The Unfinished Garden. Barbara White Claypole
family like a corporate greeting. And for that—Tilly tugged open the greenhouse door—she would never forgive him.
* * *
A basketball pounded the concrete and a man laughed. No, absolutely not. Tilly curved around the giant red oak and groaned. Tucked between Sari’s bumper-sticker-covered Passat and the tumble of logs that passed for the log pile, was a sparkling Alfa Romeo convertible. Oh, this was too much. She had a thousand things to do, half of which she couldn’t remember, but would if she wasn’t being harassed by a wealthy retiree who was giving her son advice on free-throws and encouraging her only employee to giggle like a sixteen-year-old on date night.
Tilly paused at the end of the driveway, hands on hips. She was, if no longer a Haddington in name, a Haddington in heart. One never has an excuse for rudeness. Although James Nealy was testing her on that particular philosophy.
Since the conversation with her mother two weeks earlier, Tilly had developed a strategy for handling James: ignore him. She figured by the time she left for England, he would have lost interest. No one could be that persistent. No one, it seemed, except James.
“How many times do I have to say, ‘I can’t help you’?” She kept her voice light, jovial even, but anger foamed inside.
“I like repetition.” He grinned, flashing even, white teeth. So, James thought he could whittle her down, did he? Big mistake, because she could play a mighty fierce game of chicken.
“Well, gotta run.” Sari headed to her car. “James? It’s been real.”
“Want to tell me why you’re here?” Tilly said to James. She could take him, no problem.
“Want to tell me why you don’t answer your messages?”
Tilly threaded her thumbs through her belt loops and gave her bring-it-on smile. But as the Passat squealed onto the driveway, she glanced at Isaac, and the fight drained out of her. Poor love, even the promise of hostility brought a flush of dread to Isaac’s cheeks.
“Now I feel as if I’m the one who’s always apologizing,” Tilly said. And how unreasonable was that, since James was at fault? “But I’m sorry. As Isaac told you last week, I have a family emergency to handle in England. We leave tomorrow. That makes me kinda busy.”
There was a difference between persistence, which Tilly applauded, and pestering, which she abhorred. When someone pushed too hard, her instinct was to hunker down. It was a Tilly thing. And if her resolve had wavered with James’s admiration of her garden, it had hardened the moment her life had started circling the family drain and he’d begun leaving phone messages that started with “Maybe you didn’t receive my previous message.”
And why was he wearing a black long-sleeved shirt in ninety degrees? Maybe he preferred air-conditioning to nature. A person, in other words, who had nothing in common with Tilly.
James crossed and uncrossed his fingers in a silent jig. “I believe Maple View Farm’s ice cream is nationally acclaimed. And since you live two minutes away, I was hoping, if I promised to deliver you back here in half an hour, that you and Isaac might accompany me to their country store?”
“Could we, Mom? Pretty please with Cool Whip and sprinkles on top?” Isaac’s grin stretched until he resembled The Joker.
“I’m a little grubby for socializing.” Tilly brushed a cobweb from her T-shirt.
“You look beautiful.” James sounded as if he were stating a historical fact. Okay, so she warmed to him. Not because he had thrown her a compliment, although that was appreciated, but because she was certain James would have said, “Yes, you look like shit,” if he had believed it. And honesty at all times was another Haddington trait, Tilly’s favorite.
“Shall we take my car?” James asked Isaac, who punched the air with enough excitement to spontaneously combust.
* * *
The forest often closed in around her, but on the farm shop porch, Tilly could breathe. When the real estate agent had first driven her by the farm, thirteen years ago, Tilly’s heart had skipped at the lowing of a cow, the stench of livestock and the sight of a fox ambling across a plowed field. How excited she’d been to discover this yawning landscape of green space that reminded her of the Bramwell Chase estate.
The view hadn’t changed in thirteen years, which was perfect. Monotony was Tilly’s life preserver. Maybe that was why gardening fed her soul. She loved the predictability of seasonal change, the certainty that redbuds heralded spring, that lantana was the belle of summer, that Coreopsis integrifolia lit up her garden every Halloween. And yet—she shifted and her cutoffs chafed against her sweaty thighs—gardening, like life, was about the unexpected.
She eyed the stranger sitting next to her, his waffle cone mummified in layers of paper napkins. Now that Isaac had run off to tumble over the hay bale, James had retreated into silence, licking his two scoops of black walnut into a smooth, dripless nub with a single-mindedness that she had come to associate with him after only two meetings. How did she get here, sitting on a rocking chair next to someone she was trying to avoid? A stranger who projected complete focus while eating ice cream but whose constantly moving fingers hinted at something out of control.
James rose, opened the garbage can flap with his elbow, and lobbed his untouched cone inside.
“Why spend so long deciding which cone to have if you weren’t going to eat it?” Tilly nibbled through the end of her sugar cone and sucked out double chocolate chip ice cream.
“Life is in the details, Tilly.”
When they were talking, she forgot they weren’t friends. “You’ve got something against cones?”
“Ones that have been sitting out in the air all day, yes.”
“Worried you might catch a deadly disease?”
“Possibly.” His eyes were hidden behind mirrored sunglasses, but he appeared to stare at her. Silence pressed on her chest, the silence of strangers who had no understanding and no shared history. “I need to go inside and wash my hands,” James said and vanished.
A mud dauber hummed under the porch roof, and a memory tumbled out, so vivid Tilly had to gasp. Swear to God, she could hear Sebastian’s giggle, the giggle that fizzed like soda spilling from a shaken bottle. Her memories must be scrambled if she was confusing wasps, Sebastian and laughter. He was terrified of wasps. Always had been, always would be, because he refused to acknowledge it. She took a huge, gulping breath and nearly choked on a lungful of clotted, late-afternoon heat. Sebastian didn’t deserve her thoughts. She wasn’t allowing him to steal them.
She waved to Isaac, who was tumbling around with two smaller kids, making buddies with ease thanks to equal doses of his father’s charisma and his grandfather’s canny way with people. She had never been as open and trusting as a child. Of course, she had been painfully shy for most of her life. Amazing how widowhood had knocked that out of her.
The shop door jangled and James reappeared. He shook his hair from his face and smiled at her. She grinned back; it was impossible not to.
* * *
Her smile, her smile doused the swell of anxiety.
“This is very noble of you,” James said as he resettled next to her. He tugged at a loose thread on the hem of his shirt. “Going to look after your mother.”
“My mother doesn’t need looking after.” Tilly took a tiny, birdlike bite from her cone. “I’m merely helping out.”
James stopped moving. He recognized self-talk when he heard it, the belief that positive words could lead to positive thoughts. How he wished that were true. In an instant, he wanted to know her hopes, her fears, her family story. The works.
“Do you have siblings?” he said.
“I have two sisters, twins. Eight years younger than me. They were preemies, so it was a case of join in the mothering or fall by the wayside. And then