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Bananas on Sundays
Episode 3 of 3 of Found Tortoise, Very Calm by Tara Kincaid · free to read
The notch on the tortoise’s shell was the first thing Felix Whitcomb showed me on Saturday, one finger on his diagram and one on her.
“Back edge, left side,” he said. “Same as Duchess.”
He was in his seventies, in a cardigan buttoned wrong by one button, and he had laminated the diagram since Wednesday. In the margin, in small careful letters, it said Bananas on Sundays.
“I had her thirty years,” he said. “She went under the fence eleven years ago. I fixed the fence the next morning, which was the wrong order.”
It was the third Saturday. The barista had stopped asking. My cup said Good Luck.
The Ortegas came in one car this time. Omar had a new document, a letter from his vet saying that sulcatas sexed under five years old are often sexed wrong.
“Rocco was three when they sexed him,” he said. “So Rocco could be a girl.”
“Big Steve could be a girl,” his wife said.
Josh came at nine sharp with a paper grocery bag. It was full of hay and dandelions and something leafy I didn’t know.
“Mallow,” he said. “From my yard. She likes it.”
“You were very calm last week,” I said.
“She was in a warm bathroom with a guy who’d read care sheets. That’s better than my neighbor.” He sat down. “The records are at my sister’s, in a box marked Kitchen. She’s mailing them.”
So there it was. Three claims, four names, three kinds of proof. A fifteen-digit number. A laminated diagram. A bag of weeds and a box marked Kitchen.
Priscilla had said get sure. The vet had said she could have seventy years left. Whoever I picked, she would live with them for most of that. If I picked wrong, nobody would ever find out, including her.
I thought about the strawberry.
Omar had brought a container of watermelon, cut up, in case Rocco needed welcoming. Felix had a banana in his cardigan pocket. He said he always carried one.
I lifted her out of the basket and set her on the patio. Then I put down a cube of watermelon, a slice of banana, and a handful of Josh’s mallow, a foot apart, in a row.
Nobody said anything.
The tortoise walked to the watermelon first. She looked at it. Then she pushed it away with one front foot, like a bill she didn’t recognize.
She walked past the banana without slowing down.
She ate the mallow, all of it, steadily.
I put her back in the basket and handed it to Josh.
“The vet said she doesn’t know fruit is food,” I said. “Somebody raised her for twenty or thirty years on weeds and never once gave in. A tortoise who gets watermelon every summer knows what watermelon is.”
Omar looked at his phone for a long time, at Rocco pink to the eyes.
“He really does love watermelon,” he said.
“Check under the decks on your block. The vet said they dig. Twenty-three days out, he’s probably dug in close. Every deck and every shed.”
They left in one car.
Felix didn’t argue.
“I enlarged your photo at the library,” he said. “I drew the notch from that. I think Duchess had one. I wanted her to have one.”
“She used to follow the mower,” Felix said. “Every Saturday, all the way around the yard, one length behind. I would slow down so she could keep up. After she went under the fence, I kept mowing slow for a year.”
“They live a long time,” he said. “She could still be out there. She could be under somebody’s porch, perfectly fine, with no idea anybody misses her.”
“She could,” I said, and I meant it.
“Pearl gets weeds in the yard on Sunday mornings,” Josh said. “You could come watch.”
Felix thought about it. “I’d like that.”
“No bananas.”
Felix took the banana out of his pocket and peeled it. “Then I’ll have to eat it myself,” he said.
At his truck, Josh set the basket on the tailgate.
“She laid an egg,” I said. “In my gym shorts. The vet X-rayed her Monday. Nothing else in there.”
“She does one or two a year. Usually in my tomatoes.”
“She’ll outlive you, you know.”
“That’s the idea.” He tapped the shell. “I’m getting her chipped Monday. And registering it.”
He gave me back the basket. It had hay in the weave and a crack down one side, and it would never fully be a laundry basket again.
At two that afternoon, Omar sent a photo. A tortoise under a neighbor’s deck, mud to the eyebrows, looking offended.
Rocco, it said. Definitely a boy.
When I got home the heat lamp was unplugged. Priscilla was on the couch, and there was a bag of dandelions on the counter that I had not picked.
“Did he know about the strawberry?” she said.
“He knew before I did.”
She nodded. “The bathroom’s cold,” she said.
That was as close as she was going to come.
I put the laundry back in the basket. It sagged on the cracked side but it held.
“So,” Priscilla said. “About the cat.”
We discussed it for four minutes.