Chapter 17 In the Garden
IN THE GARDEN
It’s heavy, the August heat. Hannah’s mom calls it “oppressive” when she comes home from work in the evenings, her forehead glistening with a light sheen of sweat.
Joanie calls it “the Luzianna plague” when she and Hannah drive around in the early afternoons, blasting the air-conditioning between back-to-school errands.
But to Hannah, the heat feels like a blanket.
Warm and secure. And lucky for her, Baker agrees.
“Can you pass me that cake pan?” Baker asks, her chicory eyes drifting down the counter.
They stand in Hannah’s kitchen with the screen door open to the earth outside, washing them in the mild nighttime heat and the trilling cicadas.
Hannah’s parents are in bed, content with their air-conditioning and their summer quilt.
They don’t know that Hannah and Baker have propped the porch door open.
“Do you think your dorm will have a kitchen?” Hannah asks, bringing her the cake pan.
Baker pauses mixing the brownie batter. “I hadn’t thought about that. I hope so, otherwise I don’t know how I’ll send you surprise treats.”
“When I daydream about visiting you, that’s what I picture. Us in the kitchen, baking cookies for your new friends.”
Baker smiles at the thought.
“And if there isn’t a kitchen, we’ll just leave campus and come home for a night,” Hannah reasons.
“Is it bad if I don’t want to come home for a night? I want to have the whole weekend to ourselves when you visit. And I want to be able to, you know”—her face turns pink—“actually sleep in the same bed.”
Hannah pokes at her hip. “Are you having dirty thoughts?”
“No!” Baker laughs, kicking at Hannah with her arms still poised over the mixing bowl.
“I think you are.”
“I’m going to fling this batter at you.”
“No you’re not,” Hannah says, hugging her from behind. She squeezes Baker’s middle and drops her head onto her shoulder. “But anyway, I’ll be back for lots of visits. I figure we can come home for at least one night.”
Baker releases the whisk, spinning in Hannah’s arms so they’re facing each other.
“You got it,” she says, and she kisses Hannah.
It’s hard, that second week of August. It’s bittersweet.
Hannah’s stomach is anxious when she wakes in the morning, automatically counting how many days they have left together.
She thinks of how far she and Baker have come, and she wishes they could go on forever, growing and learning together, without the impending separation that college will bring.
She stands in the middle of her childhood bedroom, with sticky old stuffed animals lumped together in the corner, with pictures of her friends adorning the walls, with Baker’s favorite sweatshirt strewn over the bed, with piles of clothes that she has already set aside for Emory.
And all she can see, as she stands there caught between two worlds, is Baker asking her to dance.
“What are we doing?” Hannah laughs, her heart rate accelerating as Baker steps away from the music speakers.
“Dancing,” Baker says, like it’s painfully obvious. She takes Hannah’s hands and pulls her close. “Like we should have done at prom.”
The song is soft, rhythmic, mesmerizing.
Baker sways Hannah from side to side, her head resting against Hannah’s, their hair mixing together, brown into blond.
Hannah turns her head into Baker’s neck, and Baker holds her at the small of her back, and the music washes over them, a song that exists only for them.
“You looked so beautiful at prom,” Baker whispers.
Hannah wraps her arm tighter around Baker’s waist. “So did you.”
Baker kisses the side of Hannah’s face, right where her skin meets her hairline. “I didn’t feel like I did,” she says. “But I do now.”
Every time Hannah gets into her car, she sees Baker in the passenger seat next to her, wearing her brother’s faded old LSU baseball cap, laughing around the straw of her Sonic milkshake.
“Let’s go out to dinner,” Hannah says, reaching across the console to trace a finger over Baker’s palm.
“Dinner?”
“Yeah, like on a date. We can dress all fancy, and I’ll pick you up with a bouquet of roses or something, and I’ll take you to dinner.” She pauses. “If you don’t like it, we don’t have to do it again.”
Baker’s smile breaks across her whole face. “How could I not like that?”
So they go on a date. Hannah wears her prettiest dress and her favorite perfume, and Baker steps out of her garage with her navy sundress on, her hair pulled half up, the bobby pins glinting in the evening sunlight.
“I don’t know why you brought that,” Hannah says, eyeing Baker’s clutch as they drive down Perkins. “You know I’m gonna pay.”
Baker raises her eyebrows. “Not if I fight you for it.”
They go to Parrain’s, where the hostess seats them on the humid porch, and it’s crowded and busy in a good way. They order sweet tea and boudin balls, and Baker asks, “So—since this is an official date, does that mean we have to talk about different things than when we were just best friends?”
