“Oh yeah?” I ask, feeling intrigued.
“No one has a choice in life. No one really gets to choose what path they go down. Every single second of every minute of every hour, day, month, and year we are alive was predetermined for us the moment we were born.” Her voice is growing in volume as if she’s angry with Robert Frost himself. “I mean, how can one person say, ‘whatever is meant to be will be’ offer so much truth, only to be completely called out by Robert Frost, who’s talking about us having choices in life. No one has a choice. Everything that happens was meant to happen and we’re just passengers on this ride. Right?” Holy hell, this woman is fired up. She must have really been screwed over by fate, but this may be the most intelligent conversation I’ve ever had, or potentially the most therapeutic, at least.
“Who said ‘whatever is meant to be will be’ anyway?” I ask.
“Them, that person, whoever ‘they’ are—you know, the person with all the sayings,” she says. Her smile returns, accompanying a soft breath of laughter.
The longer I look at her, the more at ease I feel. I’m not sure why, considering the despise I normally have for being around other people, but something about her takes that distaste away, kind of like what Charlotte has done for me over the past few months. Except Charlotte was fucking AJ. “You may be the smartest person I have ever met,” I offer as a compliment in lieu of a response to her criticism of Robert Frost. In truth, nothing that comes out of my mouth could hold a flame to the intellectual thoughts she just shared.
“Why are you here?” I ask her, not only for the reason of moving away from the poetry discussion I will eventually stumble on but also because I truly want to know why a florist is here in a place where there are no more flowers. I have never seen anyone visit these flowerless gardens at the end of fall, besides a straggling elderly person looking to get his or her number of steps for the day accounted for.
“I...” she stammers on a response. “I just like it here. I feel connected to this place for a reason I can’t explain. It just makes me feel whole when I’m feeling a little broken, you know? So I come here almost every day.” How have I only run into her twice?
“And why are you broken?” I continue.
“I’m literally broken from the inside out. Trust me, it’s not something I’d want to waste your time explaining.”
“There he is!” Olive’s voice shouts from the top of the hill. I turn to find Dad holding her tightly in his arms as he stares down at me with sympathy. Always sympathy. “I told you we’d find him here.” As Olive is lecturing Dad, he takes the stone steps one by one. I want to tell him to turn back and let me have just a few more minutes here but he wouldn’t listen.
“Dad, I’ll—uh—I’ll meet you up at the car in just a minute,” I tell him, hoping he’ll stop coming toward me.
“Who is she?” Olive asks in a sing-song voice. “She’s pretty, like a Disney princess. You look like...” Olive pauses for a moment, tapping her little finger against her chin. “Oh, I know! You look like Rapunzel, but with brown hair.” Yes, Olive’s right. That’s exactly who she looks like.
Ari giggles in response and stands from the bench, making her way over to Dad and Olive. “Well, I’m not Rapunzel, but thank you for saying that. You are absolutely adorable,” Ari says.
A smile sprouts over Olive’s lips, stretching from ear to ear. “Thank you,” she says through a fit of quiet laughter.
“If you don’t mind me saying, Miss, you look familiar, but I can’t quite place my finger on where I know you from. Are you and Hunt friends? Did you go to high school together, maybe?”
Ari takes a couple of steps back, fussing nervously with her hair. “Uh—oh, no, she—we just see each other here sometimes—a common interest, you know?” I chime in.
Dad stares at me for a minute, looking between the two of us with a look I can’t decipher. “Huh, well then, maybe you just have a familiar looking face,” he follows up.
Ari’s cheeks have deepend into a dark shade of pink as she stammers over her next words. “Yeah, I—um—I—I get that all of the time,” she says. She does not get that all of the time. She’s exquisite, honestly—like no one I’ve ever seen before. A lot of it has to do with her eyes though, not just the way they look, but the way she looks at things like she’s exploring everything for the first time, seeing things with amazement. Or at least that is what I have noticed in the thirty minutes we’ve now known each other.
“You know, I really do think I know you from somewhere,” Dad says again.
Ari turns around, reaching for her bag below the bench. “I don’t think that’s possible,” she says, looking as if she’s about to run, yet again. “I just moved here from San Diego a few months ago.”
San Diego? Who would leave San Diego to come all the way across the United States to Connecticut of all places…to work in a flower shop?
“Ari, what is the name of your flower shop?” I say, reaching for her arm before she’s out of reach.
She shakes her head subtly and slips out of my loose grip.
“Dad, Charlotte is real-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-ly upset that you left her,” Olive says, loud enough that Ari turns to look at me once more as she jogs up the stone stairs. “She said it’s all a big misunderstanding. And a big, big, big, big mistake.”
“Olive, hush,” Dad says to her. And now her bottom lip is in place and Olive is officially pouting. “Oh stop it with the lip. I need to talk to your dad for a minute.”
“I’m sorry,” Dad begins. “I didn’t mean to scare your friend away.”
“She’s not my friend,” I reply coldly. But I would have liked her to be my friend, I think. What am I thinking? Saying? I haven’t dated anyone in the time Ellie has been gone because it didn’t feel right. Now I’m sitting here confused as all hell about how I got my emotions wound so tightly around Charlotte that I actually feel pain for what she did with AJ, and now this...a complete stranger has captured my attention in less than thirty minutes. This isn’t me.
“What’s going on with you, Hunt?” Dad asks. Placing Olive down on her feet, he then turns to her, saying, “Go find me ten little rocks by the bench over there. Ten.” Dad holds his fingers up one at a time for Olive to count.
“I know how much ten is, silly Grampy.” Olive skips over to the bench where she begins her search, counting out each rock slowly, one at a time.
“Hunter,” he begins again. “Talk to me, Son.”
