Garden Spells (20 page)

“Nothing’s wrong,” she said, then she saw her.

There was a woman, a petite redhead, sitting cross-legged on the floor, two bottles of beer on the coffee table next to her. She either meant something to Tyler or clearly wanted to. Her shoes were off and nowhere to be seen, and she was leaning forward so that the flowy V-neck of her shirt fell away from her chest slightly. She was wearing a peach-colored bra. It seemed Tyler had two females ready to seduce him that night.

How could she be so stupid? Did she really think he was just sitting here
waiting
on her? “Oh. You have company.” She started backing away and backed right into him. She whirled around. “I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about. Rachel is an old friend, passing through on her way to Boston from Florida. She’s staying with me a few days. Rachel, this is Claire, my next-door neighbor. She’s a caterer specializing in edible flowers. She’s incredible.” Tyler took Claire by the arm and tried to lead her farther into the living room. After a couple of seconds he had to pull his hand away quickly, flipping it back and forth as if burned. He met her eyes with a dawning understanding.

“I’m sorry. I really have to go. I didn’t mean to bother you.”

“You weren’t—” Tyler said, but she was already out the door.

“Claire?” Sydney called. She was halfway up the staircase before Sydney made it out of the sitting room. “Claire?”

She stopped and turned.
“Rachel.”

Sydney looked up at her, confused. “What?”

“He was with
Rachel
,” Claire said. “They have history. They have a bond. She’s staying with him. She was looking me over like competition. I’ve seen it before. Women do it to you all the time.”

Sydney looked flabbergasted and indignant, which, when Claire thought about it later after she had calmed down, was nice. Her sister was mad on her behalf.
“He had another woman over there?”

Claire thought of those photographs of her grandmother with a series of smitten boys. “I don’t need a photo of a man looking at me as if he loves me. I’m fine. Aren’t I fine?”

“You really want me to answer that right now?”

Claire put her hand to her forehead. She was still so hot. This was unbearable. “I don’t know how to do this. Maybe I’ll just go out to the garden and every once in a while he can come by and we won’t talk about it afterward but the apple tree will thank him, like last time.”

“You’ve lost me.”

Claire let her hand fall to her side. “I feel like a fool.”

“That, dear sister, is step one.”

“Do you think you could write it down? I have the recipe all wrong,” she said, and turned to walk up the steps. “I’m going to take a bath.”

“You just took one this afternoon.”

“I smell like desperation.”

Sydney chuckled. “You’ll be fine.”

Claire changed out of her dress and put on her old seersucker robe. She was looking for her slippers when her bedroom door opened.

She could only stare, dumbfounded, as Tyler entered and ominously closed the door behind him. She grabbed the lapels of her robe, which was ridiculous, considering what she’d just gone over to his house to do.

“Why did you change out of that dress? I love that dress. But I like the robe too.” His eyes slid down her body. “Why did you come to see me tonight, Claire?”

“Please forget it.”

He shook his head. “I’m through forgetting. I remember everything about you. I can’t help it.”

They stared at each other. Take one man and one foolish woman and put them in a bowl. This wasn’t going to work.

“You’re thinking too much again,” Tyler said. “So this is your bedroom. I’ve wondered which one was yours. I should have guessed it was the turret room.” He walked around, and she had to force herself to stay where she was, not to run to him and take the photo he’d lifted from the bureau, not to tell him to leave the books stacked by the window seat alone, that she had a particular order to them. She’d been about to share her body with this man, and she couldn’t even share her room? Maybe with some preparation, time to shove her shoes under the bed, to take the stained coffee cup off the nightstand.

“Isn’t Rachel waiting for you?” she asked anxiously when he peered into her open closet.

He turned to face her. She was across the room, in the corner where she’d last kicked her slippers. “Rachel is just a friend.”

“You have history.”

“We used to be a couple, when I first moved to Florida to teach. It lasted about a year. We didn’t work out as lovers, but we remained friends.”

