Glory Road Read online

  “Yes, you’ve mentioned that.” My mother could go on a tear about how things used to be. Every time one of the old buildings in Perry was bulldozed to make way for a shiny new CVS or Shell station, she said we were one step closer to the Rapture. “But you do know that you’re friends with every single person in Perry, and if you follow your first rule of business—which is not a real rule, by the way—we won’t have any business?”

  Mama waved the thought away as if it were a pesky fly. “Friends will stick by you when the going gets tough. What did those tulips ever do for you?”

  “Pay for that fancy manicure, for one.” I muttered it under my breath, but I knew she heard me because she held out her hand and flicked a speck of dirt off her pinky.

  Mama had been giving away occasional free tidbits to her friends since the day I opened Twig’s doors almost eight years ago. Usually I was able to turn a blind eye, but lately things were changing. With the recent arrival of Earl’s Green Thumb Garden Center less than a mile away, even some of my most loyal customers had been lured in by the promise of $4.98 trays of begonias, no matter that they were poor quality and didn’t come with a slice of Mama’s cobbler on the side.

  After washing my hands in the deep sink along the far wall, I ducked out the back door, catching the screen with my foot before it slammed behind me. The back of the shop was covered by an arbor draped with lavender wisteria and sweet Confederate jasmine. The thick vines and dainty tendrils created a deep, welcome shade.

  Years ago, I stuck an old rocking chair back into the corner behind the door, and sometimes I sat there even while customers streamed in and out. They’d pass on by, not noticing the slight movement of my chair. Today the shade beckoned with cool, soft fingers and I sank into the chair, rested my head on the back, and closed my eyes.

  It was hard to believe this small two-room cottage that now held birdhouses, decorative flowerpots, wind chimes, and other assorted gardening gifts once held the neighborhood’s junk. When I was young, the cottage was home to Perry’s House of Salvaged Goods, an emporium of sorts run by Mr. Berkeley, an old man who’d lived in the cottage “since time began,” as Mama liked to say.

  The cottage, and the yellow house next door that Mr. Berkeley also owned, had been vacant for years by the time I moved back home with five-year-old Evan and our Mercedes SUV stuffed with everything we owned, which pretty much amounted to our clothes, books, and Evan’s toys. I hadn’t wanted to bring anything else—I no longer felt a connection to any of it. Not even to Chris’s last name. In our divorce proceedings I requested permission to change my name back to McBride. The change felt right. Natural.

  I moved back into my childhood home with Mama, just down the road from Mr. Berkeley’s spread, while I figured out how to navigate my new life and dodge the deep crack Chris had gouged into my heart. That crack remained for months, as raw and jagged as the day I found out about Tiffani, despite Mama’s best intentions to bury my grief in fruit cobblers and buttermilk biscuits.

  The sugar helped in the short term, but what really served as a balm to my spirit was the road itself. The split rail fences, the fields, the quiet. For the first time, I appreciated this place that had been the backdrop to my childhood, the place I wanted to escape after high school. Now I saw its particular beauty and the sacrifices my parents made to give me a happy, stable childhood in this place of freedom and fresh air.

  I’d been here six months when I saw a man tapping a For Sale sign into the red dirt in front of Mr. Berkeley’s cottage. That sign triggered something in me. Glory Road was the same stretch of land it had always been, but somehow it felt like a new version of itself. If it could feel new, maybe I could be a new version of myself too. All at once, I knew this would be where I could stand boldly on my own two feet and grow—and Evan and Mama could grow right along with me. Love had let me down, but now I could bloom for myself.

  Three days later, I sat at a long cherrywood table and signed a half-inch-thick stack of papers that transferred ownership of the cottage, its grounds, and the yellow house next door to me.

  As soon as Evan and I were settled in the yellow house—a sweet 1947 three-bedroom home with original hardwood floors, six-inch crown moldings, and large airy windows—I got to work. I’d always been interested in plants and gardens—I used to dream of backpacking across Europe to visit the gardens of Versailles, Giverny, and Villa d’Este—but never entertained the idea of opening my own garden business until the opportunity blossomed right in front of me.

