The Confessions of Frances Godwin by Robert Hellenga Page B

early November he was having trouble breathing. His big classroom voice had been reduced to a loud breathy whisper, which he tried to correct, unsuccessfully, by pinching his vocal cords together.
    Shortly before Thanksgiving the choir kids came, as they always did, to rake the leaves in the big lot north of the house where we had our garden—tomatoes, lettuce, arugula, and herbs. Paul and I always put the garden to bed while the kids were raking, but this year he was too weak. He tried to stack the logs that Mr. Friend, who looked after the yard, had dumped in the drive, cut short so they’d fit in the old coal fireplace, but he couldn’t manage it and I got the choir kids to do it. He sat in a chair at the edge of the garden and took pictures of me pulling up the tomato plants, and of the kids hauling leaves to the back of the lot on a big tarp that was starting to fall apart—documenting the occasion, as he did every year. Kodak moments that he wouldn’t be around to remember.
    There were still lots of green tomatoes on the plants. I thought I’d picked them all at the end of September. “We’re still in the tomato business,” I said to Paul. “For a while, anyway.” We always let the green tomatoes ripen in the basement. In the dark. We’d usually eat the last tomato in January. They tasted great, as if they’d gained strength there on the shelves, in the darkness. On shelves. On an old trunk. On the seats of old wooden chairs.
    I pulled up the stalks and stuffed them in garbage cans and yard waste bags. On Wednesday I’d drag them out to the curb.
     
    Autumn is my favorite time of year. Well, it’s probably everybody’s favorite time of year. People often announce this preference the way they announce the fact that they don’t like hospitals or funerals. As if it set them apart from others. But this year was so sad that I thought it did set me apart, apart from everything old and familiar. Or maybe it put me at the center.
    The wind had torn all the leaves off the maple trees that Paul had planted in the parkway and most of the leaves off the big oak tree at the back of the lot. The students piled the leaves against a shed in the back and helped me pull up the cattle panels we used to stake the tomatoes and put them on top of the leaves to keep the leaves from blowing away. I didn’t bother to cut off the bits of rope we used to tie the plants to the cattle panels.
    “You should be singing,” I said to one of the choir kids. “How about ‘Autumn Leaves’?”
    “The jazz ensemble does that,” he said, and suddenly it took my breath away. Remembering the song. How I’d loved that sentimental old song in high school. And then I’d grown out of it. But now I was growing back into it.
    “Are you all right?”
    No, I wasn’t all right. I was thinking that we’d just paid almost seven thousand dollars for a new furnace and central air and that now we were going to have to sell the house. Paul was dragging his feet, but it would have to be done.
    Paul made his way to the back to take a picture of the huge pile of leaves sloping down from the shed at the back of the lot. So many leaves. Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Valombrosa. Paul and I took a bus once from Florence to Vallombrosa to see the leaves for ourselves. We walked a long way into the woods, and when we got back, the last bus for Florence had already left and we had to spend the night in a lovely old hotel.
    It was time to write a check for the choir kids. Paul had gone back into the house to get the checkbook. The wind had suddenly stopped, as if it had nothing more to say.
     
    The writing was on the wall. Paul would be starting chemo right after the holidays and had finally agreed to sell, so it would be our last Christmas in the old house and everything glowed in the candlelight of nostalgia as we waited for Stella to arrive from Iowa City. Winter is not a good time to sell, but I’d already talked to a realtor and