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The cat, much like Poppy, didn’t seem to care. I stomped across the room to open the door and then followed the cat out.
Only because Poppy was going to hurt herself if someone didn’t help. And other than the cat and a priest who’d never helped anyone, I was the only someone around.
“Hey!” Poppy called as I approached. The sea gulls were out in full force over near the side entrance to the church and I remembered, all at once and deeply against my will, that Father Patrick always fed the sea gulls. Just like he’d fed those fucking cats. “Everything all right?”
“You’re going to open your stitches,” I said and picked up the giant roll of chicken wire by myself. I turned on the priest who was watching me with an open mouth and barely restrained fear. “Where do you want this?”
“I, ah . . . well.”
I turned to Poppy who pointed at the far corner of the garden, and I carried the wire over my shoulder down the sloping hill. The sun was hot, but the breeze was cool—a combination of perfection I’d forgotten about while living in New York, where it was either hot or cold with nothing in between. I’d missed the way the ocean smelled up here. New York City was near the very same ocean, but it never smelled like this. Deep brine and fresh.
I dropped the chicken wire on its end right near the spot where the fencing had been bent back, probably by the deer. “You have snips?” I asked, and the priest pulled them out of his pocket.
“I can handle it from here,” he said. “There’s no need—”
I stepped back and the roll of wire started to fall. Of course Poppy stepped forward to grab it, and I caught it and her before she got there. “Just give me the snips,” I said to the priest who clearly had not gotten any better at taking care of people.
“I got it,” the priest said with a hard edge to his voice. He came to stand next to me and pulled the edge of chicken wire while I unspooled it. When he had enough, he crouched and clipped each wire one by one.
“Careful,” he said as the wire popped free and caught on the edge of my sweater. Poppy untangled me.
“I like that sweater,” she said with a saucy look at me under her lashes. Daft girl, flirting with me in front of a priest. I liked the shamelessness of it. Of her in the sunlight on a hilltop. In a garden.
“Do you remember this garden?” Father Patrick asked, looking up at me, a half smile on his face. Like he was reading my mind, like we were all having such a good time. “It’s the same one you helped—”
“I don’t remember the fucking garden,” I snapped at him.
Once the wire was free, I took the roll back up the sloped hill to the shed where, in the darkness that smelled of cedar mulch and mud, I had a strange sense of déjà vu. The garden tools were all hung on a pegboard. The rakes and shovels were clean and resting against the walls next to big bags of fertilizer and mulch sitting in buckets.
We do that so the mice don’t get into them.
Rattled by the memory, I got out of the shed.
“You done?” I asked when I got back to the edge of that garden. Father Patrick was bending the edges of the wire over the existing chicken wire so it hung in the right place.
“Just about,” Poppy said.
“I’ve expanded it over the years,” Father Patrick said, like someone had asked him. “The one we built was about half this size.”
“You built this garden?” Poppy asked me, bright-eyed, like I’d taught the cat to talk.
“No.”
“We’re going to make a garden, boys. We’re going to break the ground and fertilize it. We’re going to plant seeds and do everything we can to help them grow.”
“Fuck all grows up here,” Tommy said. Snarled, really. And I snarled with him because that was what I did. Father Patrick didn’t even say anything about the language. He was disappointing that way. Refusing to be provoked when provoking the priests was what we lived for.
But truly, our hearts weren’t in it.
Father Patrick had pulled us out of the punishment Father McConal had given us and we were calmed by the sunshine and fresh air. And weak from hunger.
The priest couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “You built this before—”
“No,” I said.
Poppy blinked at me, accepting my lie for what it was—the end of this conversation.
“After we finish here,” she asked. “Do this do you think we could go help Father Patrick—?”
“No,” I said.
“But there’s wire over the windows in the sanctuary and it would be so pretty without it.”
