Miss Lissy metme at her succulent-roofed mailbox.
“You’re late.” Her arms were crossed in her favourite stance. I knew what she was thinking. But a gastric bypass had removed her ability to punish my still-small body in the traditional way.
“Didn’t realise I was on your schedule,” I said, letting myself through the gate.
“It’s common sense to arrive at the same time you did last time.” Her tone was all ice.
“What is it they say about common sense?” I tapped my finger against my lip as I walked the path to the patio, her eyes burning into my back. “Oh, hi Em!” I added, relieved to see the teenager sitting cross-legged and surrounded by books on the wooden stairs.
She nodded quickly, her black hair falling in front of her eyes, before turning her attention back to her reading.
“You might be able to help me, Ema,” I said, continuing my question. Partly because I felt like I might be able to decipher her wellbeing from her answer and partly because I could tell Miss Lissy was pissed that I wasn’t grovelling at her feet for my tardiness. “Do you know what they say about common sense? It’s a funny saying. I can’t seem to remember it.”
She shook her head without looking at me. I wondered how her parents hadn’t come to figure out that something was wrong. Although I guess I had no proof that anything was officially wrong. But I knew Miss Lissy, and that was all the proof I needed.
Didn’t she still have to call her parents? Perhaps she had parents like me, or like my dad at least, who worried in silence but talked about nothing.
“It’s not very common,” Miss Lissy answered for her, her spectacled eyes fixed on mine. “I heard you were doing a spot of gardening yesterday. That’s what I thought you could help me with this morning,” she said. Tiny alarm bells sounded a warning within me. Quiet, but they were there. Like a tinkling in my gut.
“How on earth did you hear that?”
She tilted her head. “I’ve got birdies everywhere. You should know that by now.”
Did I ever. I let my backpack slump to the ground and followed her through the garden.
This.We had to make a little piece of Breeze’s yard like this. Except nothing like it.
“Have you used a swing hoe before?”
I narrowed my eyes, waiting for a joke that didn’t come. “Do I look like I have?”
She handed me a long-handled tool with a squared copper end and pushed it gently back and forth across the soil, pulling up small weeds as she went. “It’s more productive. Hoes on both the forward and backward motion,” she said, thrusting it into my hands.
I couldn’t help snorting. Don’t we all.
I wasn’t sure how I’d been roped into gardening duty today when my agreement was to visit Miss Lissy once a week until I left. It clearly had some kind of servant fine print I had missed,and my comfort outfit was overheating me in the mid-morning sun. Apparently, Glades Bay was five degrees warmer than anywhere surrounding it, as well as having more old people fall over per square metre than anywhere in the region, on account of its large elderly population. Sounds like two additional good reasons to get the hell out of here.
“Do you know what these are called?” She gestured to the bell-shaped pink flowers that towered above her compact frame. My eyes formed slits as I considered her. Foxglove was my middle name, but I doubted she remembered. More likely, one of her little birdies had passed it along. She was gearing up for a point.
“Foxgloves,” I replied flatly, inspecting the copper blade of the tool in my hand. Pretty.
“Well done,” she said with forced delight, her smile stretching. “It’s a funny thing about flowers. They all have symbolic meanings.” She waved an arm around her garden. “These, for example, symbolise love.” She pulled another pink bloom I didn’t recognise towards her face. “Chrysanthemums bring comfort in sorrow,” she added, brushing her hand across a bed of yellow. “And these—” she clipped the tallest foxglove’s head with her secateurs, “these symbolise riddles and secrets.”
She looked at me. Just a flicker. Measuring the impact before snipping another.
The alarm bells in my gut rang louder.
“Why do you think someone would name you after that?” she asked, pinching the bloom between her fingertips.
“I doubt they gave it much thought. Or maybe they heard it was good for the heart.”
“Or poisonous?” Her words were sharp. Her stance mirrored mine.
“Maybe my parents had a morbid streak.”
“Or,” she said, drawing the word out as she clipped another stem, “they knew a thing or two about secrets.”
I kept at the rhythmic motion of the swing hoe. Forward and back. Forward and back. The repetition helped me appear calm, even as my chest raced. I would not give her the satisfaction. How dare she talk about my parents as if she knew them?
