SIX

The greenhouse is getting crowded. Uli and I have grown enough tomatoes to keep the whole neighborhood in spaghetti sauce this winter. He planted the seeds in his kitchen a few weeks ago, and the other day he showed me how to transplant them into bigger pots. “Mark Weiss’s grandmother smuggled the seeds from Germany,” Uli said. “She sewed them into her hat band. The fellows at the border never noticed. Good thing too. These are the best tomatoes I’ve ever eaten.” In a few months, he says, this greenhouse will be like a jungle with big red fruits hanging everywhere. (Yup, tomatoes are fruits because they have seeds. Who knew?)

Out in the garden, tiny pea shoots are poking up. I put a bamboo stick next to each one to give the little sprouts somewhere to climb. In the next row over, I planted hard, wrinkled little fava beans, but first I had to pop each one into my mouth and get it all wet. Apparently, something in our spit—enzymes, Uli says—helps break down the bean’s outer coating so it’s easier for the sprout to break through. That’s what his friend’s Turkish grandmother told him anyway, so he always does that when he plants favas. If spit has anything to do with the towering plant and superlong bean pods in his photo of last year’s garden, I’d say it’s worth the extra step.

The next row is purple orach, or mountain spinach. (I didn’t have to stick those seeds in my mouth, thank goodness. They’re so small and papery, they would all stick in my teeth.) Scottish blue kale is the next row after that. We put the tiny cabbage plants in the last row before the hedge. Uli started growing those indoors a few weeks ago too, and for the past few days, he’s had to ferry them back and forth between his living room and the front step to harden them off. (That’s gardener-speak for “get them used to the cold.”) Twelve plants. Three different varieties.

“Who eats this much cabbage?” I ask as I plant. On the stool next to me, Uli lights up as if I’d mentioned chocolate.

“Wait till you try sauerkraut,” he says. “I grew up eating it the German way, with caraway seeds and wine in it. But I like the Turkish way even better—with lemon and ginger. Or we could make rotkraut—red cabbage cooked with apples. Or roasted cabbage. So many ways to eat it. Just you wait.”

I don’t have the heart to tell him that in eighty-five days, I’m out of here. But now that I’ve spent so much time working in the garden, I kind of wish I could see it in its full mad-vegetable glory. I guess Uli can send me pictures. Or maybe Nikko. I’ll ask him to help Uli once I’m gone. The harvest is going to be huge.

I push the hoe deep into the dirt and wiggle it back and forth, enough to loosen the earth but not enough to upset the soil’s invisible creatures. There’s a whole underground world down there that I had never thought about before. The bacteria that live close to the surface can’t live deeper down, and the ones deeper down can’t survive close to the surface. Each creature has a job to do. If someone mixes them all up by digging, a whole lot of them die, and the rest have to regroup before they can get back to work.

Uli nods at the row of cabbages. “Looks good. Next task. Turning the compost.”

“Aye, aye, captain.” I salute him with one dirty-gloved hand. He smiles, and I wander over to the big wood-and-chicken-wire boxes behind the greenhouse. A wave of warm air rushes up to me when I lift the lid. It smells like soil after a rain. I dig the hoe in deep, haul out dirt from the bottom and bury the eggshells and other kitchen scraps that were resting on top.

“Asparagus should be ready to eat this year,” Uli says.

“Blech,” I say.

“You’ll change your mind. I planted it three years ago. This’ll be the first crop.”

“Wait.” I turn to face him. “You’ve spent three years on a vegetable that tastes like socks and makes your pee smell funny?”

He grins. “Not socks! Asparagus tastes like Heaven. No comparison to—”

“I know, I know. Organic heirlooms always taste better than conventional store-bought food, right?” I smile so he’ll know I’m not about to bite his head off like Dad would. Sometimes I wonder if the organic debate is what finally ripped my family apart. I mean, Dad did a lot of the cooking when he was a teenager. Imagine coming home from school, cooking dinner and then eating to the soundtrack of The Dangers of Conventionally Grown Food. I picture plates flying, organic gravy dripping down the wall and my dad secretly stocking Uli’s freezer with TV dinners just out of spite.

Uli props his elbows on his knees and takes a deep breath. “Your father must have had a rough day yesterday. He sure was touchy last night.”

“Yeah, no kidding.” He’s been grumpy for a week straight but won’t tell me why. Grown-up stuff, is all he says. That could mean anything from money to Mom to Estelle with a whole new list of stuff to fix in the building. Today when I got home, Dad was stomping around, slamming cupboards, because the power had been out since the morning. All day people had been knocking on his door to let him know. His bad mood filled the apartment, so I went to see if Nikko was up for a wobble around the school parking lot. But he was out, so I came over to Uli’s, leaving Dad to deal with his own mood. “He’s not exactly an open book, my dad.”

