“You could’ve solved all the cold cases,” I agreed with a sigh. “Spied on all the cheating husbands. Found all the bodies tossed overboard from cruise ships.”
“Which is more than you’d think! But nursing paid so well …”
Horticulture never did, and I’d even taken a slight pay cut to come up to Maine for the summer. In the ten years I’d interned for, and then worked for, the New York Botanical Garden, I’d barely managed a living wage. I was thirty-two, with a roommate and student loans and too many credit cards in my name to eventhinkabout an actual vacation. It was safe to say that I wasn’t quite where I thought I’d be by now. To be honest, before taking this job, I had been contemplating turning in my resignation and moving home to North Carolina before Jeff could give me The Talk about my lacking work ethicthese past few months, and before I had to admit that I . . . couldn’t find it in me to care anymore.
What’s the point?, I kept thinking.
I didn’t know the answer to that anymore. I wasn’t sure I ever had.
In lieu of Jeff giving me The Talk, he suggested that I apply for this position and take the summer to think everything over. To find an answer.
“You have a gift,” he had told me. “Apply to Lilymoor. Help Mrs. Beck with her garden for the two hundredth anniversary and then decide. You’re one of my most reliable people. I’d hate for you to leave this career without giving it some serious thought.”
Mom had agreed that maybe a summer in Maine would revitalize me, like how sometimes you just needed to move a potted plant to a different window for the view. I wanted to argue that it was probably the amount of sunlightthroughthe window that mattered, but what did I know—maybe itwasthe view.
I was at Lilymoor, after all, and a not-so-small part of me thought it was coincidental that this position came up just at the ten-year mark, as if Lilymoor had wanted to remind me of that promise.
So I’d applied, and I’d been chosen.
“How’s the garden coming? Ready for the bicentennial?” my mom asked.
Iwish.
“I’m still looking for the vines,” I said, “and I hope I can find them before they choke out the entire hedge maze. And I still can’t figure out where the water’s coming from that’smaking the wildflowers so damp.” I felt exhausted and frustrated just talking about it.
Never mind that weird garden, which I had to remind myself I shouldn’t worry about if I didn’t even remember where it was—no matter how unprofessional that sounded. There was only so much I could do, and Mom didn’t need to know about it, or else she’d be asking about the garden, too.
“And,” I added with a huff, “I met a really rude guy today. He was asleep and I woke him up because it was closing time, and he was just—argh! Even thinking about him makes me mad,” I added under my breath as I wandered into the kitchen for food. “And he was hot. Which is just kind of insulting, you know?”
Mom barked a laugh. “You do have a type.”
“Regrettably,” I mumbled.
“Oh!Did I tell you that I ran into one of your old college friends the other day? She was the one who took a job up in Manitoba to study those fish.”
“They were beluga whales.”
“Yes, those! Apparently she’s back at Duke as a professor now, and she seems really happy. She asked me what you were up to, and she seemed excited that you were working at the NYBG—said it fit you.”
It did, once upon a time. I took a pitcher out of the refrigerator and poured myself a glass of water as I listened.
“Shealsosaid for you to call her once you’re back in the city.”
“Sure,” I replied noncommittally. Honestly, I couldn’t remember her name, and by the conversation, Mom clearly hadn’t asked it, either, or if she had, she’d already forgotten it.Mom was never good at names—it took Harrie coming to stay with us during college breaks for Mom to remember hers, and by then Mom loved her as much as she did me. Harrie wasn’t close to her parents like I was with Mom, and often jokingly asked if Mom was looking to adopt.
“And you don’t even have to worry about my health insurance,” she would say.
Mom, in no formal way, had in fact adopted herlongbefore Harrie ever asked. Mom bought her Christmas sweaters with the rest of the family, and Mom included her in Drear family reunions, and she’d even made Harrie a bridesmaid at her wedding to my stepdad, Eddie.
And at the funeral, Mom had ordered the prettiest flowers. Of course she had. I’d helped her pick them out. Harrie’s fiancé cried over them, saying how I always knew the right flowers to get. It was the one thing I knew, the one language I was well-versed in.
Harrie collected untranslatable words, and I learned the language of flowers.
Roses for devotion, pink carnations and rosemary for remembrance, bluebells for kindness, zinnias for absent friends, red chrysanthemums for love, poppies for consolation, aloe for grief, arborvitae tufts for a steadfast friendship . . . butterfly weed to let one go.
I had taken out all the butterfly weed. Thrown it in the dumpster out back of the funeral home.
“And, who knows, maybe you two can reconnect. You never do anything in the city, so maybe she can be your wing-woman.”
