by James Heaton

Let me start by saying that I’ve never been one to grow things or write a damn story, I’m better at just telling the damn things to you on my porch. As an eighty-year-old man that’s sort of embarrassing. But neither has my wife (grow anything that is, she’s good typing out her thoughts), but in the summer of 1997, we tried our hand at a tomato plant. Seems easy enough, right? We had friends who bragged about their summer gardens and how much yield they got from their effort, but we just didn’t have the energy to put into tilling the yard and planting row after row of plants. Now my grandparents did it every year and so did my wife’s father. And they would can a mess of jars of vegetables for the winter. And all that work that takes a dedication that we didn’t have or care to possess. We aren’t lazy, we preferred sitting on the back porch talking gossip about the neighbors or the heat of the summer. We had young neighbors that would fight for hours and then make up and we heard all of it, wither we wanted to or not. We talked about our beach trips and how we always wanted to go back down to the coast, hindsight says we should have sold our house in the Upstate and moved to the Low Country where we could have been happier.
Now when my wife came home with a small batch of tomato plants from her friends, I didn’t know what to say other than, “What the hell are we gonna do with those?” Her reply was “Grow them, stupid.” She only called me stupid when I said stupid things, guess I deserved that one. As if either of us knew a damn thing about growing tomatoes. We knew how to pick them at the grocery store and of course the best meal in the summer was cucumber water and tomato sandwiches with salt and pepper and Dukes mayonnaise. If you don’t use Dukes just stop reading here and move on, you’re not my sort of person. I’m a southern man and Dukes mayonnaise is as southern as you can get. Sorry if you don’t feel that way.
So, I indulged her. I went to Lowes and bought a huge plastic pot, and she bought a large device to support the vines. It stood five feet tall and looked ridiculous with such tiny plants. We watered the plant and after a few days I realized that I needed to drill some holes in the bottom of the pot because the water was creating a mini swamp in the pot. The excess water drained out and after a week we saw real growth. Somehow, we were lucky that we didn’t drown the little bastards. The vines had started to grow, and we strung them up to support them, a little string here and a little there. Before we knew it the vines had reached the top and it was a beauty if I do say so myself.
Meanwhile we enjoyed visits from our great grandbaby, little Lila, named after my mother. Little Lila had started to walk and was making her way through the house at breakneck speeds. It was amazing to think that a year ago we were fighting over who got to hold her in the hospital, but my granddaughter had been so loving and wanted to share the love and made sure we all got a turn. Being a great grandparent was the best thing that ever happened to us. We spent the summer watching and listening to the words that our grandbaby began to speak. For a year old she was amazing, she repeated everything, and I swore she got my intelligence. I looked forward to the day I could sit her down and read to her, I already picked out the first book. It was Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway, a short novella that was easy to grasp. A man is unlucky at fishing and then he captures a fish, and then loses the fish to those bastard sharks. But he is left with his pride. A perfect story for a young girl, right? Well not according to my Martha. She said I should stick to Dr. Suess, and I said “Bullshit”. You raise the kids on real literature, and they turn out smart.
So much happened that summer and we were watching every day for a little tomato to sprout. And before we knew it, we saw a tiny green ball. It was the size of a marble and for all intents and purposes it was a fine tomato. It was around this time that I noticed Martha having headaches, and she just didn’t have headaches, never as far as I knew. She never used the old excuse, not tonight hun I have a headache. She was always in good health, even her doctor said so. I was on top of things and booked an appointment for her at the doctor and they ordered labs and tests and what they found out was that she had been having little mini strokes.
I’m not a man to show sadness or cry, God knows there are enough men out there doing their fair share of crying but not me. But that day I did. I cried in the bathroom of the hospital while she was getting dressed after the test. I cried because she was all I had. Sure, there were the kids, the grand kids and the great grandbaby, but Martha was my world. I honestly didn’t know how I could survive without her.
