“Have fun,” I said, and she looked about ready to explode with happiness.
“Obviously!” she replied, pulling her purse over her shoulder, and promised to update us tomorrow on how it went.
This was her fifth date since I’d come to Lilymoor, and I envied her optimism. When I first arrived, I took one look at my dating options and immediately deleted the apps. I never had time for romance, anyway. And even if Ihadtime, I wasn’t sure that was how I wanted to spend it. I was about as romantic … well, as a dentist appointment, something Harrie often bemoaned.
“Youwork with flowers!” she used to point out. “That’s inherently romantic! I mean, don’t you obsess over Victorian flower language? Isn’t that all about love?”
“And spiting your enemies,” I had corrected.
“Okay, well,mostlyabout love. And yet your love life is as dry as the lint trap in my dryer.”
“I’m surprised you know what that is, considering I always had to clean ours out in college,” I had remarked, and she’d gasped over the phone.
“I just forget!” She gave an indignant sniff. “I can’t be perfect ineveryway.”
“Just most ways.”
“Just most,” she echoed, and I could hear her smile even a thousand miles away. That was six months before the doctor’s appointments—the ones I didn’t know about. Seven months before I caught a red-eye across the country and showed up at her door with a bottle of wine and an electric shaver when I finally caught on.
A year before she died, leaving a fiancé and a half-finished book and hopes of traveling the world and dreams of a white picket fence and a dog and kids and—
No, I’d leave the romance to Juliette. It was safer that way. “Ah,” Eula said with a soft sigh, “to be young and havetime!”
I thought about Harrie and begged to differ.
6
cigerpare
The groundskeeper’s cottage where I lived for the summer was on the far eastern side of the property. It was a small one-bedroom, one-bath house nestled into the line of trees behind the abandoned Willow Grove, a part of the garden that Eula had closed off after a fire sixteen years ago. I had to go slowly across the uneven gravel, even though the moon was bright and reflected silver across the pond.
Halfway to the cottage, my phone buzzed with a text.
It was my mom.
The weather looked beautiful there today!!she wrote. Compared to a sweltering Carolina summer, anything looked beautiful, but she had a fair point about Maine. Though she was texting because she wanted to check in, not really to comment on the weather.
I took my dirty tennis shoes off on the front porch of my cottage and pressed her number in my favorites as I unlocked the door. Mom answered in one ring, like she’d been haunting her phone. She probably was.
“You usually call me by now! I was getting worried,” shesaid. “I was just about to Find My Friends you, to make sure you hadn’t gone and slipped off a cliff.”
“I’m not going to slip off a cliff, Mom,” I replied, closing the door behind me and flipping on the lights, though I have thought about throwing myself from one.
The cottage sleepily blinked to life, the lights warm yellow and faintly humming.
When Eula first said that I could stay in the groundskeeper’s cottage while I was here, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want to take advantage of her hospitality, but then I saw the prices for apartments in the area and quickly swallowed my pride. I wasn’t sure how Wykofski and Juliette afforded their places until I learned Juliette was subletting a room over a boathouse in town and Wykofski was living in a trailer out near the national park. Yafir lived so far inland it negated the price.
The cottage, for the summer, was perfect. Even though it was a bit drafty, with a smoky smell still lingering near the wood-burning stove even in July. The furniture was perfectly lived-in, with a floral couch and a deep chair for reading, and a small kitchen with a two-burner range and a sink under the window, where crusty herbs hung from the light above. There were plaid blankets and half-height bookshelves filled with botany and ecology texts, and others about law and architecture. It was a hodgepodge collection, though Eula had said when she offered me the cottage that her nephews used to stay in it when they visited, so maybe they had something to do with it.
Down the hall, there was a petite mint-green bathroom with a claw-foot tub, and then a bedroom in the back with a double bed on a metal frame, a closet, and a chest of drawers.
It was cozy and warm, so much different from the soulless apartment I left in New York with the roommate who sometimes did his dishes, but most of the time just showered with his girlfriend and never cleaned hair out of the drain.
“Okay, yes, you’re probably right,” Mom admitted, “but I had a dream last night where you slipped off the cliffs, and you know how my brain works. It keeps replaying worst-case scenarios, and then some fisherman would find your body in three days half eaten by lobsters and I’d be beside myself with grief for the rest of my life …”
“Youreallyneed to stop watching true crime documentaries before bed,” I told her, and she agreed with a sigh.
“They’re just sointeresting, sprout. I feel I could’ve been a private eye in another life,” she lamented.
