“You aren’t a burden, Eula,” I adamantly replied. “Did someone say you were?”
She sank back into her pillows again with a wince. “No one has totellme. I might be old, but I’ve yet to have the mis-fortune of becoming senile. This part of life is rotten work. Especially when you’re the last one.”
I picked a yellowing leaf off a pothos, then turned to her, confused.
“My sister died a few years ago,” she informed me when she saw my face. “I couldn’t make it to Boston for the funeral because of the pandemic. I’m the last oldie left,” she added jokingly, trying to lighten the mood. “I’m grateful to be alive, but it’s tiring when the people you’ve shared your life with the longest are all gone.” Her gaze strayed out the window, her mouth pursed into a frown. “Sometimes you just wish you could go, too.”
“Eula …”
She blinked then, tearing her eyes away from the distant blue sky. “Oh, don’t give me that look, dear. I’ve still got a few more things to live for, and no chance a hip is going to be the thing that doesmein. When I go to hell, I’ll be kicking and screaming.”
I did laugh at that, despite myself. “You know what I think?”
“That I’m just a sad old woman?”
I put the watering can on the desk and went over to her bed. “I think you need some fresh air.”
“Then open a window for me.”
“And some grass.”
“You can bring me a patch of dirt from the yard.”
I wheeled her walker over to the side of the bed and motioned for her to stand. She simply folded her arms over her chest and looked away. “Eula,” I said.
“Sophie, dear,” she replied with equal levity.
“I’m just doing my job. I want to take you to see the progress we’ve made so far, and I think in section two of the contract itsaysI have to run every change in the garden and its flora by you.”
She waved her hand. “I trust you. There, see? I don’t need to go anywhere.”
“I’ll tell that lawyer of yours that you’re in breach of contract,” I threatened.
She gasped. “You wouldn’t!”
“Iwould.”
“Fine,” she grumbled as she slowly got herself out of her bed and steadied herself on her walker, “but I’ll have to call him up anyway to amend the contractagain.”
“For what?” I asked.
“For babysitting an old woman.”
“Ha.”
We began to leave the bedroom, and then she stopped me and asked for her sunglasses on the dressing table, so I went to fetch them. They were beside a small photo of two tall teen-aged boys in black suits, Eula and her husband sandwiched between them. I recognized the blond-haired youth on Eula’s side first, though it was the one beside Henry that made me pause. A mess of wavy copper hair and piercing eyes, gangly in the way that most teens were before they grew into their height. And I knew that this particular boy would.
Eula saw my interest in the photo. “That was taken the last time we were all together, just before Henry died.” She gave a sad sort of smile. “Almost seventeen years ago, now. We were all happy then.”
Because the young man opposite Oliver, staring up at me from the photo with windblown hair and a reckless lopsided smile, was the stranger from the secret garden.
Cyrus.
16
yoko meshi
After I walked with Eula through the garden and told her my plan to tackle the Willow Grove and the terrible news that the vines were now in the Rose Court, too, I returned her to the house so that she and Juliette could start deciding on food and beverages for the bicentennial. Oliver had gone for the day, taking his shiny Lexus back into town. He had been grumbling about the Wi-Fi connection in the old house, so I assumed he was camped out in the coffee shop doing work like he’d said. Unlike him, I welcomed the unreliable internet and cell phone reception.
