I find the kitchen easily. It’s small and tidy, with the same yellow-painted cabinets and white tile that probably came with the house when it was built. Everything is organized with the precision of someone who’s cooked in the same space for fifty years.
I wrap ice in a clean dish towel and bring it back to the living room, where Wyatt is still crouched beside his grandmother’s chair.
“Here,” I say, handing him the ice pack.
“Thank you.”
He positions it on Meredith’s ankle, and she sighs. “You’re both fussing over me. I’ve had worse injuries gardening.”
“Which is exactly why you shouldn’t be gardening alone anymore,” Wyatt says firmly.
“I’ve been gardening alone for the last few years since your grandfather died, and I managed just fine.”
“You’ve been lucky. This time, you were lucky. You were close to the house. What if you’d been in the back garden? What if you’d fallen and couldn’t get up?”
Her expression softens. “Wyatt, honey, I know you worry, but I’m not ready to be treated like an invalid.”
“I’m not treating you like an invalid,” he says. “I’m treating you like someone I love who scared the heck out of me.”
His voice cracks slightly at the last words.
“How about this?” I say, surprising myself.
Both of them look at me.
“What if someone came and helped with the garden, not to do it for you, but with you? That way you can keep gardening, but there’s somebody here if anything happens.”
Meredith looks at me with interest. “You offering?”
“Well, I could. I was planning to start a garden at the bar anyway. I could use some practice.”
“You know anything about gardening?”
“Well, I did grow some terrible tomatoes when I was seven, and I kept herbs alive in Atlanta for three years.”
Meredith laughs. “Well, that’s more experience than most people have. All right, Eleanor, you’ve got yourself a deal. Saturday mornings, if you’re free.”
Wyatt looks between us, relief washing over his face. “You don’t have to.”
“I want to,” I say, and I realize that I mean it. Not just to help Wyatt, but because I genuinely like Meredith. The idea of spending Saturday mornings in her garden and learning from someone who’s been doing it for so long sounds perfect.
We stay for about another hour. Wyatt elevates Meredith’s ankle, changes the ice pack a couple of times, and makes her promise to stay off it for the rest of the day. I make tea in her kitchen and bring it out on a tray with shortbread cookies I find in a tin by the stove.
“These are good,” I say, biting into one.
“Family recipe,” Meredith says. “My mother taught me, her mother taught her, and I’ll teach you if you’d like.”
“I’d like that very much.”
We sit in her living room drinking tea and eating cookies, and she tells stories about teaching elementary school for forty years, about her late husband Frank, who built the arbor in the back garden with his own hands, about Wyatt as a boy catching frogs in the creek and tracking mud through the house and reading poetry under the oak tree in the backyard.
“He was always a sensitive soul,” she says, looking at him with affection. “Even as a little boy. Frank used to worry it would make life hard for him, but I told him the world needs sensitive souls, needs people who feel things deeply.”
Wyatt’s ears are slightly red. “Grandma.”
“I’m just stating the facts, dear. You’ve always been tenderhearted. It’s not a weakness.”
I watch him squirm under her assessment because she’s right. He is tenderhearted. He feels things deeply, and instead of seeing that as a weakness, she sees it as a strength.
