``The gardens of the dead die with them,'' his daughter said.
``Nonsense,'' he answered.
Since their retirement his wife Nancy had made it her daily occupation to tend the garden. It had become her refuge, her escape. He would remain in the house reading the paper, watching morning news shows. Calling around to arrange to play golf. They exchanged few words in a day.
The last time she came in from the garden it was early spring. In late April he mowed the wet lawn and poked around at the flower beds. Battered daffodils were dancing raggedly in the rain. California poppies were choking the flower beds. He did what he could.
A peach tree stood in the middle of the lawn. Every summer the children and grandchildren came to gather the peaches and everyone helped bake two dozen pies and make peach ice-cream. It was a fifteen year tradition, the only time when the family got together in the year. Brilliant, happy photographs of the occasion were framed and displayed in at least five living rooms around the world.
He knew that Nancy worked on the peach tree. He knew that she sprayed and fertilized and pruned. He knew she did these things but he did not know what she did. He had never asked. Never listened.
Peaches on that tree were the size of basketballs. All right, the size of grapefruit. They were amazing. By June he saw that the peaches were not very big this year, but there were a lot of them. He let the garden hose drip below the tree. Perhaps they needed more water.
On the week end that the family was to come and bake pies he had the lawn mowed and the flower beds weeded. Things looked pretty good. The peaches were ready and they tasted good as ever.
He got up early that Saturday and he took his coffee to the porch to welcome and admire the day. The peach tree had collapsed on the lawn. Split down the middle where the trunk diverged. Hopeless. He stood in his socks on the dew spangled lawn and looked down at the broken tree. ``I tried,'' he said to the tree, ``I tried.''
When the kids arrived they stripped every peach from the broken tree and they made their pies but no ice cream. His son Tad went home for his chain saw and cut up the tree and sawed off the trunk flush with the ground. By evening he had a pie on the kitchen table and two in his freezer and all trace of the peach tree was gone. He sat out on the porch with a beer and watched the dying of the day. In the half light Tad drove up with his daughter Amy. They unloaded something from the back of the truck and placed it on the lawn where the tree had stood. A cement angel, looking not at him but at the flower beds.