  The closest place to buy plants and flowers was five miles away, and my idea was to create a welcoming space where folks in Perry and the surrounding areas could not only buy plants to beautify their homes and yards, but also relax, learn, and get their hands dirty. I wanted to show them life could be coaxed from even the driest, most unforgiving ground. I decided on the name Twig because I liked what it represented: something alive and growing. Wanting to be so much more, but not quite there yet.

  I sold the Mercedes and used that profit, plus a small business loan from the bank, to build a greenhouse behind the cottage. The one-acre property already boasted an impressive display of flowering shrubs and fruit trees thanks to Mr. Berkeley’s near-obsessive gardening habit. I pruned those and added to them, then built up an inventory of trays, pallets, and pots of annuals and perennials, bought mostly from Alabama growers. I took master gardening classes at the public library and the Botanical Gardens in Mobile to hone what I already knew and add to my knowledge.

  It took nearly a year before I felt ready to open the shop to customers. By then, I was so steeped in the gardening world, I felt I’d been born to do it. As if all the time before—my young years at home, my years with Chris, all my hopes and regrets and half-blurry dreams—had been seeds dropped down into deep holes that were just now peeking their heads aboveground and stretching up toward the sky.

  I lifted my feet off the ground and let the rocking chair coast to a slow stop, the old boards sighing in relief. Above me, the fan Mr. Rainwater had wired onto the arbor sent down a surprisingly forceful breeze, stirring the scents around me into an intoxicating mixture of honey, vanilla, and rich, dark earth.

  When I’d first moved back home, I’d craved something, anything, that couldn’t be taken away from me. All I had was Evan and Mama. Not even my sweet father was there anymore—he’d died while I was pregnant with Evan, four months shy of meeting his only grandchild. I felt like a weary traveler desperate to claim something as my own.

  Eight years later, I still couldn’t believe my luck in walking up Glory Road the day the agent stuck the sign in Mr. Berkeley’s yard. That I was given a chance to claim my spot on the map before anyone else took it. My home with Evan in the yellow house, Mama down the road, my life’s purpose in the greenhouse and tucked into pots scattered around Twig—this was my life now. Keeping things small—close to home—meant no one could take it away.

  CHAPTER 4

  Creativity is a crucial characteristic of a good gardener. Just about anything can creep in and ruin your hard work. When this happens, it’s the gardener’s chance to make do. To be creative. However, a good gardener also knows when it’s time to call for help. Sometimes it takes more than just one set of hands to make things right.

  —SALLY JO MCINTYRE, CONTEMPLATIVE GARDENING

  JESSIE

  It was almost the end of the workday and I could practically feel my Nikes wrapped around my feet, my legs pumping down Glory Road, my mind blissfully free for forty-five minutes. The run didn’t happen every night—sometimes several days would pass without me lacing up my shoes—but I always returned to it. It would be waiting for me, like an old friend ready to listen.

  It wasn’t that Twig was an especially difficult place to work. I got to keep my hands in the dirt, run my business fifty yards from my home, and keep an eye on Mama during the day. But some days the combination of heat and grime, money worries, and certain fussy customers almost did me in.

  Today
Birdie Davis had spent my entire lunch break bemoaning the black spot of death on her climbing roses and how I’d sold her a defective product (which I hadn’t). Major Gregg, an eighteen-wheeler of a man who regularly drove all the way from Sweet Bay just to buy flowers at Twig, had badgered me for twenty minutes about slugs on his petunias. Then I’d discovered a wasp nest the size of a football under the eaves of my potting shed. Unfortunately, I discovered it with the end of my rake, sending hundreds of wasps into a frenzy and scaring away my customers. Days like today, I was ready to hang a Closed sign in the window and hop a plane to an island somewhere.

  But then there was that dreamy purple-and-blue hour—the slip of time after the sun went down but before it got dark—when I’d sit on the front porch after a long run and look out on what I had. My little house with the wavy glass in the windows. The tin-roofed, plank-walled shop with overflowing window boxes and flowering vines creeping up and over the porch rails.

