Page 54 of Key West Homecoming

“Tell me about this one.”

Jake considered the tree.

“It’s about two years old. I bought it at a garden center on North Roosevelt. I meant to put it in the ground, but I decided I liked it in the pot.”

“Why?”

“I could move it when the weather got bad. Then I got used to it there.”

Emma touched one of the leaves.

“It flowers twice a year,” Jake said. “I get maybe a dozen limes if I’m lucky.”

“My grandmother wanted a key lime tree.”

Jake looked at her.

“Did she?”

“Every summer she said she was going to plant one. Then she’d find something else she wanted more, or she’d decide she didn’t have the right place for it. She never got around to it.”

Jake looked at the tree.

“Well, there’s one now.”

Emma nodded.

The simple fact of it caught at her more than she expected. Jake couldn’t have known. He’d bought the tree because he wanted one, yet somehow he had done another thing Gloria had meant to do and never had.

Emma looked from the tree to the lilies and then toward the porch.

When she first arrived, she’d been amazed that the cottage looked so much like the place she remembered. She had blamed Arthur for lying about its condition, but she hadn’t understood the other half of it.

The cottage still felt like Gloria’s because Jake had cared for what Gloria left behind.

He hadn’t preserved it like a museum. His paintings were on the porch, his herbs grew by the kitchen door and his key lime tree sat beside the steps. He’d made a life here without erasing the one that came before it.

Emma wasn’t sure why that mattered so much to her, but it did.

“I’ll leave it in the pot,” Jake said.

She looked at him.

“So you can move it if you want to.”

“Move it where?”

“Wherever you want. Chicago, if you want to try.”

“It wouldn’t survive Chicago.”

“Probably not.”

Emma smiled.

“Keep it right where it is. It belongs here.”

“All right.”