Barbara White - The Unfinished Garden

James concentrated on slowing down his breath, winding down his fear, and reliving the moment he had seen her garden on the edge of the woods. His pulse had slowed, his thoughts had fallen silent, and he’d known, just known: whatever lay at the end of that driveway held the key to his plan.

Piedmont Perennials had been his final appointment at 6:00 p.m. Six, a sign that everything would be okay, except for that god-awful honking. James glanced up as a skein of geese flew over in textbook formation—an imperfect, imbalanced V with one side longer than the other. Symmetry soothed his fractured mind, but the lack of it….

James jerked around, searching for a focal point, a diversion, anything.

Stop. Please, just stop. And a picture of Tilly dropped into his mind. She moved with the elegance of a prima ballerina, albeit one in a scarlet top and frayed cutoffs. Scarlet, she was a woman of bright colors who could spin through life laughing, gin in hand. But there was a sadness in those huge, pale eyes. Yes, she was beautiful, but beauty held no meaning for him. He was attracted only to women who were as screwed up as he was, even if they hid it better. Fuck. Not good, not good. Eighteen months celibate and focused on one thing—fixing himself. Fighting terror sucked up enough emotional energy. How could he salvage any for the mess of love and desire? Besides, being alone was his default button. Best for others, best for him. And yet…Tilly had made him smile.

His insides were heaving with fear, and she made him smile.

Her feet, poised for a pirouette, were so small, so vulnerable—so bare. Bare and dirty. And covered in soil. Soil on her feet, soil on her hands, soil she’d transferred to him. Soil poisoning her, poisoning him.

Boss back the thought, James. Boss it back.

Bossing back, the most basic weapon in the cognitive-behavioral therapy arsenal, sounded as easy as flipping on the turn signal. Don’t want that thought? Toss it and change direction. And yet summoning those three short words, boss it back, demanded enough focus to cripple him.

Why, why had he shaken hands with a gardener, a woman with dirt under her thumbnail? He must get to the rental apartment and throw everything, even his Pumas in the washing machine. Scour himself clean and then scrub the car inside and out.

Lose himself in time-consuming routine, his comfort and his curse.

But first, vomit.

Chapter 3

The ache in her right shoulder blade, an old symptom of her scoliosis, continued to throb to the cacophony of spring peepers. Or had they already become bog-standard tree frogs by early June? One of those Southern things Tilly could never figure out. Read-aloud time, that most precious part of the day, had slipped by unnoticed, so she’d promised Isaac he could come back outside in his jammies to catch fireflies.

The phone rang and Tilly picked it up on the first ring. “Piedmont Perennials.” She swallowed a yawn.

“Tilly? James Nealy.” His voice was deeper on the phone. Or did she mean sexier?

Bugger it. She really must start checking caller ID. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.” He paused. “Listen, I realize you’re probably doing bedtime with your son.”

At least he was aware of that fact. Half a Brownie point in his favor.

“And I’m sorry, I’m sorry…I know I took up enough of your time yesterday evening, and you’ve made your position perfectly clear. Perfectly clear. But I’m—” he hesitated “—obsessed with your garden, and sadly for you, that won’t change. Name your price and conditions. I’ll agree to anything.”

“How about agreeing to find someone else?”

“Not an option.” In the forest, a blue jay jeered. “It has to be you. Your garden speaks to me.”

She laughed. She had a gardening groupie? Was this how David had felt every time a grad student drooled over one of his lectures? Not a bad sensation, really. “Are you always this sure?”

“I have good intuition, Tilly. I wouldn’t be retired at forty-five if I didn’t.”

“Lucky you, because mine is crap.” One irreversible mistake, that’s all it had taken to dull her intuition into nonexistence. Tilly shivered, despite the clawing humidity. For a second she was back in the cold, white hospital room. Some days she wasn’t sure she’d ever left.

A carpenter bee looped past, searching for a place to burrow. It would, no doubt, drill a pretty little hole in her cedar railing. One bee, one hole, meant nothing, but small things had a nasty habit of becoming big things. And she didn’t want to think about the damage a colony of bees could inflict.

“So there is a chance for me?” James said.

Obviously, she hadn’t mastered no quite as well as she’d thought. “You know, I really, really want to dislike you.”

“Yes, I can have that effect on people. Although they tend to skip the want part.”

Tilly smiled. If he kept this up, she might have to change her mind. “It’s late, and you’re right. I’m in the middle of bedtime.”

“Can I call tomorrow?”

“You’re pushing it.”

“Sorry, sorry.”

“Do you always apologize this much?”

“It’s one of my more annoying habits.”

“You might want to work on that.”

There was a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the phone line. “I’m trying.” His voice was lower, quieter.

“Good night,” Tilly said, and hit the off button before James could reply.

She scuffed up a dusting of red clay with her gardening clog and imagined rain. English summer rain that pattered and pinged and smelled fresh, clean and cool. James’s talk of childhoods the day before had unsettled her, left her with an aftertaste she couldn’t nix. A quick fantasy blindsided her—running home to her mother, her twin sisters, Caitlin and Bree, and of course, Rowena. Tilly may have changed her name and citizenship, but she was English at heart, just as she would always be a Haddington.

Isaac, who had been searching the edge of one of her shade beds for who-knew-which disgusting creepy-crawly, rose and yanked up his pajama bottoms. “Thinking of Daddy?”

“Nope.” Her eyes followed a vapor trail toward the stratosphere.

“England?”

“Busted.” Bugger, she was a pitifully easy read. Thank God she never had secrets to keep. “I was remembering gloriously wet summers when I was your age. Snakeless, too.”

Isaac recoiled as if she’d driven over skunk roadkill with the truck’s windows open. “Are you going to drag us back?”

“Wow. Why would you ask that?” Avoidance, smart move.

“You think everything’s better in England.” Isaac twisted his foot, and a hunk of guilt constricted in her stomach. “But I want to live here, in our house, for ever and ever.”

“I know, my love. I used to feel the same way about Woodend.”

“Do you still?”

Not a fair question. Woodend was the place that caught her when she fell from life, and it always would be. Isaac continued to wait for an answer, but a sugarcoated one she couldn’t give.

“Woodend is a place of memories. I was born there. I met Daddy there….” Tilly stared at the dogwood tree they had planted on the sixth-month anniversary of David’s death.

“This is a place of memories, too, Mom. Yours and mine and Daddy’s.”

But the memories here were polluted with grief. Once again she had shared too much and disappointed Isaac. Yes, he was old in intellect, but emotionally he was far younger than eight.

“You’re right.” Tilly swelled with love. Sometimes just looking at Isaac made her chest heave with the imagined horror of a thousand what-ifs. “I’m sorry. I’m a little lost today.”

“That’s okay, Mom. I have lost days, too. Hey, I need to pee. Want me to do it by the cold frame to keep the deer away?”