any time and a few more helping with the activities we had going on throughout the day, so usually five to eight people depending on the time and day.”

  Boone slid a chair back under a table as he headed out of the dining room. The tour was moving on, and based upon what I’d already seen, I couldn’t wait to see the rest.

  “Is that including you?” I asked as I came up beside him.

  “That’s including me.”

  “What sort of schedule did you have?” I asked as he opened the first door we came to in the hall. This room didn’t have as many windows as the kitchen had, so it was a bit darker. I was hesitant to enter, but when he went in, I followed.

  “If the center was open, I was working. That was my schedule.” From the way his voice wasn’t echoing as much as it had in the kitchen, I guessed this room was half the size of the dining room.

  “What were the center’s hours?”

  Boone’s footsteps moved around the room, then fresh light cut into it. And then more as he lifted the shutters covering the windows. “Monday through Friday, we were open six in the morning to nine at night. On the weekends, we opened an hour later and stayed open an hour later.”

  “You were open fifteen hours a day?” I moved about the room more comfortably, letting my eyes adjust to the light. “Seven days a week?”

  “Yes and yes.”

  “So your work weeks were a breezy one-hundred-and-some-change hours?”

  Boone settled against one of the window wells and looked around the room. Now that my eyes had adjusted, I saw it was a kind of library. Rows of bookcases had been shoved against walls, all of them brimming over with books, and in the center of the room, a bunch of beanbags and colorful floor rugs had been laid out.

  “That sounds about right,” Boone answered.

  “When did you sleep?” I paused when I came up beside a tie-dyed beanbag that still had Anne of Green Gables propped open on it.

  “Whenever I wasn’t working,” he said, lifting his shoulders. “Sometimes by the time I’d finish with the cleaning and the bookwork and the ordering, I’d be too bushed to make it back to my place, so I’d just come in here, snuggle up, and lights out.” Boone eyed one of the larger beanbags that had clearly seen its share of use.

  I shook my head, baffled. The Boone I’d loved could have done no wrong in my eyes, but the Boone of today . . . he was something else. Someone who had made so much of his life. Someone who had beaten the odds and chosen to put good into the world when it was so much easier to go with the other option.

  “You’re a saint,” I said, turning around slowly.

  “No one gets to be a saint without first being a sinner.” Boone shoved off of the window well, heading for the door. “Funny thing, isn’t it?”

  I crouched beside the beanbag with the book. I was tempted to pick up the book and put it away, but at the last moment, I stopped. I stood, turned around, and left the room just the way it was—ready for the young person who’d left the book there to come back and finish reading it.

  “In this room, we mostly did arts and crafts.” Boone carried on down the hall, opening doors as he passed them. “And this one, which was a coat closet when this place was a functioning church, was my office.” He glanced at me when I peeked my head inside the cramped space. “I couldn’t stretch my arms behind me without banging my hands into the wall.”

  “I’m surprised you could turn around at all in here.” I crinkled my nose when I estimated that while the space was on the longish side, it couldn’t have been any wider than three, maybe four feet.

  Boone laughed, grabbing my shoulders and steering me away from the coat closet of an office. “But what I’m really excited to show you is what’s just outside.”

  “The sports fields?” I asked as I let him lead me through a different room that looked to have a bunch of educational materials before he threw open a door that led outside. “Those are great, Boone. They look really well-kempt, and I love the bleachers you have lining the baseball field.”

  “The fields are great,” he said, guiding me down a few stairs before steering me in the opposite direction of the fields. “But this is what you’re going to think is really great.”

  He didn’t have to guide me much farther before I caught sight of what he must have been talking about. From the parking lot, it hadn’t been visible, but from what I could make out here, it looked to be a large area fenced in by honey-stained fence posts.

  “A fenced-in yard?” I said, moving closer. “This is what you think I’m going to think is really great? I’m more of a fenceless yard type of person. Open spaces and no boundaries type of thing.”

