Chapter 30
Thirty
When we pull into the garage, Valencia is working at the little wooden table where her gardening supplies are. She waves to
us with gloved hands and a bright smile.
“How was shooting paper targets?” she asks.
“Nowhere near as fun as the real thing,” Marcus says. He says it in a joking tone, but all I can think is he really means
it.
Valencia rolls her eyes playfully before giving him a kiss. “Well, now that you’ve gotten your testosterone workout in, you
can all help me in the garden.” There are several new hydrangea plants, only a foot high, in cardboard trays on the garage
floor.
Marcus frowns. “Sorry, gotta do some motion writing upstairs.”
Or he’s going to smoke a bowl to help him come down.
She frowns and turns her attention to Easton, who puts up his hands. “JT is picking me up in ten minutes.”
“I’ll help,” I say before she can scold him. “I mean, I guess it’s my own fault the old ones died to begin with, right?”
Valencia turns to me with a look of surprise. Then she reaches for the box of Miracid on the top of her workbench. She holds
it out to me, showing me it’s still unopened.
“You lied about fertilizing them. But I think Gramma Sharon was right. It was a blight, and that’s no one’s fault.”
She believes me. I have no clue why I feel so relieved, but I am. Maybe because a blight would mean the plants weren’t killed maliciously.
She tosses the box on the workbench again and smiles. “I planted the hydrangeas when I was pregnant with you. It’s only right
that we do it together this time.”
Valencia hands me a pair of gardening gloves and tells me to grab a shovel. She leads me out to the garden, where large paper
bags have already been filled with the branches of the dead hydrangeas. She tells me she cut them all away, but we still have
to dig up the roots.
“Did we ever do this before?” I ask. I move aside some of the mulch and start digging around the hydrangea stump. “The gardening,
I mean.”
She laughs. “No. I never even cared about the garden until you were gone. The reason I planted the hydrangeas in the first
place was because they’re low maintenance. Water them on hot days and fertilize them and they’re usually good. When you were
gone, I started looking into new garden beds and bought some books.” She nods toward the backyard. “I even had raised beds
and a nice vegetable garden back there for a few years.”
But now the yard is only grass.
“What happened?”
“Asshole squirrels,” she says with hatred. “Those little shits would see my tomatoes, days away from ripening, and take a
single bite out of every damn one. I’d be lucky to get one tomato a year, if that. So it was either kill ’em all or get rid
of the raised beds.” She shrugs, disappointed.
“So you got into gardening, and Dad got into boating?” I motion toward the boathouse.
Valencia smiles. “Well, he was always into boating. When we lived in DC—you were just a toddler then—we would all come down
here on long weekends. Once, he rented a sailboat and had the captain attempt to teach us how to sail. You and Easton weren’t nearly as interested as he was, and we ended up having to end the cruise
early. The next time he went alone, and I took you boys to a movie.”
“But he still put in the boathouse.”
Valencia nods. “He’s waiting on the perfect boat to put in there. But not a sailboat. That won’t fit.”
I think about asking how much it cost. I know the answer because I’ve seen the invoice upstairs. It was almost half of Nate’s
life insurance policy. Which means there was plenty left over to buy a boat—I think? But now that they have to pay back the
money, maybe that’s changed.
Something in the dirt catches my eye. It looks like a root—small, thin, and brown with dirt—but it’s harder than a root would
be. I pick it up. Maybe it’s a broken piece of rock?
I throw it into the grass behind me and dig a little deeper.
But my shovel catches on something. This time it’s fabric.
Old, dirty, and shredded. Maybe it’s burlap that Valencia put down for the garden and forgot about?
I try to pull it out but it’s lodged under the dirt, so I dig around it, following the fabric until it stops. I pull a little
more and it starts to come out. It’s not burlap, but maybe cotton.
Something rattles around inside as it unfurls.
And out tumbles a mess of dirty bones.