“Peabody,” Temperance said as Joseph moved to retrieve the ball from the dog. “He won’t give it up voluntarily, you have to negotiate.”
“How do you negotiate with a dog?” Joseph said.
“With Peabody specifically, you pretend to be interested in something in the opposite direction. He cannot resist investigating things. The moment he moves, take the ball.”
Joseph looked at Peabody, and then looked away with great elaborateness, toward something entirely non-existent at the far end of the garden, and Peabody, after a moment of suspicious consideration, stood up to look.
Joseph had the ball.
“That worked,” he said with genuine surprise.
“He is very consistent,” Temperance said. “Most reliable things are, once you understand them.” She said it generally, to no one in particular, but she was aware of Harper nearby glancing at her as she said the words.
The game continued. It had no rules to speak of, evolving organically. At some point Joseph discovered that Midge would chase anything that moved, and spent five minutes testing thelimits of this theory with his own jacket sleeve. Harper said nothing about the jacket sleeve, which Temperance noticed.
Huh.She thought to herself that the Harper she met earlier would have redirected and corrected the entire exchange. But this Harper did no such thing.
She looked at him standing in the middle of the lawn watching his son laugh at Midge’s trajectory with something open and unmanaged in his expression.
He had changed.
Then Joseph threw the ball too hard and it went wide and bounced toward the rose bed and Biscuit, who had apparently been waiting for exactly this kind of opportunity, heaved himself to his feet and lumbered after it with surprising speed and arrived at the rose bed ahead of the ball and walked directly through the freshly turned earth at its border and came out the other side with his paws impressively dirty.
Harper looked at his shoes, which had also acquired some of the freshly turned earth.
“Your shoes,” Temperance said, laughing. “They are muddy.”
“I can see that,” he said. “But we are in the gardens, and I suppose that it could be worse.”
It was that moment that it occurred to Temperance that now was a great time to test out her theory to see if Harper had really changed. She picked up a handful of the loose earth from the rose bed border and held it up.
“It could be worse,” she said. “I could make it worse.”
He looked at the handful of earth, and narrowed his eyes at her. “You wouldn’t,” he said.
Something shifted in his expression that was not quite a smile and he took one step toward her. She took one step back, and then she threw the earth, not at him exactly, more adjacent to him, and it scattered across the front of his coat. He looked down at it and then looked up at her with an expression she had never seen on his face before.
Oh no.She was in trouble now.
So, she ran across the lawn with no plan whatsoever, hearing him come after her, which she had not entirely expected, and Joseph made a sound that was pure delight. Midge joined the chase while Temperance ran toward the apple trees.
“I bet you will not be able to catch me,” she giggled. He caught up with her at the apple trees, which was faster than she had anticipated given the difference in their stride. But he did not grab her arm or block her path, simply reached down and picked up a fallen apple from the grass and held it up.
“That,” she said, slightly out of breath, “is an apple.”
“It is,” he said. “You started this. Now shall I throw it at you?”
“I threw it adjacent to you,” she said.
“The coat disagrees,” he said with the apple was in his hand. She was against the apple tree now, realizing that he was closer than the situation strictly required.
Oh my.
“Truce,” she said.
He looked at her for a moment.
“Truce,” he agreed, and lowered the apple. They stood there for a second in the apple tree’s shade with the sounds of the garden around them, Joseph laughing somewhere behind them. “We should go.”
