Glory Road Page 23

  To think that all I’d wanted was a love that swept me away like Daddy had done with Mama. A love that made all the others seem like dim, faraway stars. I thought I’d found it in Chris, and I let myself be swept away by him and the life he offered, not realizing that the one who may have represented what I truly needed had been calmly waiting in the wings.

  “When I knew the proposal was coming, I panicked. I needed to know if you still had the same feelings you did on the night of the bonfire. When you told me you loved me.”

  I wiped away the tear that tickled at the edge of my eyelashes. “But when you said you were happy for me, what else was I supposed to think except that you’d moved on?” I sighed and held my hands up. “Chris proposed two weeks later.”

  Ben closed his eyes and ran his hand up and down the side of his bearded cheek, then across his eyes. “All that time—”

  “But you and Marissa—” I said at the same time.

  Our words were cut off by the deep throb of an engine rumbling up the road. I glanced over my shoulder as headlights roamed across Ben’s front yard. Nick. Ben and I both took a step away from each other. I quickly passed a finger under my eyes and ran my hands across my hair. He shoved a hand in his front pocket and held up the other in a wave.

  Nick stopped and rolled his window down at the foot of the driveway. “How’d the painting go?” If he saw the unease on our faces or sensed any tension, it didn’t show.

  “Two coats on both bedrooms,” Ben replied. “How was the game?”

  Nick shrugged. “Braves lost by two runs.”

  Ben nodded. “I’ll be back up in a sec.”

  Nick waved to me and parked farther up the driveway, then headed into the house. The door slamming behind him shook me out of my fog.

  “It’s late. I need to get back home.”

  Ben reached out and tugged on my shirtsleeve. “Jess, I can’t . . . I didn’t . . .” His stammering echoed what was happening in my mind. The shock of such a years-long miscommunication was hard to wrap my brain around.

  “I know.” I took a step back from him, then another.

  “I’ll bring your computer to you tomorrow.”

  “Thanks.” I turned and started walking. After a few paces, the glow from his garage light faded and I savored the dark as it wrapped around me. The farther I walked from his house, the easier it was to let the tears fall.

  “To fixing broken things.” When he’d said it earlier in the night, it felt so true, so fitting for the two of us. We fixed broken, lifeless things—cars, computers, barren dirt, a tender heart. But maybe our repair skills didn’t extend to the brokenness that existed between the two of us.

  Nothing was the same as it used to be, and there was no way to go back. I shouldn’t want to go back, anyway. The past was just that—in the past.

  Just ahead, the glow from my little yellow house beckoned. I’d always loved the way houses looked at night when darkness surrounded them, yet inside everything was bright and clear. That was how my house appeared as I approached it. Everything inside it ablaze with life. I took a deep breath, shaking off thoughts of what might have been, and crossed the yard toward home.

  CHAPTER 25

  The spirit of a gardener is both tenacious and yielding. The best caretakers of natural beauty can persevere in seemingly hopeless situations but will yield to nature’s authority when necessary.

  —SELA RUTH MCGOVERN, THE WISDOM OF GARDENING

  EVAN

  Mom stuck to her plan of making me work off my “lapse in judgment,” but I was surprised to discover I didn’t mind the increased workload like I thought I would. In fact, I kind of liked it. I could’ve done without being so up close and personal with Mr. Rainwater’s drop-offs, but the rest of it—spreading mulch in the far beds, breaking up the hard-packed dirt where Mom wanted to plant a row of lemon trees, moving the ladder around to hang Kimberly ferns along the front porch and under the arbor in the back—wasn’t too bad. If I let my mind drift and ignored how hot and sweaty I was, the hard work actually felt good.

  I was pulling a wagon full of big blue liriope—a fancy name for monkey grass—to Ms. Rickers’s tiny Smart car when Nick’s Challenger rounded the curve in the driveway and coasted to a stop right next to me.

  “Looks like you have another customer,” Ms. Rickers said as I pushed one tray of monkey grass under the seat to make room for another one. A Smart car definitely wasn’t ideal for hauling what must’ve been fifty pots of monkey grass—enough to line both sides of her new front walk.