  Boone pinched my shoulders, still guiding me along. “The fences are to keep out the deer and other animals. I wouldn’t choose to have them either if it wasn’t necessary.”

  “Keep the deer out of what?”

  When we stopped outside the fence, Boone reached over the top and opened the gate. He invited me to go in first. I gave him a suspicious look before taking a hesitant step inside.

  My second step wasn’t as hesitant. “A garden,” I whispered, twisting around to try to take it all in. I couldn’t though. Something of this magnitude couldn’t be taken in all at once. “You put in a garden.”

  Boone answered by stuffing his hands into his pockets and shrugging.

  The space was easily as large as the inside of the building. If I had to guess, probably twenty-by-forty feet large. Raised beds lined the perimeter, and tomato cages and trellises wound through the center rows. A rudimentary walkway of river rocks had been woven through the garden, and there was such an abundance of fresh fruit and herbs and vegetables, I understood how Boone had been able to feed so many kids so much fresh food.

  “How has it stayed alive with the bank owning the property?” I crouched beside a healthy tomato plant bursting with hefty scarlet globes.

  “Someone on the next property over may or may not be coming in and hand-watering it daily.” Boone moved around the garden, plucking a couple of weeds and dead leaves away.

  The tomato was so ripe, I barely had to touch it for it to break free of the vine into my hand. “You live next door?”

  “As next door as places are out here.”

  Boone’s mom had lived, and I guessed she still lived, a few miles in the other direction. I assumed he wanted to be close to her without being too close. I’d been more of the mindset that I wanted to be far away from my family, as far as the country would allow.

  “How long have you lived in your place?” I asked.

  Boone continued pruning with his back to me. I was temporarily distracted from the plants by watching him. Before the past two minutes, I hadn’t known Boone knew what it took to tend to a garden. To keep so many different types of living things alive and thriving. I couldn’t figure out if that was my impression because he’d never outright admitted to not knowing the root of a plant from its flower, or if it was because I couldn’t recall a single living thing growing outside or inside his mom’s trailer, a stray piece of crab grass included.

  “I bought it from my uncle when I was eighteen, but I didn’t move in until a couple years after that.” Boone shuffled down the row of herbs, tearing off little bits of each and collecting them inside his shirt pocket.

  “Why didn’t you move in right after you bought it?” I remembered Boone’s uncle who’d lived out here—crotchety was the w
ay most people who knew him described him—but I’d never known Boone had bought his house from him.

  “I wasn’t ready,” Boone answered, continuing down the garden, getting farther away with every shuffle.

  I stood and wiped the tomato with my dress. “Can I see it?”

  He was quiet. I was almost convinced he hadn’t heard my question until I noticed him nod.

  “I’ve got to get some fresh clothes sometime this week, right? Before your family realizes I really do own nothing more than the shirt I’ve got on my back.” His tone was light, but I knew there was a heaviness in his meaning.

  I was just about to bite into the tomato and eat it like an apple when something flashed at the other end of the garden. The sun was catching something just right. My eyes watered from its brightness, but it didn’t stop me from moving closer. Every step I drew closer, the light became less severe, and it was bearable when I was a handful of steps back.

  It was a sign made out of different kinds of metal and welded together by someone clearly skilled with a blowtorch. I’d only known one person in my life who could wield a blowtorch like most kids did a pencil.

  “What is this?” I hollered at Boone, who was still fussing with the herbs.

  When his head tipped in my direction, his back went rigid. “It’s a sign.”

  I crossed my arms and continued to study it. “Thank you for that world-shattering revelation, but my question had more to do with what it says.”

  “What do you mean?” Boone lifted himself up but stayed where he was.

  “‘Clara’s Garden,’” I read. “That’s what the sign says.”

  “It does.”

  I couldn’t stop staring at the sign, puzzled over why it was there and what it meant. “Is that Clara as in me . . . or a different one?”

  I saw Boone slowly making his way in my direction, but there was no urgency in his steps. “I’ve only known one Clara in my life so far.”

  “So that means . . .?”