I put the book back on the shelf. Behind the files.
“Don’t tell anyone.”
“Who would I tell? I talk to you, your grandmother, and a laptop.” She crosses her arms. “Rosa would frame them.”
“Exactly why you don’t tell Nonna Rosa.”
She grins. Wide. The kind that turns her sharp features young.
I sit down. Open the report I wasn’t reading before.
“The osprey is my favorite,” she says.
“Noted.”
By evening, the garden is hers too. I don’t remember agreeing to this. The roses are Mama’s. Have been since she planted them thirty years ago. Iron trellis from Nonna’s village outside Palermo, shipped when Mama visited Sicily as a girl and fell in love with the garden walls there. Mama grew up in New Orleans but her roots ran back to the old country through Nonna Rosa’s hands. I’ve maintained them for eleven years. Pruning. Watering. Keeping the beetles off the leaves. No one else touchesthem. Gia offered once and I cut her down with a look that earned silence for a week.
But tonight Isabella followed me out and I didn’t stop her.
She’s on the stone bench near the broken fountain. Knees pulled up. Face turned toward the evening sky. The humidity has dropped enough to make the air bearable and the cicadas are loud in the oaks.
I’m standing near the roses. Checking new growth on the climbing variety Mama loved. Red so dark they’re black in this light.
“That’s a mockingbird.” She’s pointing at the oak. A gray bird in the upper branches, running through stolen songs. “I know about things that aren’t on a screen too.” She hugs her knees tighter. “I looked up New Orleans birds because I was bored. Don’t read into it.”
“I’m not.”
“You are. I can see your face doing that thing.”
“My face doesn’t do things.”
“Your face does one thing, which is nothing, and right now it’s doing a second thing, which means I’m getting to you.” She’s grinning again. “Two facial expressions. Growth.”
I turn back to the roses.
“What are those?” She points at the climbers. “They’re beautiful.”
“Mama planted them. The trellis came from Nonna Rosa’s village outside Palermo. Mama visited as a girl, saw the garden walls, and shipped one back.” I strip a dead leaf. “Papa thought she was losing her mind. She said a garden without roses wasn’t a garden. It was a yard.”
“She sounds like a person with strong opinions.”
“She had opinions about everything.”
“Good.” Isabella pulls her sleeves past her wrists. The evening cooling. “Opinions are underrated in this family.”
She’s shivering. The kind she’d deny. I don’t offer a jacket. I step closer. Stand beside the bench. My body between her and the breeze off the garden wall.
She leans into the warmth. Her shoulder presses against my leg. Neither of us moves away.
The cicadas fill the space between us. Not silence. Louder than silence. An agreement neither of us made out loud.
“Your mother would have been a good hacker.”
“My mother didn’t own a computer.”
“Doesn’t matter. Opinions, patience, and the stubbornness to ship a trellis across an ocean? That’s hacker energy.” She tilts her head back. Her chin tipping up. “That’s where you get it.”
“I’m not a hacker.”