  Nick climbed out of his car and leaned against the side of it, arms crossed, sly half grin on his face. My stomach twisted into the hard knot of nerves I now expected anytime he came around. “Working hard?”

  I held my hands out to encompass the wagon, the monkey grass, and the other cars in the lot. “Yep. Stand there too long and I’ll put you to work.”

  The grin disappeared, and he shoved his hands in his pockets. “Yeah, that’s kind of why I’m here. Dad told me you’d gotten in some trouble over the driving thing.”

  As soon as she heard the word trouble, Ms. Rickers stiffened next to me. She was always first in line—well, after Gus of course—to receive or deliver juicy Glory Road gossip. I could practically hear her wishing she could turn up her hearing aid just a smidge more.

  Nick took a step toward me and lowered his voice. “Since it was pretty much my fault that you’re in this mess, I thought I’d come by and help you work.”

  “You want to work?”

  He shrugged. “Well, my dad kind of told me I had to.” I laughed and red splotches rose on his cheeks. “I wanted to anyway though. It’s the least I can do. So . . .” He held out his arms. “Tell me what I need to do.”

  I closed Ms. Rickers’s trunk and motioned for him to follow me to the passenger side of her car. “You can start by figuring out how to fit the rest of these pots in here.”

  “You got it.”

  After ten minutes of pulling, shoving, and creative maneuvering, Nick managed to fit all the monkey grass into the tiny car.

  “Son, I wasn’t sure it was all going to make it in, but you did just fine.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a small wad of bills. “Here’s just a little something. Maybe treat yourself on your way home.” She smiled, and I could have sworn she batted her eyelashes at him.

  “Unbelievable,” I said as she drove away. “She’s never tipped me and I help her every time she comes in here.”

  “Maybe she just thought I deserved a treat.”

  I shoved his shoulder and he laughed. “It’s only three dollars. I’ll buy you some ice cream or something.”

  Inside the shop Mom was ringing up a customer and another couple waited in line, so I just pointed to Nick and mouthed, “He’s here to work.”

  Her face brightened and she held up a finger so I’d wait. When she finished with the customer, she pulled me over to the back door. “I found a beetle on one of the hydrangeas this morning.” Her eyes were wide and a little frantic.

  “Okay,” I said slowly. I tilted my head to the side. “That’s a problem?”

  “It’s a Japanese beetle. They’ll eat through the leaves until they’re skeletons if we don’t get them off. I need you to check all the hydrangeas and . . . why don’t you just check everything? If it’s an invasion, we’re in a world of trouble. If it’s just a few, you’ll have to pick them off.”

  “With my fingers?” I wrinkled my nose.

  “Just get a bucket from the back and fill it with soapy water. Pick them off—yes, with your fingers—and drop them in the water. Let me know what you find.” Before I could ask anything else, she headed back to the counter and a customer balancing four birdhouses in her arms. “Oh and, Nick,” she called. “Thanks for the help.”

  An hour and a half later, we’d finished going through the hydrangeas and azaleas practically leaf by leaf and moved on to the small potted fruit trees. We each carried a bucket of soapy water with a coup
le dozen dead beetles floating on top. It was gross, but having Nick as a partner made it slightly better. We didn’t talk a whole lot, but I liked having him there. He sang a little—he cracked me up belting out “Cotton-Eyed Joe”—and tried to get me to sing a few verses of Johnny and June’s “Jackson,” but I politely declined.

  When the trees were cleared with minimal picking necessary, we dumped the soapy water and drowned beetles way out back past the fence. Next on my list was planting Mom’s gardenia shoots into pots. Earlier in the summer we’d taken cuttings off branches of the largest gardenia bushes and stuck the ends in jars of water. Over a few weeks, they sprouted delicate white roots and the beginnings of new leaves. A few customers had been in asking when the pots would be ready, and Mom and I had both been meaning to transplant the shoots for several days. Now it was time.