“How is that possible? After all you’ve been through?”

“I don’t know. It just is.” He walked toward her. She could have sworn chairs and rugs moved out of his way to make his path easier. “Did you want to talk? Did you want to ask me to dinner or a movie?”

She was literally backed into a corner. He came up close to her, doing that not-quite-touching thing he was so good at, like she was able to feel him without actually feeling him, like she was imagining him somehow. “If I have to say it, I will die,” she whispered. “Right here. I’ll fall to the floor, dead from embarrassment.”

“The garden?”

She nodded.

His hands went to her shoulders, and his fingers snaked in under the collar. “Not so easy to forget, is it?”

“No.”

The robe slid off her shoulders and would have fallen off completely had she not still had a hold of the lapels. “Your skin is hot,” he whispered. “You could have blown me over with a whistle when I felt how hot you were at my house.”

He kissed her and pulled her away from the corner. He then backed her toward her bed, devouring her. Take one man, one foolish woman, put them in a bowl and
stir
. Her head was spinning, her thoughts dizzy. She felt like she was falling, then she actually was. The back of her knees hit the bed and she fell back. Her robe opened and Tyler was there, breaking the kiss only long enough to take off his shirt so that their bare chests touched.

He knew. He remembered how she needed that kind of body-to-body touch, how she needed someone to absorb what she had too much of.

“We can’t do this here,” she whispered. “Not with Sydney and Bay downstairs.”

He kissed her hard. “Give me ten minutes to get rid of Rachel.”

“You can’t get rid of Rachel.”

“But she’s going to be here three days.” They stared at each other, and he finally took a deep breath and rolled beside her. She was going to close her robe, because how could she just lie there with her robe open? But he stopped her by sliding his hand over her chest and cupping one of her breasts. It felt so secure, so right.
Mine
. “Expectation can be nice too, I guess,” he said. “Three whole days of expectation.”

“Three whole days,” she repeated.

“What changed your mind?” he said, moving to his side and dipping his head, putting his mouth where his hand had been.

She grabbed his hair in one hand and squeezed her eyes shut. How could she want something this much, something she didn’t even understand? “I should let people in. If they leave, they leave. If I break, I break. It happens to everyone. Right?”

He lifted his head to look in her eyes. “You think I’m going to leave?”

“There can’t be this forever.”

“Why do you think that?”

“No one I know has ever had this forever.”

“I think of the future all the time. All my life I’ve chased dreams of what could be. For the first time in my life, I’ve actually caught one.” He kissed her again before grabbing his shirt and standing. “I’ll give you one day at a time, Claire. But remember, I’m thousands of days ahead already.”

It was Fred’s first night in the attic, and Evanelle could hear him moving around upstairs. It was nice, knowing someone was around, making small busy noises like mice. The thing about ghosts was that they didn’t make a sound. And she’d been living with the silent ghost of her husband for long enough to know.

She wondered if she was being hypocritical, encouraging Fred to move on. It wasn’t as if Evanelle had moved on, really. Maybe it was different when the one you loved died, as opposed to the one you loved simply leaving you. Or maybe it was the same thing. It probably felt like the same thing, anyway.

All of a sudden, Evanelle sat up.

Damn.

She needed to give someone something. She thought about it a moment. It was Fred. She had to give Fred something.

She turned on the light by her bed and reached for her robe. She walked into the hall, then paused, figuring out where to go. The two other bedrooms downstairs were now neatly organized with filing cabinets and nice wooden storage shelves for all her things.

Left.

The second bedroom.

She flipped the switch, went to the filing cabinets, and opened the drawer marked
G
. In the drawer she found gloves, a geode, and grass seeds neatly categorized under their proper headings. Under the heading
Gadget
, there was a reference note Fred had put there that said,
See also Tools
. It was trouble he needn’t have gone to. If she needed a tool, she went right to the tool. But Fred still hadn’t gotten his mind around how exactly it worked. Well, hell, neither had she.

