Something Great

1March 2000 "What do you want to plant first?" Her voice echoed loudly in the house with nothing for it to run into but moving boxes and dust, and the sound of it made me smile. It was just like her to be talking about planting seeds when the backyard was still a mess, all knee-high grass and dandelions. She always seemed to be one step ahead of herself, dreams first and life second, but that had never bothered me. I maneuvered around boxes until I was standing in front of the glass doors in our soon-to-be living room. It was dark outside, the backyard a shadowy blue and the lake a black void beyond it. I closed my eyes and let myself picture what she was seeing—the hot sun beating off the water, the two of us in dirty baseball caps crouched in the garden, picking vegetables and berries and placing them into a wicker basket. "Green beans, probably. We could have so many by summer." Never mind that she didn't like green beans all that much, really only ate them because I grew them. I ate enough for the both of us, and she loved that I loved them. Now that she'd brought it up I was itching to find that box; it would’ve been labeled The Garden Box if we'd bothered to label any of these boxes. Not that it mattered if I opened the wrong one; they'd all have to be opened at some point anyway. I dug my keys out of my pocket and used the house key to tear the packing tape down the middle of the box nearest to me. In the kitchen, I heard her rustling through the groceries we'd bought earlier that night, her mind bouncing from the garden to dinner without stopping to think about the unpacking we had to do. The box I had opened was, unsurprisingly, not the right one; it was filled with books, not gardening tools, which was also not a huge surprise. I'd say at least a third of these boxes were full of books—when we were asked why we needed such a big house when there was only two of us, the answer was that we needed more book space. The floor space in our apartment had been taken over by stacks of books piled in corners, piled in doorways, piled anywhere you might accidentally knock one over and send them all sprawling. I started taking the books out, turning them over in my hands, even though we didn't have bookshelves up yet. Each book I picked up I set down in a stack by my feet, and the increased tripping hazard made the living room feel more familiar. A Steinbeck, a Stephen King, a book on the stars and a massive book on English literature were the first in the pile, followed by an Agatha Christie, Life of Pi, a book about a drag queen, a book about God. Some were new, not a sign of wear on them, some of them were beat to hell, and some had library barcodes on the spine. I was just pulling The Catcher in the Rye out of the box when I heard her curse, mumbling something along the lines of "forgot the f*****g paper plates." She came out of the kitchen holding a slice of bread in one hand and a jar of peanut butter in the other, apparently already half way through the sandwich making process. "So, what are the odds we find the box with the plates in it?" Even as she asked I could tell she was halfway to eating off one of the boxes, or maybe the floor, but wanted to put the question out anyway. "Out of what?" I asked as I set the book down and continued unloading the box onto the floor. She didn't seem particularly bothered by it; probably liked the normalcy of books on the floor as much as I did. She shrugged, waved the bread when she answered, "Out of ten." "Zero, probably," I said as I put the last book on the top of my wobbly stack. I started breaking the box down as she walked back into the kitchen, probably to start making dinner on the grocery bags. Though this wasn't the first time we had made dinner together—unpacked together, lived together—it felt different: like something was changing, for better or for worse. I leaned the box up against the wall once I had it flat and took a slow look around the room. It was strange, everything being so empty but at the same time so full. Even more strange was the pile of books among the boxes, because as normal as it was, it was odd to see only a few of the many that we had. I moved onto the next box, not intending to unpack, but just to open it and see. But when it was books, I had to start taking them out, making another pile. The Harry Potter books (two copies of each, because neither of us could bear to part with our first copies), the Bronte sisters, a physics textbook. Annie on my Mind, a book on succulents, a Batman comic. Once that box was empty, I wanted to open the next. I knew that I was tired from the move itself—we'd loaded the U-Haul ourselves, lugged all the boxes to the front door (down the driveway, up the front porch stairs), shoved them all throughout the bottom floor—but I felt that I didn't want to wait till tomorrow to unpack everything. Unpack, settle in, make this home ours. "Hey, Evelyn? You wanna unpack tonight?" She came back out of the kitchen, sandwich in each hand, and looked at the new pile on the floor. "I thought you'd want to do the garden tomorrow?" She held one of the sandwiches out to me and placed hers on the nearest box (I guessed she'd stopped caring about not having any plates). "I do," I said as I cut open another box. She shrugged and pulled out her own house key, sliced open the box she'd put her dinner on. I looked into my box—desk lamps, a small fan, nothing interesting. I had moved on to the next nearest when I heard Evelyn gasp. "Our plates are in here!" I laughed, watched her take one out just to set her sandwich on it. "The mugs and kettle are in here too . . ." she said nonchalantly, while peeking at me out of the corner of her eye. I guessed that was my cue to get up and make tea, so I got up, took the kettle out of the box, and walked into the kitchen. "You know we should get up early tomorrow to start the garden, right?" she called from the living room. I filled the kettle up from the tap—we'd have to get a filter on it soon—and listened to her opening box after box after box, probably looking for the garden tools. She was right: We'd have to start early tomorrow. We had to get our seeds in soon if we wanted to have anything to show for it by the end of summer. "Mhm," I started the stove, put the kettle on, "and if we unpack now we're going to be up late." She couldn't see me, but I shrugged, and I was pretty sure she must have too, because she said, "Okay", and that was the end of that. It wasn’t like this would be the first time we had stayed up all night only to have to get up early in the morning. I went back to the living room to get two mugs and tea bags out of the same box the kettle came out of, and saw that Evelyn was surrounded by books. All our boxes were open, but she'd only emptied the ones with books in them, finishing what I had started. Stacks on stacks covered the floor in between the boxes, just like back at the apartment. As I poured the whistling water into the mugs and waited for the tea to steep, I thought about her in there, sitting surrounded by boxes and books. I filled my mug with sugar and hers with milk, and remembered the first time I'd met her. She'd been surrounded by books then too, and I'd had a thermos of tea sitting next to me. At the time I didn't know her, and she didn't know me, and now we were unpacking a house, and I knew how she liked her tea, and I was bringing her a cup while she sat among our book collection. And this wasn't the first time I'd seen her like this, but this was the first place that was our own, the first place I could call ours. Not ours that we were renting, ours. And tomorrow we would wake up and start our garden, and we would have tea in our backyard with the lake resting serenely in front of us. All this because of that first day in the library, a day I wasn't supposed to be working and a day she hadn't planned on stopping in. One moment in time that brought me here, where I knew we'd be happy. Home. I carried both of our mugs to the living room and set hers down beside her. She was looking around for something, a book probably. The chances of her finding it by herself (with help, even) were slim right now, but I decided to offer my help anyway. "Are you looking for something?"