“You got that right,” my grandfather says.

I close the lid of the compost and go back to where Uli’s sitting. I pull out a tiny chickweed plant from between the spinach and hand it to him. “What’s next?”

“The bed over there needs weeding.” He pops the chickweed into his mouth, points to a jungle of weeds at the far end and picks up his stool. We make our way over there, and he says, “Now tell me what’s new with your Montreal friend.”

He likes my Sofia stories. Last time I was here, I told him about her upcycling sewing class and the funky purple trim she added to an old polyester dress. When she went to put it on, she discovered she’d sewn the sleeves shut.

“Nothing new today,” I tell him, “except that our favorite DVD store closed. Me and Sofia were loyal customers, maybe the only customers. No one rents movies anymore. But the guy who owned the store loved movies, and he gave the best recommendations.” I try to picture our neighborhood without Película, but I can’t.

“It’s hard to see a place change,” Uli says, like he’s reading my mind. He bends down to pluck a few blades of grass from the soil but then sits back on his stool, as if the effort is too much for him.

It must be hard to see himself change too, I think. We’re silent for a few minutes. It’s a comfortable silence though.

“What’s that?”

I stop weeding for a moment, and I hear it too, a bicycle bell ringing over and over again. “I’ll go look.”

It’s Nikko. The saddlebags on his bike and the box on the back rack are brimming with ice-cream cartons. “Jackpot!” he says. “Your grandfather around?”

“Is all that ice cream for him?” Does Uli even like ice cream? Sure, we ate it together in Montreal once, but I’ve never seen him eat it here. It’s packaged food, after all.

“It’s for everyone!” He tells me how the grocery store’s freezer conked out in the power outage, so they were selling it for a dollar a tub. “I bought enough for Uli and for everyone in the building. It’s half melted, but ice cream is ice cream, right?”

Uli appears behind me. “Deep freezer is in the basement. Toss it all in there. Firm it up a bit before you hand it out. I’ll keep a few tubs for myself. Thanks.”

“Really?” I ask. “All this talk about organic and local, and now you’re going to fill your freezer with this stuff?”

“Bah,” Uli says. “Ice cream’s not about nutrition. It’ll have more flavor in my mouth than in a trash bin, which is where it would have ended up if Nikko hadn’t bought it.”

“My thinking precisely,” says Nikko.

“Gotta pick your battles,” Uli continues. “I choose chocolate. Basement door is this way.”

A few minutes later, the freezer is full. We make our way back to the greenhouse and stretch a plastic tablecloth over the potting table. Uli brings out bowls and spoons from his kitchen. Each bowl gets filled to the brim.

“You’ve got a big garden, Uli,” Nikko says as we scoop the sweet coldness into our mouths. “I bet it’s a lot of work.”

The garden is still not much to look at—a few plants are poking up out of the dirt rows between all the plastic bottles sticking up everywhere—and I wonder what Nikko really thinks of the place. “Uli grows endangered vegetables,” I blurt out, because suddenly it feels important that Nikko doesn’t think my grandfather is as weird as I did at first. “He’s been collecting the seeds for decades. If it weren’t for him, a lot of these plants would die out completely.”

Uli smiles at me before turning to Nikko. “The garden has to be big for a good harvest of seeds. Vegetables grow in the meantime. Too many for me to eat. I donate most to the soup kitchen.”

“Really?” I didn’t know that part.

Nikko asks which soup kitchen, Uli mentions a name, and Nikko nods like he’s heard of it. “I volunteer at the one on Pandora,” he says.

I didn’t know that either. “What do you do there?”

“I work in the kitchen.” He waves his spoon through the air like it’s a sword. “The fastest chopper in the west. That’s me.”

“Good skill to have,” Uli says. “You come over when we’re canning this summer. We could use your help.”

“At your service.” He nods his head graciously.

“So do you grow the same plants every year?” Nikko asks.

“At least two of each variety,” Uli says. “I usually try for more, but space is at a premium.”

“I’m sure no one would blame you for skipping a season,” I say.

“I would blame me,” Uli says. “Every region used to have its own vegetables. Peru still has hundreds of varieties of corn and potatoes. But the unusual ones will all become extinct unless people keep planting them. The whole world becomes poorer when that happens.”

Nikko has a thoughtful look on his face. “So this garden is a museum too. A living vegetable museum.”

“Exactly.” Uli smiles and looks over at me. I can tell he approves of my new long-haired friend. “Now, who wants more ice cream?”

“Are you kidding?” Nikko asks. “I couldn’t eat another spoonful.”