Under
Gadget
, she found what she needed. It was a gizmo still in its store packaging, a kitchen instrument called a mango splitter, purportedly making cutting around the seed of a mango easier.

She wondered how he was going to take this. He had initially moved in because he’d hoped she would give him something that would help him with James. Was he disappointed in her for not producing that hallowed thing? Now, after all this time, she was going to give him something, and it had nothing to do with James. Maybe it was for the best. Maybe he would take it as a sign that he was doing the right thing, moving on.

Or maybe he would think he just needed to eat more mangoes.

She heard the soft chirp of Fred’s cell phone upstairs. He had said he didn’t want to use her phone, in case she needed to call someone to tell them that she was coming over with something they needed, which made her feel good, like he thought of her as a superhero.

She knocked once on the door to the attic, then walked up the stairs. When she reached the top step, she saw Fred in his leather reading chair near the corner cupboard that housed his television. An antiques magazine was on the leather ottoman in front of him. The area still smelled like fresh paint.

“Right, right,” he was saying into the phone. He saw her and waved her in. “Do the best you can. Thanks for calling.” He hung up.

“Did I interrupt something?”

“No. It was just business. A delayed order.” He put the phone down and stood. “What brings you up here? Are you all right? Can’t sleep? Do you want me to cook something for you?”

“No, I’m fine.” She held out the package. “I needed to give this to you.”

CHAPTER

12

S
ometimes Henry wished he could fly, because he couldn’t run fast enough. A couple of nights a week, Henry would get out of bed, quietly so he wouldn’t wake his grandfather, and he would simply run. On the night he turned twenty-one he ran all the way to the base of the Appalachians, heading into Asheville. Being that age suddenly gave him a burst of energy, and he knew he had to do something with it or else he would explode. It took him six hours to get back home. His grandfather had been waiting on the porch for him that morning, and Henry told him that he’d been sleepwalking. He doubted his grandfather would understand. There were times when Henry couldn’t wait to be old, like his grandfather, but there were times also that his body was alive and jumping with youth, and he didn’t know what to do with it.

He didn’t tell Claire that day they all went to the reservoir, but he’d never been there before either. He’d never done those things other kids his age had done. He was too busy with the dairy and dating older women who knew what they wanted. Being with Sydney made him feel young, but it also made him feel a little sick, like he’d eaten too much and he could never run enough to make the feeling go away.

Tonight he stopped by the edge of the field, his feet wet and his ankles scratched from the thorns of the wild roses that bloomed in the bramble next to the highway. The lights of a car came at him from the road and he ducked into the grass as it passed, not wanting anyone to see that he was out there at two in the morning in only his boxer shorts.

He didn’t get up, even after the sound of the car disappeared. He stared up at the moon, which looked like a giant hole in the sky, letting light through from the other side. He took deep breaths of the wet grass and warm roses and the black pavement from the highway that was still so hot from the summer sun that it melted at the edges and smelled like fire.

He imagined himself kissing Sydney, putting his hands in her hair. She always smelled mysteriously female, like the salon where she worked. He liked that smell. He always had. Women were amazing creatures. Amber, the receptionist where Sydney worked, was pretty and smelled the same way. She was interested in him too, but Sydney always stopped just short of encouraging him to go out with her when he sometimes met Sydney at the White Door. Sydney didn’t feel passion for him, but maybe she did feel a little possessive of him. He wondered if there was any shame to hoping she would grow to love him. He could feel this lust enough for them both.

He stood and ran back toward the house, a faint purple light trailing behind him like the tail of a comet.

From his bedroom window, Lester watched his grandson run. All Hopkins men were like that. Lester had been like that. It was a common misconception that being old meant you couldn’t feel passion. They all felt passion. They all had run that same stretch of field. Long ago, when Lester first met his wife, he’d set trees on fire just by standing under them at night. He wished for Henry the same thing he had with his dear Alma. And running at night like you were on fire was the first part of getting there. Eventually, if Sydney was the one, Henry would stop running to nowhere and start running to her.