  Mama and Evan would be in the house chatting about this or that—maybe Mama was telling her about the exact point at which Johnny Cash’s music turned from dark to holy, or maybe Evan would be explaining how Joni Mitchell’s “Come In from the Cold” has some of the most achingly perfect lyrics of any song ever written.

  Whatever had happened during the day, however much we sold or didn’t sell, whatever prickly or lovely customers strolled in, it all faded when I saw our spread of land in the falling light.

  For now, Mama was still in the shop, dusting and rearranging. Though she wasn’t Twig’s owner, she often acted like she was, insisting that everything had to be lined up just so and that no speck of dust sat on a shelf unnoticed. I appreciated her fastidiousness because it meant I didn’t have to spend precious hours during the day on housekeeping.

  The clock on the wall told me I only had fifteen minutes until closing, so with an empty gravel lot out front, I began processing the day’s transactions. This part of the day was usually the most tense—seeing how big a bite Earl’s Green Thumb had taken from Twig and mulling over the lingering financial effects our rare cold spring had had on the business. Plus, my computer had been acting funny lately.

  Granted, it was ancient, but other than a few long phone calls to customer service centers in India, it had been mostly reliable, and I hadn’t wanted to find the money to upgrade. It had been taking longer to boot up in the mornings though, and just recently it started going dark for short periods during the day. Mama joked that it was taking its afternoon siesta.

  I was chewing a fingernail and squinting at the screen—did that column show I sold a whole four thousand dollars less this month than the same month last year?—when it released a high-pitched beep and the screen went completely black.

  “What in the world?”

  “What is it, dear?” Mama was on the other side of the room dusting the rack of wind chimes, making such a racket she almost had to shout.

  “I think my computer just died.”

  I ran through my usual arsenal of cures—press the power button a few times, jiggle the mouse, check to make sure the cord was plugged in securely—but the screen stayed stubbornly blank. I leaned over and planted my forehead on the surface of my desk.

  “Why don’t you try unplugging it? That usually does the trick.”

  I fought the urge to roll my eyes. “I don’t think that’ll help.”

  Finished with the wind chimes, she crossed the room and peered at the screen. “I don’t want to say I told you so, but . . .”

  “But you told me so?” My forehead was still pressed against the smooth wood of the desk.

  “If you’d just use a simple credit-card swiper with the carbon paper and a plain old bank ledger, you wouldn’t be in this mess. Never trust a computer. Or a politician.” She patted my hand. “I’m headed to the house. I’ll check on your peas and add a little water, make sure they’re not burned to the bottom of the saucepan. Oh, and I’d call Cliff if I were you.”

  With a swish of her short gray bob, she was gone.

  I picked up the phone and called the only computer repair place in Perry, Cliff’s Computer World. I knew Cliff well because he asked me to plant the flower beds in front of his shop each season.

  “Did you try plugging in the laptop?” he asked when I explained my problem. “Maybe the battery just died.”

  “Well, the battery won’t stay charged. I keep it plugged in all the time.”

  “You keep it . . . ?” He sighed. “Okay. Why don’t you try unplugging it? Count to ten, then plug it back in.”

  I reached around and yanked the cord out of the wall, then did a quick “one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi” and plugged it back in. “I got nothing.”

  He went over a few more options to try, then exhaled. I heard his chair squeak as if he was leaning back and propping his feet on the desk. “And how long have you had your laptop?”

  “Let’s see. I got it just after Evan was born, so fourteen years. Thereabouts.” As I talked, I pushed away from the desk and opened the front door. The porch of the shop was in the shade now, and I sat in the glider by the door.

  Cliff laughed, one sharp snort followed by a little giggle. “Fourteen years? And it’s a PC? It’s likely your motherboard’s gone out. You’re lucky it’s lasted this long. I can check it out, but it’ll take me a little while to get to it. The fire department just dropped off one of their computers that’s on the fritz.”

