Page 35 of Grumpy Bear

So I ignored his question and raised my hands to the sky. “Beautiful day out here, isn’t it?”

Trey eyed the beds again with doubt, then his gaze traveled up my body, evaluating me. He snorted and shook his head. Without saying anything else, he took off with a lurch, throwing out a hand to save a tower of towels from toppling out of the cart.

I took the trimmer and followed a pebbled path that disappeared behind the chapel into a more formal-looking garden enclosed by boxwoods. The hedges were still untamed, not cubes like you might see in an English garden but left to grow shaggy with their unknowable plans. At the back of the space, a reddish-purple Japanese maple shaded a small water feature. A concrete statue of some classical god holding a trident stood over a tiny pond with a fountain burbling between his feet. I assumed it was Poseidon, but what did he have to do with anything? The gold and white blob of a fat koi sloshed by.

There was a rectangular block of marble on the ground, a headstone or grave marker. Wayne Allen Gentry 1969-2015.

Surely he wasn’t actually buried here. The large water feature was only a few feet away, not to mention the size of the naturally occurring boulders. There was no room for a grave. It was a memorial garden, then.

It felt irreverent to use the weed eater with its wicked, waspish whine. I laid it down and got on my knees to pull a few tall weeds by hand. I started to hum “Farther Along.” It seemed appropriate to sing a little of the verse, but feeling self-conscious, I stopped at the chorus where it swells really big and full-throated. My voice died off into humming again.

Maybe it was the sunshine in the purple leaves or the steady presence of the bees and the koi, but I felt the need to sing a hymn. I usually avoided gospel, hymn-like songs, wanting to leave my years growing up in church in the past. I hadn’t wanted to pray in longer than I could remember.

But I didn’t know what I was going to do. Why was I even here, and where would I go in four days?

Four days. There was no home to get back to. Yet, I was still trying to get to that, following whims and committing to some vague dream.

I guessed there was no way but forward. And the next step would reveal itself at the right time, just like the one that had brought me here.

Maybe it would come through another person like Austin. Maybe he was right about me finding opportunity here as well as anywhere else. Maybe I was going to meet some person who held a clue to that next step for me.

Maybe this was all meant to be, and I just had to stick to my faith that music was the key to my future happiness.

I did have faith. Especially in that. Only in that.

It was a farfetched thought, I knew, but it did cross my mind that Wayne Allen Gentry, whoever he was, might put in a good word for me if, on the off chance, heaven was a real place.

Old indoctrinations were hard to shake. I still carried a kind of sad fondness for what I was brought up to believe.

I touched the stone with my fingertips and sent up a wish for peace.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

I almost jumped out of my skin, thinking it was Trey coming back to belittle me some more.

I scrambled to my feet as Coleman came into the garden, shirtless, his hairy chest matted with sweat.

“I was…” I pointed dumbly at the ground.

Scowling, he scraped up the pile of weeds I’d pulled and threw them over the hedge into the woods. “I yelled your name like five times.”

“Sorry.”

“We gotta go. Creek’s about to overflow into the pool.”

“Oh. Fuck. Okay.”

We gathered the tools up in a rush, and I was barely seated in the UTV before he took off down the hill, across the bridge, and… right past the pool complex.

“Are we not stopping?”

“No. We’re going up to the swimming hole.”

16

Sawyer

Artist.