My dad and the tomato plant

One summer a few years ago me and my sister, Suzy, were at dad's. Suzy may have been staying with him at the time, I don't remember. We went to the garden centre to get him some plants for the garden. He wanted flowers so we bought him some flowers that old people like: frilly like an old ladies knickers. I also bought him a tomato plant. We got home and started putting them in the borders. I told him I'd got him a tomato plant as well. Emotionally that's when it kicked off. I don't remember it exactly but it went something like this:
"Why?"
"You get tomatoes off it."
"I don't want it."
"Why not?"
"I wanted flowers. I don't want that."
"You can eat the tomatoes off it."
"I don't want it. Does it have flowers?"
While technically I imagine anything that bears fruit has to have a flower of some description I decided to exaggerate the tomato flower's gorgeousness and told him it had lots of pretty yellow flowers.
It kind of petered out around there, both of us in bad moods. The tomato plant stayed, mostly because I'd put it in the ground and he wouldn't know how to dig it out. Like most of my trips to see my dad in the last few years I left his house sad and not sure if I wanted to go back to see him again. Later that summer my sister told me that the cleaner who used to come in to look after my dad ate the tomatoes for her lunch when she was there. I don't know if dad ever did.

Here's a picture of dad from one of my visits to him that I remember as being happy. Mostly I think because he liked (and I guess approved of) the new-old-somewhat broken Citroen Xantia that I'd bought and it was the first time he'd been in it. I'd had it when I visited him in hospital the year before but he hadn't got to see it. I remember driving up to see him in hospital on a sunny day with the car windows open playing the album A Tom Moulton Mix very loud (especially Eddie Kendricks's Keep on Truckin') and feeling somewhat serene and happy. I guess I was glad he was alive, getting better. Somehow going to see him in hospital felt like a way that we could get on. He liked the fuss the nurses would make of him in hospital. He could be very charming with strangers when he wanted to, asking where they were from, about their name, accent and family. It reminds me of another story that makes me very angry but that's for another time.