“No,” Hannah laughs, “I’m just gonna make fun of the way you fidget with your napkin, like I always do.”
Baker’s smile turns shy. “I’m fidgeting because I’m nervous.”
“Why are you nervous?”
“Because this is the first date I’ve been on where I actually like the person,” Baker says, and Hannah blushes all over.
They drive to City Park afterward and sit in Hannah’s car, and Hannah thinks of all the times she came here late at night and wished for something better for them. “Did you know,” she asks, surprising herself, “that being around you is my favorite thing in the world?”
Baker answers by kissing her, sudden but soft. They kiss again and again and again, Baker’s hand buried in Hannah’s hair, losing themselves in each other’s mouths until the windshield starts to fog.
“Holy shit,” Hannah says afterward. “I don’t know how I ever thought kissing anybody else was good.”
Baker smirks, her eyes lit with magic. “Yeah? I’m that good?”
“Stop,” Hannah laughs, tugging on her wrists. “Don’t act like you don’t like it, too.”
Baker kisses her again and says, “No, you’re right,” in a breathless voice.
They hold hands and listen to the radio while they drive back to Baker’s house. Hannah pulls into the driveway and turns the car off, and they turn to look at each other.
“Did you want this?” Baker asks, holding up her empty to-go cup of sweet tea, her voice silly. “Maybe as a souvenir of our first date?”
“Nah, wasn’t that memorable.”
Baker lunges across the console to tickle her side. Hannah squirms away, her own laughter ringing in her head.
“That was hurtful, Hannah,” Baker says in a fake-wounded voice. “You shouldn’t say things like that to your girlfriend.”
Hannah heats all over at the word. She stills with her back against the window, her hands still held up to ward off Baker’s tickling. “Girlfriend?” she asks. “Really?”
Baker’s eyes become hesitant, but then she says, in her brave voice, “Yeah—isn’t that what we are now?”
Hannah feels brand-new. “Yes. Yes, we absolutely are.”
Baker leans across the console to kiss her good night. “I’ll see you in the morning, right?”
“Right.”
“Night, Han.”
Hannah guides her in for one more kiss. They hold their lips together and Hannah breathes in Baker’s scent, and then Baker squeezes her hand and slips out of the car.
When Hannah lies in bed at night, all she knows is the feeling of Baker waking her up on the twenty-second of July, her hands warm on Hannah’s shoulders, her mouth dropping kisses to Hannah’s face like pennies into a fountain.
“Wake up, Birthday Girl,” she says, her voice in that halfway place between whispering and speaking, and Hannah smiles without planning to, the way she used to smile as a kid when her mom would wake her on Christmas morning.
Baker takes her to Zeeland Street for breakfast, and they sit in their favorite booth, and Baker pulls one leg up on the bench like she always does.
They feast on eggs and bacon and grits and hash browns, and Hannah looks across the table at Baker, sitting there in her tank top and running shorts with her hair pulled back from her face, and she cannot remember ever being happier.
They eat spice cake with Hannah’s family that night. Joanie cuts the slices, bragging about how this is the best cake she’s ever made. Hannah’s mom and dad sit at the far side of the table, both of them wearing content smiles, Hannah’s dad laying his hand on the table for her mom to take.
“Can’t believe we have an eighteen-year-old,” Hannah’s mom says.
“That makes y’all pretty old, doesn’t it?” Joanie says.
“Feels like you were just born, Hannah.”
“It was one of the two best days of my life.” Her dad smiles.
Baker sits next to her on the back porch steps later that night. “Can I give you your birthday present?” she asks, her voice breathless.
They walk in silence up the stairs to Hannah’s bedroom, hands clasped between them, a growing excitement, a restless energy, palpable between their bodies.
Baker guides Hannah to sit on the bed and closes the door behind them, her chest heaving with breaths.
Then she crosses to the far side of the room and opens the windows.
The room swells with humidity and the scent of flowers and the song of crickets. Baker comes back to the bed and places her palm over Hannah’s heart—Hannah can feel it drumming within her—and eases her down onto her back.
“I couldn’t figure out what to get you,” Baker says, brushing Hannah’s hair back from her face. “What do you get for the person who gave you everything?”
Hannah’s arms begin to shake, but this time she is not afraid.
“And I realized,” Baker says, taking a breath, “that there’s one thing I haven’t truly given you yet, and that’s me. My self. My whole self. Without the fear or the shame. Just with love, and abandon.” Her voice shakes, but her eyes are clear. “Is that okay?”