“Last call,” Uli warns, but I shake my head too.

“I’ll take these inside.” Nikko begins collecting bowls and spoons.

“Leave ’em,” Uli says. “Go hand out your ice cream.”

I pull on my gardening gloves. “Will you tell people you rescued it from the trash?”

“Sure,” Nikko says. “Who’s going to care? And if they do, that’s more for us. Wanna help?”

I look over at Uli. “I—”

“Go ahead,” Uli says. “Weeding can wait. And maybe I’ll come too. I’ll bring some maple-walnut over to William.” William is Uli’s friend in our building. They’ve known each other forever.

Nikko takes his bike home. Uli and I start loading the ice cream from the freezer into a couple of empty boxes he has lying around. “Nice young man.”

“I bet you say that about everyone who shows up with gallons of ice cream.”

He smiles. “Glad he was thinking straight. Imagine throwing out food! You’d never catch me doing that. If you’ve ever been truly hungry, you just can’t do it.”

“You were hungry a lot growing up?” I ask.

“I used to eat paper when I was little, just to fill my belly. I never told my mother that though. She tried so hard to look after me. Later I lived on the streets for a while after leaving my uncle’s place. I was always glad when people threw out food then. I got a good few meals from dumpsters. You can’t be too persnickety when you’re on the street.” He shifts a few tubs in the freezer. “There! There’s one! Maple-walnut!”

I go in after it, and when I hand the carton to him, he holds it in the air triumphantly. Nikko comes down the basement steps and lifts one of the boxes. I grab the other, and we parade across the street to our building. We say goodbye to my grandfather at the elevator. I would hug him, but I’m carrying a box loaded with ice cream.

“Will you come again tomorrow?” he asks.

I nod. “Sure, I’ll finish up that weeding. And maybe some more ice cream.”

“Deal,” he says.

First stop is our apartment’s little freezer. “Ice-cream rescuers get first pick,” Nikko says, and I choose dark chocolate and French vanilla, hoping Dad will make some of his amazing strawberry sauce for sundaes. He’s not home—which must mean he’s running off his bad mood, thank goodness—so we head up to the fourth floor and work our way down. Nikko does most of the talking because he knows everybody. Everyone greets us as if we were the smartest, most generous people ever.

The one door we don’t knock on is Estelle’s. Nikko says there’s no point because she’ll either be offended that the ice cream is half melted, or she’ll complain that we didn’t get the kind she likes. I go along with this right up until we’re almost out of ice cream, but the whole time I keep thinking of that day in second grade when Lisa Sampton invited our entire class to her birthday party except for Billy Odiah, who smelled funny, and me, the teacher’s kid. No matter how annoying Estelle can be, I can’t offer ice cream to everyone in the building and leave her out. Within seconds of knocking on her door, though, I wish I’d listened to Nikko.

“I certainly don’t need the calories,” says Estelle. She takes the carton anyway and squints at the label. “And I hope you used your discretion when it came to William on fourth. He has a heart condition. Every gram of fat puts him at risk. I, for one—”

Nikko raises a hand and sets off down the hall. “Sorry, Mrs. Fornan. We won’t endanger your life any further. Gotta go now! Bye!”

I hesitate for a moment, then give an awkward little wave and dash after Nikko. As soon as we’re in the stairwell, he says, “If you ever bring me ice cream and I act like you’re a public menace, please lob the tub at my head.”

I imagine the gooey mess dribbling down his shoulders. “Do you have a flavor preference?”

“Blue bubble gum would look rather dashing, wouldn’t it?”

He follows me down to my apartment. He had planned to head home after we delivered to Estelle—his apartment is across the hall from hers—but I guess striding away from Estelle to fumble with a key in his own lock wouldn’t have been a very grand exit. He waves a spare carton of raspberry-ripple at me. “Want this last tub of poison?”

“Sure. I’ll stuff it in the freezer.”

We open the fire door into our hallway just as two paramedics and a firefighter squeeze out of the elevator, rolling a stretcher between them.

“Uh-oh,” says Nikko.

I recognize Uli’s white hair first. I scream and run to him. No reaction. One paramedic glances at me but says nothing.

“Is he—?”

William is the last one out of the elevator. “He’s alive, Chloë. But he had another stroke. I called the ambulance.”

“Can I go with him?”

William tells the paramedics that I’m the granddaughter.

“Sorry, honey,” one of them says. “You need to be over eighteen to ride in the wagon.”

“But where are you taking him?” I don’t know any of the hospitals here. And where’s my dad?

Dad shows up just as the ambulance takes off. I’m freaking out in the hallway, and William is hugging me with his frail arms. Nikko is standing off to the side, looking at his feet.