The old woman rolled her eyes. “OfcourseI got bored! And so, I bullied my way out. Thank you, sweetie,” she added to the firefighter with her walker, who also delicately handed over her expensive turquoise purse. She patted him gently on his bicep. “Tell your mother that I appreciate her help in my escape. But she still owes me that chicken salad recipe!”
“I’ll tell her, Mrs. Beck,” the firefighter replied kindly.
Another one, a woman with short hair and shoulders strong enough to pull me over her like a sack of potatoes, said as she handed Juliette a folder, “A physical therapist will come here three times a week at ten a.m., and here’s the prescriptions for her meds, and instructions.”
But Juliette could only glare at the old woman. “Eula!”
“Don’t give me that, Jules. You know I couldn’t stay away,” the old woman said, then turned her attention to me.
There were a lot of things about Odette, Maine, that I didn’t understand. The obsession with lobster, for one. The family-owned grocery store hours, for another. The pricing on the menu at the only bar in town. The lack of available men within a fifty-mile radius on any dating app.
And Eula Beck, the owner of Lilymoor House and Gardens.
Harriett and I had seen her once from afar ten years ago when we visited. It was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment between the arches of the Central Garden. A proud-standing woman in a zipped-up fleece jacket, even in summer, in jeans and worn work boots, with hot pink gloves and a matching bucket hat. She was walking with a shovel, a goose waddling along behind her.
“Was that her?” Harrie had whispered to me, catching my arm to stop me, because she had seen her, too. When I nodded, she got excited. “Let’s go meet her!”
“No,” I said, grabbing her to keep her from running over to the woman.
“Why not?”
“It’s too weird,” I whispered, “and besides, what would I say? ‘Hi, I love your gardens and want to work here someday’?”
Harrie gave me a blank look. Then she said, “Yes, actually.”
“No,” I decided, turning in the opposite direction Eula Beck went.
“You’ll regret it, Soph,” she warned.
And maybe I had, but I’d never toldherthat.
Ten years later, I wound up here anyway. If I were like Harrie, I’d call itfateorkismet, but it was simply that my career field was small, and my position at the NYBG allowed me these kinds of opportunities. It was just coincidence.
Twenty-two-year-old me wouldn’t have believed that I now call Eula Beck at the end of every week to update her on the progress and my plans. Though while she oversaw my transfer, the paperwork was done by her private lawyer, and Juliette had welcomed me to the estate itself, and Wykofski had shown me the ropes.
Eula was this distant overseer—
Until now.
While her cloud-white hair was windswept from the drive up, and her clothes still in moderate disarray, she looked more put together than I did on a good day. With pearls around her neck, she wore a dainty little pink sweater and white trousers. For an old white lady who had fractured her hip a month ago, she seemed rather well, if you didn’t look at the IV bruises on her hands or catch the slightest wince whenever she shifted the wrong way. But then she set her piercing caramel eyes on me. They were kind but hard, and I suddenly had the terrible fear that she could see right through me.
And I was afraid she didn’t like what she saw.
“Andyou,” she said with a smile, “must be the magical Sophie Drear.”
5
ya’aburnee
I’ve always understood plants.
Give them a little water, a little sunlight, a little love, and they rarely surprise you. People, on the other hand?
We were strange, and confusing, and sticky. We laughed when we cried and cried when we laughed, we danced when we were sad and danced when we were happy, we grew hungry for food, for touch, for far-off places—
We fell in love with the wrong people, and we sobbed on the kitchen floor when the heartache sent us to our knees. We brought over Chinese takeout, and we plotted murders and we messed up, again, and again, and again.
We were elusive. When we got sick—really sick—we couldn’t be saved with sunlight and water and new soil. We couldn’t be trimmed off and propagated. And no matter how much time, or hard work, or effort, sometimes all you could do was sit at our bedside and talk with us.
