When I returned that afternoon with gardening gloves, shears, and a shovel for Rus, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. He seemed to have gotten a good chunk of the gazebo done in my absence, which was strange. He had fastened on the railings and tied the lattices to the pillars so that the trumpet vines could grow up them in the years to come. I gave him the regretful news that I hadn’t found the garden yet.
“You don’t have to come visit me every day,” he said. He’d tucked his glasses into his shirt pocket and was feeding the budding trumpet vines through the lattice, startlingly gentle with them.
“How do you know I am?” I challenged. “I could be coming once every other day, or four days, or once every week.”
He glanced up, and then back down at his work. “The sunburn on your shoulders is still there from yesterday.”
I glanced down at my shoulders. They were, indeed, still pink from yesterday. I wasn’t sure what to think about the fact that he noticed something so small. “Oh.” What else had he taken note of that I hadn’t thought to fix or hide? It was toolate to be self-conscious about itnow. “Well, what if I want to visit you? I’m sure it gets boring here alone.”
“It’s not that bad,” he replied. “I like to garden, actually.”
I could already tell that from his hands. Delicate motions and calloused fingers—not the hands of a lawyer.
“It’s the quiet that gets me,” he went on, glancing up to me, the dark blue of his eyes like sapphires when the sunlight hit them. “So, I don’t mind the company.”
“Well, then, lucky for you, I have about an hour to waste.” I sat down on the inside of the gazebo to watch him. “Do you still garden?”
“Not very much. I don’t have the time. Work takes me away a lot, so plants usually can’t survive me.”
“Ah, right. You have very important clients on your very important phone,” I teased. His mouth twitched into a ghost of a smile. He fed another vine through the lattice. “Do you miss it?”
“No,” he scoffed, slipping the vine through another hole in the lattice, “but I like the structure of my work, the cadence of it. The inertia forces me forward. I don’t have time to second-guess things, which is nice. And the pay isn’t bad, either—”
“I meant gardening,” I said gently.
His fingers paused in surprise, and then he huffed a laugh. “Ah.Well. I mean, it was a hobby and of course I miss my free time,” he babbled, as if I’d taken him off guard. “But … yes. I miss it. What made you want to be a gardener?”
“Ahorticulturist,” I corrected.
“Right. That.”
I leaned against the railing of the gazebo. It was a questionI’d been asked enough over the last decade that I had a canned response for it—loving nature, being invested in plant biodiversity, climate change—but it was also a pretty impersonal one. I picked at the wooden railing, peeling off a sliver of wood. “When I was in school, Mom and I moved around a lot. I didn’t have many friends, and I was constantly having to catch up on schoolwork, so I was an anxious kid. A social studies teacher invited me to the gardening club. She said it would help me relax and make friends.” I leaned my head against the railing, the memory of that teacher a blur. “I can’t for the life of me remember her name, but she changed my life. Whenever I felt overwhelmed or that my life was out of control, I’d pick up a discarded plant on the side of the road or I’d go out into the backyard and plant flowers I’d never see, because we’d inevitably move again before they bloomed. But it didn’t matter. I felt safe.”
He glanced up at me through the lattice, lingering thoughtfully before he returned to his work again. “Whenever summer came around, my parents were more than happy to get rid of me for a few months, so I came to stay with Eula and Henry. If I was at Lilymoor, my parents were convinced I couldn’t get in trouble.”
“Could you?” I wondered aloud.
“Obviously,” he replied, concentrating too much on the vines to disguise a grin, “but I used to get in a lot more. School bored me, so I entertained myself. But when I was here? No one treated me like a kid, so I didn’t golookingfor it. If I messed up, Henry would put me on grunt duty and make me mulch the entire front landscaping.”
“Oof.”
“I know. I quickly learned.”
“I should have figured you were one ofthosekids,” I mused, and he laughed. “Let me guess, at school you acted out and exploded something in chemistry class? Or started a gambling ring on the playground?”
He glanced up at me through the railing slats, mouth open in shock. “A poker ring, thank you,” he finally said, indignant. “In middle school. And the only reason I got in trouble was because a parent complained that their kid was gambling away all their lunch money. It wasn’tmyfault they were bad at the game.”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re all the same.”
“Oh?” He raised a challenging eyebrow. “You know a lot of us troublemakers?”
“My best friend is,” I replied, then dropped into silence. I wanted to kick myself. I hadn’t slipped up like that in months. “Was,” I corrected, softer.
I waited for that look of sadness. That pity. But it never came.
“Harrie,” he guessed.
I gave a wordless nod.
