Alexandra Clemente Perez

Don’t Kill the Flowers.

It was the summer of nineteen-sixty-six. Or, perhaps it was was sixty-seven. No, it was defintely sixty-six. I remember, because the day before was my eleventh birthday and I was born July of 1955. The kitchen still smelled like the vanilla cake Mamá had baked especially for occasion. As the sun rose, I dipped what was left of it in café, lightened up with plenty of milk and some cinnamon dusted on top for good measure. Normally, I detested being awake before the sun but on this morning I jumped out of bed. This was the day I started working with Papá. 

It was  seven in the morning by the time we got outside, and already the Central California sun was beating down on us as if it held a grudge. Just loading the mower onto the bed of the truck made a shiny layer of sweat appear over my forehead, dripping into my eyes . When we were finally finishes, I jumped  into the passenger’s side of the truck, my frame so small I could still swing my legs as they hung off the edge of the seat. I gazed out the window and thought about  all the things I was going to buy now that  I that was going to be earning my own money. 

All week, in my back pocket I had been carrying around a newspaper, neatly folded up in thirds, where I meticulously looked over the “for sale” ads and circled all the possibilities. As Papá  drove us to our first house of the day, I pulled it out and read. Somebody on Pine street was selling a record player. I imagined my little brother Javier and I on the floor of the bedroom we shared, listening to records  I could borrow from the library.  I circled that one with the pen that accompanied the newspaper in my pocket at all times.  Somebody else on Elm street was selling their bicycle. I took extra care to circle that one twice. 

Our first house of the day was in Lakeview Estates, the gated community on the other side of the bridge. The  town underwent, and I believe still undergoes  to this day a complete transformation once you  the cross the underpass on Washington Way. On the side we lived on, the homes were mostly one story, with one or two bedrooms at the maximum  and were painted unconventional colors like peach, green and orange.  Once you crossed the underpass, the homes got bigger, the colors became  more neutral and the lawns were suddenly pristinely maintained. That was usually thanks to hired help, like  Papa and I. Most of Papá’s customers were here, on what my school friends and I used to call the “nice side of the bridge”. 

Papá pulled into the driveway and put the truck in park. We climbed out, and he opened the gate to the backyard with the key he was given by the owners. The doors swung open to reveal what in all likelihood was a yard not much bigger than most  standard suburban back yards. To my eleven year old eyes, however, accustomed as they were to apartment living, my father may as well have opened the gates to disneyland. My eyes darted immediately to the swing set, painted with candy-cane red and white stripes, then moved to the underground kiddie pool and finally ended on the trampoline. But then  Papá walked up beside me and pointed beyond all of that to the jasmine shrubs that lined the entire yard. 

“You see this?” Papá said, in his accent. 

I gave a nod. 

“You’re going to trim them, nice and straight, while I’m cutting the grass,”  and he put a pair of shears in my hands, the handles barely fitting in my tiny grasp. Perhaps sensing my apprehension, he followed up the declaration with; “Here. Watch me.”

He began to demonstrate the correct way to trim the hedges; how to correctly  hold the shears, how to keep a strong stance so that your arms don’t get tired and to ensure you cut in neat, straight lines. But then suddenly he stopped, and he looked  down at the leaves that had fallen from the hedge to the ground and he gasped. 

He reached down to pick one of the fallen branches and showed me the white, barely-there jasmine flowers just beginning to bloom.

“I killed the flowers,” he says, suddenly taking on the demeanor of a small boy. 

“You didn’t see them, Pa.” I said, consolingly. 

His gaze shot up from the fallen flowers to me.

“They were still alive,’ he said. 

…

Once the lawn was done, we finished loading the tools onto the bed of the truck, just in time to hear the front door swing open. The customer stepped out, wearing heels and a dress reminiscent of the shows I always saw on TV - the mothers hovering busily over a  kitchen counter and donning ruffled aprons and red lipstick. She took  a step out of the house, speaking excitedly into a phone reciever. The chord on the phone didn’t go past the front steps of the house, and so she came to a halt  on the bottom step, pulled two dollar bills from an envelope, and tossed them in our direction. Without a word or even a glance in our direction, without stopping her conversation on the phone, she dissappeared into the house and quietly shut the front door behind her. 

The whole drive home, as I gazed out through the window, I watched a tumbleweed follow us to our next customer and thought about the previous four hours. I thought about the way Papa furrowed his brow with concentration as he made sure the mower left perfectly symmetrical lines in the grass. I thought about how pained he was at trimming the flowers in those bushes, devastated at ending their lives just as they had begun to bloom. I wondered how it was possible that to somebody else my father was merely the hired help you toss a money at once a week, when to me he was the axis on which the world spun upon. 

When we arrived to our next house, Papá  put the truck in park then looked over at me for a split second before reaching into his pocket. He produced one of the two crumbled up dollar bills that he had received from the customer, and handed it to me. 

“What’s this?” I asked. 

“Your half of what we made at the last house,” he says. “Take it. Save it for school, so one day you’re not working a job like mine” and he stuck one of the dollars in the front pocket of my shirt.

He hopped out of the truck and began unoading the equipment from the truck, just like we had at the last house. A routine we would repeat six times that day, if I remember correctly. But before I jumped out to join him, I took the dollar out of my pocket and I stuck under the driver’s seat of the truck, hoping that if my father was ever in a bind for change, that bill would be there to help him in his time of need.