  After dropping off the buckets at the back of the shop under the sink, I grabbed a tray of empty plastic pots—Mom rarely threw empty ones away because there was always another use for them—and directed Nick to the potting shed next to the shop. I pushed open the faded green shutters that served as doors to the shed and breathed in. Twig always smelled nice—a mixture of scented candles, potting soil, and whatever Gus had baked that morning—but the potting shed smelled like heaven to me. Soil and moss and damp pea gravel and sun-warmed wood.

  It’s how I imagined a deep forest would smell. Or maybe Narnia. It was always warm inside, but a different warmth than the heat outside. Usually the windows were cranked open and the shuttered doors never closed all the way, so there was always some airflow, making the heat feel good, somehow, no matter what time of year it was.

  Inside, Nick ran his hand over the wall. Over the years Mom had tacked up so many random bits of paper and torn-out magazine pages that they almost formed wallpaper in the small shed. Anything she ran across that she thought was important or that caught her eye—photos of gardens, charts of sunrises and sunsets, flower names and their meanings, gardening quotes or bits of wisdom—she’d stick it to the wall with a thumbtack. Many of the pieces of paper were yellowed with age and softened by time.

  A long farm table under the big, south-facing window held two rows of gardenia sprout jars. I showed Nick how much potting soil to add to each pot and how to nestle the cutting into the soil, then we settled into an easy routine. I scooped soil from a bag and poured it into the pot. He pulled the cutting out of the jar and placed it in the soil. I covered it and set the pot back in the window. Rinse, repeat.

  As we worked in front of the wide bay window, Mr. Rainwater trundled toward the plastic pool behind the greenhouse. The tire of the wheelbarrow bounced a little over the stone and grass path. When he paused to wipe his forehead with his bandanna, Mom hurried out the back door and tried to take the handles from him. He shook his head. Behind them, Gus stood on the back porch, her nose wrinkled.

  “So it’s just the three of you?” Nick tilted his chin toward the window. “You, your mom, and your grandmother?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “What about your dad? Does he ever come around?”

  I shrugged one shoulder. “Not much. He lives in Birmingham. And he’s kind of a jerk.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. He wasn’t that great to my mom, I don’t think.” I dropped the scoop into the bag and a little plume of soil burst out. I wiped my cheek with my wrist. “There was this other woman . . .”

  “Geez.” He paused with a plant in his hands. “That sucks.”

  “Yeah.” I pulled the scoop out again and poured soil into the next pot. “I’m pretty glad he’s not around much. I don’t have to go through the whole pretending-I-like-you stuff.”

  “I know what you mean. I see my mom a good bit. These days, at least. It’s weird though.”

  “Weird how?”

  He ran his free hand over the top of his head. His hair wasn’t long, but it wasn’t cut short like most guys’ either. It was somewhere in between.

  “She and my dad had a . . . a thing a long time ago, then I came along and she split.”

  “Split? Like—she left you?”

  “Well, not alone, but yeah. She decided she couldn’t do—I don’t know, the mom thing. She dropped me off at my dad’s with a bag of clothes and this Mr. Potato Head that apparently I loved.” He chuckled. “I think my dad still has it somewhere.”

  “So your parents are divorced?”

  He shook his head. “No, they were never really together at all. They just had me, and I lived with her until I was three. That’s when she took me to my dad’s and left. I didn’t see her again until my dad randomly bumped into her at the airport last year in Atlanta. A few days later she came over for dinner. That was weird.”

  “Yeah, I can see how it would be.” And there I was, thinking my parental situation was strange—cheater dad who married his mistress and twin eight-year-old stepbrothers I’d only met once in my life—but not seeing your mom for thirteen years? I couldn’t even begin to imagine that.

  “So your mom and dad—are they . . . ?” My heart began to thump and my hands felt clammy. I thought of Mom and Mr. Bradley and the unspoken things that seemed to fly between them anytime they were together. “They’re not married now, are they?”

  “No! No, no. Not married.”

  I exhaled. “Good.” When he looked up at me, I pointed to the next jar. “Hand me that one, will you?”

