He tilted his head in thought. “Did she run the gambling den?”
It wasn’t a question that asked me to recite a eulogy. It was a question that gave me permission to remember her as a person. A knot undid in my chest. “Pokémon trading cards,” I said, and he laughed in delight. It was the first time I’d heard that kind of sound from him—bright and airy. It was a good one, as far as laughs went.
Above him, in the rafters of the gazebo, a trumpet flower bloomed.
Was the garden . . .respondingto him?
As if he heard my question, he said quietly, “They’ve been doing that randomly. The crab apples, too. And the asters by the wall. The vines.”
I really didn’t think there was anything random about it.
He cleared his throat and said, “I bet Harrie wiped the floor with the other kids at recess.”
“She says she did,” I replied, tearing my eyes back down to him. “If she was half as successful as she was with her essay business in college, I pity those kids. You would have liked her.”
He sat back on his heels. “If she’s as brilliant as you, I’m sure I would have.”
“She was better,” I said. “She had this energy about her that was . . .catching. I always felt like I could do anything with her beside me.”
And now it felt like I could barely take root anywhere, too afraid to. If I did . . . If I proved that I could live without her, that I could grow and change, even with her gone . . . It was a hard thing to accept. What if the more things I did—the more I experienced, the more I learned, the more I lived—the less of her I’d keep with me?
He gave me a thoughtful look, studying my face like it was a piece of art hanging on the wall of a museum, noting every detail. His gaze was the color of the ocean at dusk, dropping to my mouth. Then down to the soil.
“Tell me more?” he ventured.
I let out a sharp breath. I looked away.
“The walls are high,” he said, motioning to the ivy-thatched perimeter. “I don’t think there are any secrets that can climb them. We certainly can’t.”
No, we’d both figuredthatout. I puffed out a laugh.
Though if the secrets couldn’t get out, then they just reverberated here, and that might be worse. But … no one had asked about her before. They’d only ever given me their condolences, a thing I didn’t want and had no need for. It couldn’t resurrect her. But his question . . .
“She loved sunflowers,” I began, “and the Cheesecake Factory unironically and the smell of old books and she collected untranslatable words. Her favorite wasdustsceawung.”
He folded his arms across each other on the railing, setting his head on top of them as he listened. He said, “That sounds like a sneeze.”
I smiled, because I think I had said something similar to her when she told it to me. “It’s Old English for the idea that you come from dust, and you’ll go back to dust. She always said it sounded poetic, like we were just on one big wheel, going around and around and around.”
“Like a carousel,” he mused.
“A Ferris wheel. She loved those, too.”
And she just got on it a few decades too soon.
He thought of another question. “What was her favorite Taylor Swift song?”
I laughed. “She didn’t have one.”
“Not a fan?”
“She just couldn’t choose. Can you?”
“‘Out of the Woods,’ obviously.”
“Rather on theme, isn’t it?”
He shrugged. “I like to match,” he said simply.