Claire discovered that expectation was nice for some things—Christmas, waiting for bread to rise, long car trips to somewhere special. But it wasn’t nice for others. Waiting for certain female guests to leave, for example.

Every morning, just before dawn, Tyler would meet Claire in the garden. They would touch and kiss and he would say such things to her, things that made her blush in the middle of the day when she thought of them again. But then, just before the horizon turned pink, he would leave and promise, “Just three more days.” “Just two more days.” “One.”

Claire had Rachel and Tyler over for lunch the day before Rachel was to leave, under the guise of good manners—because it was a Southern tradition to do all sorts of things under the guise of good manners—but really because she wanted more time with Tyler and the only way to get it was with Rachel.

She set up a table on the front porch and served turkey salad in zucchini blossoms. She knew Tyler was immune to her dishes, but Rachel wouldn’t be, and zucchini blossoms aided in understanding. Rachel needed to understand that Tyler was hers. It was as simple as that.

Bay had taken her seat at the table and Claire had just set out the bread when Tyler and Rachel walked up the steps.

“This looks lovely,” Rachel said. As she sat, she gave Claire a once-over. She was probably a perfectly nice person. Tyler liked her, and that said something. But it was clear that she wasn’t entirely over Tyler, and her sudden presence in his life was curious. There was a long story to her.

One Claire had absolutely no desire to learn.

“I’m glad the two of you get to spend some time together before you leave tomorrow,” Tyler said to Rachel.

“You know, my schedule is flexible,” Rachel said, and Claire nearly dropped the water pitcher she was holding.

“Try the zucchini,” she said.

It turned out to be a disastrous meal, passion and impatience and resentment clashing like three winds coming from different directions and meeting in the middle of the table. The butter melted. The bread toasted itself. Water glasses overturned.

“It’s strange out here,” Bay said from her seat, where she was trying to eat. She picked up a handful of sweet-potato chips and left for the garden, where she didn’t think anything was strange at all about the tree. Strange, after all, depended on your personal definition.

“I guess we should go,” Tyler finally said, and Rachel stood immediately.

“Thank you for lunch,” Rachel said. What she didn’t say was,
He’s leaving with me and not staying with you
. But Claire heard it anyway.

When Sydney came home from work that evening, Claire was in the shower, the water on her hot skin causing such steam that the entire neighborhood was enveloped in the moist fog. Claire heard the bathroom door open and jumped when Sydney’s hand appeared and shut off the water.

Claire poked her head around the curtain. “Why did you do that?”

“Because you can’t see your hand in front of your face for an entire block. I walked into Harriet Jackson’s house, thinking it was ours.”

“That’s not true.”

“It could be true.”

Claire blinked through the water dripping into her eyes. “I had Rachel and Tyler over for lunch,” she admitted.

“Are you crazy?” Sydney said. “Do you want her to leave, ever?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then stop reminding her that Tyler wants you, not her.”

“She’s leaving in the morning.”

“You hope.” Sydney walked out of the bathroom, her hands out in front of her like she couldn’t see. “Don’t take another shower. She won’t be able to see to leave.”

Claire couldn’t sleep that night. In the early-morning hours she crept to Sydney’s room and knelt at the window that overlooked Tyler’s house. She stayed there until daybreak, when she saw Tyler walk with Rachel out to her car, carrying her luggage. He kissed her cheek, and Rachel drove away.

Tyler stood there on the sidewalk, looking at the Waverley house. He’d been doing that all summer, watching the house, wanting in to her life. It was time to let him in. She was going to live or she was going to die. Tyler was going to stay or he was going to go. She had lived thirty-four years keeping everything inside, and now she was letting everything go, like butterflies released from a box. They didn’t burst forth, glad to be free, they simply flew away, softly, gradually, so she could watch them go. Good memories of her mother and grandmother were still there, butterflies that stayed, a little too old to go anywhere. That was okay. She would keep those.

