Page 58 of Meet Me in the Garden

“Odette,” Adele calls from somewhere farther inside the house. “You’ve got to come see.” She’s in the doorway to the kitchen, waving me over. “It’s unbelievable,” she says, looking at the floor. It’s the same green-and-beige checkered linoleum that Bernard laid when they bought the house, but now it’s as though there’s a layer of perfectly clear ice over the whole thing. It shines and reflects like a mirror.

“How did you do it?” I ask.

“Bruce cleaning wax,” Claire says. “It cleans as it waxes.”

“Did you apply it yourself?”

“I did. A bunch of times. Every day for a week to build up the shine.”

“Does the wax make the floor slippery?” Adele asks.

“Not at all,” Claire says. “See?” She takes a step across it, twirls a bit. “Come try.”

“I’m afraid to,” Adele says. “I don’t want to do a thing to mess it up.”

“Same here,” I say.

Claire laughs. “As though Bernard isn’t walking across my kitchenfloor all day. Can’t keep that man away from the refrigerator. And Sebastian is crawling all over it now.”

We settle in Claire’s living room, a view through the glass doors of Bernard and Al and the children outside, Sebastian playing at our feet.

“Well, this is nice,” Adele says. “What a good idea.”

“Look at Sebastian,” I say. “Such a big, healthy boy.”

“He played peekaboo yesterday. And took a bite of oatmeal with a spoon.” She smiles, her expression so bright and cheerful that I almost forget all it took for her to get here. We don’t talk about the injections and the years of hoping and the miscarriage, just like we don’t talk about Papa or Delphine. We talk instead about floor wax and the strange spots on Claire’s ginkgo tree. I tell them about finally finding my chair, and how I bought fabric for it. A garden motif. Birds and flowers.

“Al and I are going to roof the patio,” Adele says. “For shade.”

For a while, she talks about the dimensions of the frame they’ll build, and Claire talks about a neighbor a few doors down who just did the same and how it’s nice except that some of their flowers aren’t blooming because they aren’t getting enough sun. “The worst part is,” she says, “they got a dog, and when they were gone one day the dogchewedthe base of the frame. Can you imagine? Bite marks all over it.”

“I see that the men are out of iced tea,” I say. “I’ll go refill their glasses.”

“Are you bored of us?” Adele asks.

“I could never be bored of you,” I say. And I’m not. It’s more of a general restlessness. One that burrows into me and stays and stays. A relief now, to step out into the heat with the pitcher of tea.

“Did you hear?” Bernard asks me as I refill his glass. “A thousand records, in the trash.”

“No,” I say. “What do you mean?”

“The Johnnie Ray,” Al says. “There was a problem with the master and nobody in Listening caught it. Production turned out a thousand records with a pop so bad in the third track they were unusable.”

“Now Production and Listening are battling it out over who’s to blame,” Al says. “Someone’s gotta pay for it.”

A tingle at the base of my skull.

Al holds out his glass for me.

“Listen, listen!” Nathalie says, running up. Her hair’s grown darker since she’s been with me, her cheeks fuller. She still likes her bangs cut short, the striking arch of her brows visible. The same arch as Delphine’s and my sisters’ and mine, and Papa’s and Auntie Bertha’s before us. “Rudy, come on!” Rudy follows her, older and taller but doing as he’s told. “We’ve been rehearsing,” she says. “It’s time for the show.”

“Auntie Odette, will you get Mama?” Rudy says. “And Auntie Claire?”

“They might not want to be disturbed,” I say. “But then again, if it’s for a show…”

I fill Al’s glass and go back inside to get them.

Claire sighs, looks to the clock. “Well, they gave us an hour to ourselves. Not too bad. And I’ll need to get Sebastian down for his nap soon anyway.”