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Finally, he set down the tray of flowers. “How did you know?”
Trowel in hand, she paused. “Your mother told me.”
“Right.” He didn’t know what to do with his hands now. They were too dirty to put in his pockets, so he just kind of stood there looking at them. “It’s something I’d always planned to do. Write the book. Though the occasion came sooner than I expected.”
“Oh. Why?”
Hallie knelt straight down into the dirt, and his stomach turned sideways. “Can I not get you a towel or something?” She threw him an amused glance but didn’t answer. And, in a way, Julian supposed he was stalling. He didn’t know how to answer her question. Why was he back in Napa, writing the book sooner than expected? His answer was personal, and he’d spoken it out loud to no one. For some reason, though, the idea of telling Hallie didn’t make him feel uncomfortable. After all, she was casually digging away in the dirt, instead of waiting on his answer as if it would be some monumental revelation. “I changed the order of my ten-year plan slightly after . . . well, my colleague at Stanford, Garth, had something of a mental breakdown.”
She set down the trowel. Twisted her butt around in the dirt to face him, cross-legged.
But her undivided attention didn’t throw him off or make him wish he hadn’t started down this path. Her knees were caked in soil. This was as low pressure as it got.
“Normally I would be teaching through the summer. I’ve been going year-round for some time now. I wouldn’t . . . know what the hell to do with a break.”
Hallie’s gaze flickered past him to the sprawling vineyard, and he knew what she was thinking. He could come home to his family’s nationally renowned vineyard on a break. No. It wasn’t quite as easy as that. But that was a far different conversation.
“Anyway, toward the end of the spring semester, there was a commotion during one of my lectures. A student ran down the hall and interrupted my lesson on the geographical conceptions of time. They asked me for assistance. Garth had . . .” The difficult memory had him rubbing at the back of his neck, remembering too late that his hands were dirty. “He’d locked himself in his office. And he wouldn’t come out.”
“Oh no. Poor guy,” Hallie murmured.
Julian gave a brief nod. “He had some personal issues I wasn’t aware of. Instead of dealing with them head-on, he’d taken on a heavy course load and . . .”
“It was too much.”
“Yes.”
One of the dogs approached Hallie, nuzzling her face. She received the lick, absently patting the animal on the head. “Is he doing better now?”
Julian thought of the relaxed phone conversation he’d had with his colleague three days prior. Garth had even laughed, which had relieved Julian, while at the same time filling him with a certain envy. If only he were as resilient and quick to get on the road to recovery as his friend. “He’s taking some much-needed time off.”
“And . . .” She picked up her trowel again and started creating a completely new hole. As far as he could tell, she wasn’t even finished with the first one. “The situation with Garth made you want to take a break as well?”
A rock formed in his throat. “We’ve been teaching the same length of time,” he said briskly, leaving out the fact that he wasn’t without his own—unacknowledged—personal issues. Many of which had to do with their current surroundings. Memories of the tendons in his throat constricting, a weight pressing down on his chest. The dizziness and inability to find roots in his current surroundings. Julian determinedly shuffled aside those thoughts, returning to the matter of Garth. “We had the same course load with very little leeway. Stepping back just seemed like the wise thing to do. Thankfully, I’d left some flexibility in my schedule.”
“Your ten-year plan.”
“That’s right.” He looked back at her truck, noting the bright blue-and-purple script reading Becca’s Blooms. “As a business owner, surely you have one.”
She rolled her lips inward and gave him a sheepish look from her position in the dirt. “Would you settle for a one-hour plan?” Her hands paused. “Actually, scratch that. I still haven’t decided if I’m picking up dinner from the diner or Francesco’s on the way home. I guess I have a ten-minute plan. Or I would if I knew where these flowers were going. Boys!”
The dogs descended on her, snuffing happily into her neck. Almost like she’d called them over with the express purpose of derailing her train of thought.
“Who is Becca?” Julian asked, wincing at the slobber left behind on her shoulder. “Your truck says Becca’s Blooms,” he explained a little too loudly, trying to drown out the odd pounding of his pulse. He’d never seen anyone so casually muddled in his life. In the dirt with her flowers and dogs and no plan.
