Page 94 of Rune’s Solace

I knew that. Everything I’d read said wait until the real cool came, give them the best chance, do it right the first time. I’d spent enough of my life waiting for the right time.

So I wasn’t putting them in for good yet, but I was getting the bed ready along the south fence, working sand and compost into the dirt, building them a place they might survive when I finally did. If I had to baby the damn things through every summer for the next twenty years, then that’s what I’d do.

They wouldn’t bloom for a while. Couple years, maybe. The field I’d promised her would take longer than that. That was alright. I had time now.

That still felt strange to think.

For six years, everything in this garden had earned its dirt. Something for pain, something for fever, something to stop bleeding or settle a stomach or get a man through a night he had no business surviving. I didn’t grow much just because it looked good. Never saw the point.

My mother had.

She’d have hated how neat I’d made the place, for one thing. Would’ve walked in here, looked at all these straight rows and useful plants, and told me I’d managed to make dirt depressing.

I could hear her saying it.

Gavin, honey, not everything alive has to work for you.

I sat back on my heels.

“Yeah,” I muttered. “I know.”

“Telling the plants your problems now?”

I looked over my shoulder.

Amy stood in the cabin doorway wearing one of my shirts and nothing on her feet, purple hair going six directions from sleep. She’d started doing that lately, waking when I left the bed and wandering out to find me without bothering to get dressed first, and I hadn’t yet figured out how a man was supposed to get any work done with that walking around his property.

“Thought you were asleep.”

“I was.” She rubbed one eye. “Then you weren’t there.”

There wasn’t any accusation in it.

Didn’t need one.

She slept most nights now. Not every one. The bad dreams still came sometimes, and I figured they always would in one form or another, but they didn’t keep her awake six nights straight anymore. When she woke from one, she didn’t sit alone until morning and pretend it hadn’t happened.

She reached for me.

And of course she still has school and Sawyer.

Once, Amy called him before eight in the morning, he answered the phone by shouting, “If you’re dying, give me one second to put pants on.”

Boy just don’t seem right sometimes.

But he’s out here most weeks now, usually in some shirt Spinner found offensive on principle. Nobody reached for a gun when his little hatchback came through the gate anymore, and Gearhead had recently decided Sawyer needed to learn how to change his own oil, which mostly meant Gearhead did the work while Sawyer asked questions specifically designed to shorten a man’s life.

Josie fed him. Horse pretended not to like him. The rest was already done. Family.

Amy came down the steps, saw the row of pots beside me, and stopped.

Her face changed. “Rune.”

I looked back at the dirt because seeing that much feeling on her at once was still enough to make me stupid.

“What?”

“Those are lilacs.”