She stood and started to walk out of Sydney’s room, but she gave a start when Sydney said, “Has she finally left?”

“I thought you were asleep,” Claire said. “Has who left?”

“Rachel, you goof.”

“Yes, she’s gone.”

“Are you going over there now?”

“Yes.”

“Thank God. You kept me awake all night.”

Claire smiled. “I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not,” Sydney said as she covered her head with a pillow. “Go be happy and let me sleep.”

“Thank you, Sydney,”
Claire whispered, sure Sydney didn’t hear her.

What she didn’t see was Sydney peek out from under the pillow with a smile.

Still in her nightgown, Claire went downstairs and out the door. Tyler’s eyes followed her across the yard. He met her halfway and twined his fingers with hers.

They stared at each other, their conversation silent.

Are you sure?

Yes. Do you want this?

More than anything
.

Together they walked to his house and made new memories; one in particular would be named Mariah Waverley Hughes and would be born nine months later.

Sydney and Henry walked around the green downtown one afternoon a few days later. Henry had met her after work for what was becoming an almost daily coffee date. Their walks lasted only about twenty minutes, because she had to get home to Bay and he to his grandfather, but every day around five o’clock she would start looking forward to seeing him, unconsciously watching the clock and looking toward the reception area for him to appear. As soon as he did, carrying two iced coffees from the Coffee House, she would call out to him, “Henry, you’re a lifesaver!”

It was common knowledge that single men in beauty shops were descended upon like carrion, and all the girls she worked with liked Henry and flirted and teased him while he waited for her. But when Sydney told her coworkers that she and Henry were just friends, they all looked disappointed in her, like they knew something she didn’t.

“So, can you and your grandfather come to Claire’s dinner party?” Sydney asked as they walked. Inviting people over was something Claire had never done before. Like their grandmother in her later years, she never liked having guests. But Claire had Tyler now, and love made her different, less like their grandmother and more like herself.

“I put it in my calendar. We’ll be there,” Henry said. “I think it’s nice how you and Claire have been getting along. You both have changed a lot. Do you remember the Halloween dance our junior year of high school?”

She thought a moment. “Oh, my God,” she groaned, sitting on the rock bench around the fountain. “I’d forgotten about that.”

That was the year Sydney dressed up as Claire for Halloween. She thought it was hilarious at the time. She’d bought a cheap black wig and pulled it back with combs and she wore jeans covered in dirt and Claire’s old gardening clogs. Claire had become famous for unknowingly going out with flour on her face, and sometimes girls at the grocery store would make fun of her, so Sydney put streaks of flour on her face. The pièce de résistance was the
Kiss the Cook
apron she wore to the dance, which everyone had a good laugh over, because the whole town knew that no one would kiss oddball Claire, who was only in her early twenties at the time but already ridiculously set in her ways.

“I think you did it back then to make fun of her,” Henry said, sitting beside her. “These days I see you dressing like her, but I think you’re trying to be like her in earnest this time.”

Sydney looked down at Claire’s sleeveless shirt she was wearing. “True. And it helped that I didn’t bring a lot of clothes with me when I moved back.”

“You left in a hurry?”

“Yes,” she said, not explaining any further. She liked the way things were, the relationship they had, like when they were kids. David was nowhere in that picture. David didn’t even exist when they were together. And there was no pressure for anything beyond their friendship, which was a huge relief. “So you were at that dance?”

He nodded and had some of his drink. “I went with Sheila Baumgarten. She was a year ahead of us in school.”

“Did you date a lot? I don’t remember seeing you at any of the date spots.”

He shrugged. “Sometimes. My senior year and a year after that, I dated a girl from Western Carolina University.”

“A coed, hmm?” She nudged him with her elbow playfully. “You like older women, I take it.”