Barbara White - The Unfinished Garden

James Nealy needs to create a garden

James Nealy is haunted by irrational fears and inescapable compulsions. A successful software developer, he’s thrown himself into a new goal—to finally conquer the noise in his mind. And he has a plan. He’ll confront his darkest fears and build something beautiful: a garden. When he meets Tilly Silverberg, he knows she holds the key…even if she doesn’t think so.

After her husband’s death, gardening became Tilly’s livelihood and her salvation. Her thriving North Carolina business and her young son, Isaac, are the excuses she needs to hide from the world. So when oddly attractive, incredibly tenacious James arrives on her doorstep, demanding she take him on as a client, her answer is a flat no.

When a family emergency lures Tilly back to England, she’s secretly glad. With Isaac in tow, she retreats to her childhood village, which has always stayed obligingly the same. Until now. Her best friend is keeping secrets. Her mother is plotting. Her first love is unexpectedly, temptingly available. And then James appears on her doorstep.

Away from home, James and Tilly begin to forge an unlikely bond, tenuous at first but taking root every day. And as they work to build a garden together, something begins to blossom between them—despite all the reasons against it.

The Unfinished Garden

Barbara Claypole White

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For Larry and Zachariah

And for my parents, Rev. Douglas Eric and Anne Claypole White

Contents

Epigraph Many things grow in the garden that were never sown there —Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732 Worry gives a small thing a big shadow —Swedish proverb

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Acknowledgments

Questions for Discussion

Interview with Barbara Claypole White

Many things grow in the garden that were never sown there

—Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732

Worry gives a small thing a big shadow

—Swedish proverb

Chapter 1

Tilly leaned over the railing and prodded the copperhead with the yard broom. Nothing much scared her these days other than snakes and hospitals, which she found oddly depressing. You needed jolts of fear, little hits of adrenaline, to appreciate the buzz of life.

A tailless skink scurried past her gardening clog, and a pair of hummingbirds chittered as they raced to and from the feeder. In the forest, the hawk screeched for its mate.

The venomous snake, however, refused to budge.

Growing up in the English countryside, the most terrifying creature Tilly encountered was a Charolais cow. Isaac, her child guru of everything indigenous and nasty in rural North Carolina, had stared, gobsmacked, when she’d shared that gem five minutes ago.

The porch vibrated as he pogoed up and down, no doubt rehearsing the pleasure of bragging to his chums: My copperhead’s bigger than yours.

So what if she didn’t belong here, any more than that manky elderberry hiding behind her tropical plants? This was Isaac’s universe, and she would never rip him away from it. She had failed her son three years earlier. She wouldn’t fail him again. Although, once in a while, it might be refreshing to breathe air that wasn’t as congealed as leftover leek and potato soup.

Tilly panted through a sigh. The heat had sprung early this year, sideswiped her without the gradual warming of late spring. August weather in the first week of June? Bugger, her summer was set to revolve around watering. She should have been watering this afternoon—not trying to outwit a comatose snake. Or repotting perennials. Or planning to fire her assistant. Of course, firing Sari meant finding time to interview a replacement, since the business had been twirling beyond her control long before Sari had appeared as the opposing force that stops an object in motion. Isaac had been reading Newton! A Giant in Science! lately. Inertia was his topic of the week.

If she’d paid more attention on the day Sari torpedoed into her life like a Norse berserker on Red Bull, Tilly would have realized Sari wasn’t applying for a job; bloody woman was prowling for a cause. Just yesterday, she had tried to persuade Tilly to meet with some wealthy software developer about landscaping his new la-di-da property. Landscaping, really? Piedmont Perennials was a wholesale nursery. Besides, design clients would expect plans revealed in drawn-to-scale diagrams, and Tilly couldn’t compile a functional grocery list.

Isaac stopped bouncing. “What’s next, Mom?”

Damned if I know. Killing the snake was neither a thought she could follow nor an example she wanted to set for her critter-loving son. And no way could she find the courage to shovel up Mr. Copperhead and toss him toward the creek.

Tilly grinned at Isaac. Sticks of flaxen hair poked out like scarecrow straw from under his faded cap, and the front of his T-shirt was caught in the elastic of his Spiderman underwear. As usual, his pull-on shorts rested halfway down his hips. He was small for an eight-year-old, and every time Tilly looked at him, she saw playground bait. Which was the real reason she kept him at the private Montessori, not the math skills or his inexplicable passion for science.

“I’m fixin’ to find that varmint a new home,” she said. “’Cos he sure as heck can’t ’ave this one.”

As predicted, Isaac giggled through her English-accented Southern-speak. His laughter gave her precious seconds to think. No time to allow him to doubt, even for a millisecond, that his mother was able to handle every situation that rocked their lives. Except, of course, one involving snakes. And hospitals. But she wasn’t going there in her mind, not today.

“What about calling that wildlife guy from the school field trip?” Isaac said. “Doesn’t he rescue unwanted snakes?”

“Angel Bug, you’re a genius. I guess I’ll have to keep you around.”

She expected him to puff up with pride. Instead he frowned and looked so like David that Tilly had to bite her lip.

“What do you think Daddy would do about the snake?”

Tilly no longer instigated the what-would-Daddy-do game, even though she screamed silently with memories: David waking from a nightmare, his voice full of need, “Promise you’ll never leave me, babe”; David reaching for her with hot breath, greedy hands, and whispers of “Jesus. You make me so horny.” David asleep on the sofa with baby Isaac tucked into his arm.

Isaac was only five when David died. How many of their child’s memories were regurgitated stories she fed him? Did Isaac remember his father’s passion, his contagious energy, his insistence that she sprinkle mothballs around the sandbox to bar snakes? David had loathed the bugs and the snakes. Mind you, he’d hated everything about life in the South, although not his status as the youngest distinguished professor in the University of North Carolina system.

A memory pounced, and Tilly smiled: David teetering on the sofa as he hurled an academic tome at a creepy-crawly moseying across the floor.

Her husband had done nothing without panache.

“What would Daddy do?” Tilly scratched the burning itch of fresh chigger bites under her arm. “Pitch a wobbly, then insist we move to snake-free Manhattan.”