Funny how you can live to be so damn old and do so much on your own, but your heart belongs to another. That’s the way I was with Martha, she had my heart, and it was her property. I loved her more than I could ever say.
Meanwhile back at the house Martha was taking her new pills and we were busy watching the tomato turn from green to red and growing bigger every day. It was like watching a pet, except it didn’t do anything cute, it just sat there, growing.
The tomato was getting bigger every day, and we carefully watered it, talked to it and kept a watch for pests that would take the first bite out of our one tomato. And that was the funny part, there were three tomato plants in that pot but only one tomato. Martha called it our “one fucking tomato” and I burst into tears laughing hearing her curse like that. She got onto me for cursing so much that it was funny to hear her in anger cursing a tomato plant.
“What are we going to do with one tomato? We spend the entire summer growing the damn thing and it’s got one tomato on the vine!” She exclaimed.
That next day Martha took a spill in the kitchen, and I rushed to her side. She was having another stroke. I called the ambulance, and they rushed her to the hospital. I rode with her clutching her purse in my right hand and her tiny soft hand in my left. I never let go until they had to start the IV. I had never been so scared and inside I cried like a baby but on the outside, I played it tough. I told her it was nothing and that she would be fine. But she wouldn’t. The doctor told me that she could have another stroke at any time and this last one had taken her left side. She was all but paralyzed on that side of her body and it hit her hard. Luckily, she could still talk fairly well with some signs of the stroke in her speech.
I sat with her day and night. When I asked her what she wanted to do she told me she wanted to eat that tomato, that dying before getting a chance at a tomato sandwich fixed right, was well… bullshit (her words). I knew what I had to do, I had to go home and pick our tomato from the vine and slice it up nice and thick, coat the bread with Dukes mayonnaise, sprinkle it with salt and pepper and put it in a plastic bag to take to Martha.
The next day I got to the hospital early and had two sandwiches for us. I put hers on the table and she opened it up and began eating it. Halfway through she started laughing and I asked her what was so funny. She said we worked all summer for one fucking tomato. I burst into laughter and nearly spit out my sandwich. It was true, that damn plant gave us one big fat juicy tomato, but man was it good. It was probably the best tomato I ever had. It was ripe with flavor and hearty with taste.
Later that afternoon I fell asleep in the recliner in the hospital room and was awoken by the heart monitor. It was a long steady beep, and the nurses came rushing in. They told me to go into the hallway while they worked on Martha.
That was the last I saw of her alive, she passed in her sleep from another stroke.
That was it, my life was over as far as I was concerned and I wanted nothing more than to join my sweet angel in Heaven or wherever we wound up, we had been saying some pretty racy words lately so I thought we might get stuck in hell, but true hell was living without her. I missed her so much.
I remember the funeral and all the family coming to the house with a million casserole dishes. I didn’t have enough room in my fridge for all the food, so my daughter froze them in the freezer in the garage. I went out to the back porch and lit up a cigar like I did every day. Damn doctors told me to give them up, but I decided to double up on them and try to get to Martha a little faster.
My daughter came out and sat with me and she asked if there was anything special about mom that she needed to know. She wanted some grand revelation but all she got was a funny story about a sandwich.
I said she died happy, eating that one fucking tomato sandwich. Poor girl didn’t get it, guess she had to be there. But I was there, and I knew that we shared that tomato sandwich, and we were happier than a fly on shit, it was the best tomato sandwich I would ever eat.
The winter came and went, and I smoked more and more and damned if I didn’t come down with lung cancer. I rode that out like a trooper and in the summer, I planted new tomato plants. After an entire summer of sitting on the porch smoking my favorite cigars (I bought the expensive ones this time) there were two tomatoes. I waited until they were ripe and made two sandwiches, one for me and one for Martha. I wish she could have seen the two tomatoes; she would have enjoyed that.
In the end I realized that life was about the petty things, not the big events, but the little things like a really good tomato sandwich and cool cucumber water to wash it down. I’ll continue to smoke my damn cigars until they kill me and the maybe I can be with my Martha.

The End

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