  He reached and handed me the jar. “It is good, actually. I mean, they’re dating . . . sort of.” He sighed. “It’s stupid, really. They’re only together because of me. In some warped way they think I need them to be together. A unified front. Like I’m not . . . whole or something without a mom around.” He brushed a dusting of spilled soil off the table. “She wants me to call her Mom. But I can’t. She’s just Marissa. Like a babysitter or something. As if I need one. And he doesn’t love her. I’m not even sure he likes her all that much.”

  I worked quietly. That was the most words he’d said at one time since I’d met him.

  He grinned. “So now you know all there is to know about me.”

  I thought of the one thing I was still so curious about, and it popped out before I could stop myself. “Who’s Cassidy?”

  His smile faded. “How’d you know about her?”

  I shrugged. “I just—I saw her text in the car. I mean . . .” Ugh. I shouldn’t have said anything at all. “I wasn’t looking, it just . . . It was right there.”

  “It’s all right.” He took a deep breath and leaned his hip against the worktable, then let his air out slowly. His fingers were coated with soil. “It doesn’t even matter. Right now she’s no one.” His gaze was faraway, unfocused, trailing out the back window toward the far orchard and the fields beyond. He seemed so calm, so peaceful, I didn’t want to press further. It wasn’t my business anyway, but I still wondered about that xoxo.

  “Nick? You hungry for meatloaf?” Gus propped open the screen door on our house with her foot. “We’ll have plenty.”

  Nick and I had finished the gardenias and almost everything else on Mom’s list for the day. We were about to haul the last of the trash to the street while Mom swept the front porch. I looked back up at her and raised my eyebrows. “Maybe you could ask Mr. Bradley to come eat too. You know Gus always makes enough to feed the neighborhood.”

  Mom stopped and leaned against her broom. “Oh. I don’t know.”

  Just then we heard the grumble of Mr. Bradley’s Jeep. A moment later, he pulled in the driveway, like mentioning his name had summoned him here.

  “How’s the work going?” he called through his lowered window.

  “Great,” Nick said. “We just finished.”

  “My grandmother is asking if y’all want to eat dinner with us,” I said.

  Behind me, the broom handle bumped against the wall and Mom trotted down the porch steps. “Evan, I don’t . . .”

  “No, I . . . ,” Mr. Bradley stammered with the same hesitation. Why were they being so
weird? “Nick, we need to get on back. I have dinner planned.”

  Nick laughed. “Since when do you plan dinner?”

  “Since today. I just came by to drop off Jessie’s computer, then I need to run by the store for a couple of last-minute things.” He reached over to the passenger seat and grabbed the laptop, then held it out to Mom. “Sorry I didn’t get it by earlier. I got tied up and . . .”

  She took it from him and smoothed her hand across the top. “Thank you. I mean it.”

  “It’s nothing. Let me know if it gives you any more trouble, but I think it’ll be fine.”

  They both fell silent. Nick and I just stood there, waiting for them to say something else, but watching them was unbearable. No way would I be that awkward when I was an adult.

  “Okay then,” I said in an attempt to bring things back to normal, then turned to Nick. “Thanks for the help today.”

  “Yes, Nick.” Mom finally pulled her gaze away from Mr. Bradley. “You were a huge help to Evan. I think she’s just about worked off her—”

  “Lapse in judgment, yeah, yeah.” I rolled my eyes at Nick.

  He laughed and gave me a high five. “Anytime, kid. Sorry.”

  A minute later, he and Mr. Bradley were both backing up and turning around, one after the other. Mr. Bradley left without waving, but Nick held his hand out the window before driving off. My skin still stung—pleasantly—from where his hand slapped against mine.

  Gus stuck her head out of the door again. “Where’d everybody go? I thought we were about to have a full house.”

  I turned to Mom, but she’d already begun walking toward the house. “No, Mama. It’s just the three of us.”

  I glanced back toward the road one more time, but nothing remained. Even the sound of the engines was gone.

  CHAPTER 26

  The best gardens aren’t “plant-and-go” varieties. Gardens will bring you the most pleasure and peace if you do a daily walkthrough. Appreciate the beauty, check for bugs, make corrections as needed. In short, be present in the world you’ve created.