  “How long is ‘a little while’? This is the only computer I have.” I watched as Mama ambled through the grass to my house. Halfway there, she stopped and patted her front and back pockets, then stood completely still. She stayed that way for so long, I stood, thinking something was wrong. But as soon as I did, she patted her pockets again, shook her head, and continued on to my house.

  “Doesn’t the fire department have some computers in reserve they can use?” I asked, my mind partly on Mama, partly on my laptop.

  “Ms. McBride, it’s the fire department. I do whatever they ask.”

  “Yes, yes. I know.” By this time, Mama had made it to the house and opened the front door. I rubbed my left eye, the one that always twitched when I felt stressed. I sat back in the glider and blew my bangs out of my eyes. “The fire department comes first, obviously.”

  “I’ll call you as soon as I have an opening, but just know if the motherboard is fried, won’t be anything I can do to fix it.” An image of Mama’s fried eggs flashed in my mind, the yellow yolks slip-sliding across the plate. “You may want to start thinking about a replacement. And if you’ll hang on just a sec . . .” He rummaged around a moment. “Here it is. A buddy of mine sells computers. Let me give you his information. Now, his name is Hank . . .”

  I took a deep breath and let it out in a thin stream. Money for a new computer wasn’t in the budget. Even a trip to Cliff’s Computer World wasn’t in the budget.

  “Are you writing this down, Ms. McBride?”

  “Oh yes, I’m writing it down.” I rested my head on the back of the glider and closed my eyes.

  By the time I locked everything up and got back to the house, it was too late to run without food in my stomach. I’d have to squeeze it in after dinner. I kicked off my rubber boots on the front porch and opened the screen door. When it slammed behind me, both Evan and Mama looked up from where they were hard at work in the kitchen.

  “Close that front door, hon,” Mama called. “No need to invite all that muggy heat inside.” Like it was her house and we just lived in it.

  In truth, Mama lived next door, although three acres of trees and brush stood between our houses. Since she helped out in the shop during the day, she tended to use our house as a landing base until the three of us had eaten dinner. After cleaning up the kitchen, something she insisted on doing and I wasn’t about to argue, she’d gather her things from the day—the large-print crossword puzzle book, a stack of magazines, her denim jacket—and start the quarter-mile walk back to her house. Rain or shine, freezing cold or blazing hot, sh
e always walked home. One evening, during tropical storm Dawn a few years ago, I had to force her into my car to drive her home. She was mad for two days.

  “What are y’all working on?” I leaned over the pot of peas on the stove and gave them a stir. They were perfect—brown, almost creamy.

  “Gus is teaching me how to make The June,” Evan said.

  “The June, huh? She reserves that one for only the most special people.”

  “That’s what she told me. I’ve been sworn to secrecy, although who am I going to blab it to? None of my friends care about cobbler recipes.”

  “All the same,” Mama said. “Best just keep it to yourself. Especially when I add the secret ingredient.”

  I loved watching the two of them, their heads bent over the bowl of milk, butter, eggs, and vanilla. Mama would give a baking tutorial to a pecan shell if no one else was around. Evan liked to pretend she didn’t care about Mama’s recipes, but her expression before they heard me come in told me she did care. She was rapt, watching as Mama cracked the eggs—one-handed, Julia Child–style—and whisked in the milk with swift strokes.

  When Evan slid the peach-and-blueberry cobbler—including a generous pinch of cinnamon and nutmeg—into the oven, we sat down at the scratched and dinged oak table. A friend had once offered to sand off the top layer to take out all the scratches. “It’s a shame to see an antique piece like this all marked up.”

  I thanked her but kept the scratches and marks. The woman didn’t know it, but most of the scratches were actually indentations from pens and pencils. I’d done my homework at this table, as had Evan. Those “scratches” were two generations of algebra headaches, English essays, and foreign language verb conjugations. Mama had passed the table on to me when we moved into the house and didn’t have a place to eat our dinners. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed its presence until I was back to sitting at it three times a day. The table was a part of us, like most everything else on Glory Road.