He looks at me in surprise, one of my baseball caps shielding his eyes from the sun. “Really?”
“Yeah, with my mom.” I realize that it’s impossible not to talk about the big things when someone’s in your home and very curious about everything about you. He’s worn me down, this one. The food coma and sun conspire to make me talk too much. “Well, I kind of grew up here. She died when I was eight, and so I had to live with my grandparents after that. But they kept the house and saved it for me so I could decide whether to keep it or sell it once I was an adult. I kept it.”
I don’t look at him, but I can feel him looking at me. He’s quiet for a moment. Then his hand reaches over and squeezes mine. “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you,” I say. And even though I’m used to people’s sympathy and I’ve had decades of training for it, Ellis’s gesture still touches me. That tug in my ribs is pulled tighter. “Maybe it’s weird to live in the house that you grew up in with your dead mom, but it’s also my strongest connection to her.” I point to the hillside full of blossoming shrubs. “Those plants, for example—her favorite.”
His eyes get wide. “Oh. I get it—that’s why you’re named Cassia.”
“What?” I look at him in confusion.
“That plant, it’s called Feathery Cassia.”
I look at the yellow flowers, my throat feeling tight. “Really?”
“Yeah. What a cool name for you.”
My eyes catch his and we smile at each other. I feel the tug in my ribs again and try to distract myself from the feeling. “What are your professional thoughts on my very remedial gardening skills?”
He looks at the various potted plants I have on the deck—some olive trees, bougainvillea, and tomatoes. There’s a seed tray of geraniums waiting to be put into a bed. “It looks great. Very, uh, color coordinated?”
I laugh. “Listen, I have systems.”
“I can tell. You had your records organized alphabetically. Which I noticed because you have them shelved with labeled dividers like a very normal person.”
“Thank you,” I say with a sniff.
I find him gazing at the geraniums. “Why don’t we plant those today?”
“What?” I ask. “Oh, no. I don’t have the right soil and the ones that haven’t bloomed yet—I forget what color they’re going to be so I don’t know where they go.”
Ellis stares at me.
“What?”
“Get up, we’re doing this.” He stands and holds his hands out to me so I’ll take them. “We don’t need fancy soil and it’ll be fun for the blossom colors to be a surprise.”
“Um, I don’t know…”
He takes my hands and pulls me to my feet. “Listen to the professional.” I grumble but follow him over to the plants, where my gardening supplies are laid out. He tosses me some gloves but doesn’t wear any himself. When he pushes his bare hands into the dirt in my bed, I gasp. “But your hands!”
“Cass, god made dirt so dirt don’t hurt.”
I laugh. “Wow, haven’t heard that one in a while.”
He loosens up the dirt throughout the bed, the baseball cap pushed low on his forehead. “Nothing feels better than this to me.” It’s weirdly sensual the way he is touching the soil, and I clear my throat and grab a cobrahead to help him loosen up some of the roots that have managed to stay in the bed.
After we do that, he has me take out the geraniums and place them where I want them on the bed. “And remember, they don’t have to be tidy rows. Just try to have them spaced out evenly.”He’s very confident as he orders me around, but it’s not annoying somehow.
When we’re done, we stand and look at our handiwork, sweaty and a little out of breath. He has dirt smudged across his forehead and up his arms. That was a lot of geraniums. “Now, you just need to water these every few days and watch them thrive.”
“Even in this old soil?”
He shrugs. “If they look like they’re struggling, we can add some compost and stuff.” The “we” isn’t lost on me, and I wonder, just for a second, if there will be another time when he’s over again. After that manual labor, I’m starving. So, dusting off my old spare bike for Ellis, we ride down to a taco truck at the bottom of my hill. Then the tacos make us want beer, so we swing by a liquor store and grab a frosty six-pack of Modelos and crack them open on my front porch. We talk about his childhood growing up in Queens, his older sister who used to beat up kids who looked at him funny. She’s now a personal trainer with a wife and three kids.
“Ah, that explains it,” I say when he talks about her.
“Explains what?”
