Chapter 25
The old folding chair creaked beneath Felicity as she sat under the large bur oak.
After a couple of minutes of trying to read, she turned off her book light and slipped an old, faded receipt between the pages.
A train whistled and clacked from the distant railroad line, a sound only audible in the middle of the night, when ambient city noise didn’t drown it out.
Even without the thick branches above her, it would have been too hazy to see the stars.
The night was strangely hot for April, and her window AC unit had decided its working conditions were intolerable, spluttering out a couple of hours into her first sleep cycle.
She had woken up drenched in sweat, with the inside thermometer reading eighty-two degrees.
The necessary cooling shower she’d taken had further awoken her brain and caused a fresh surge of anxiety about the land use meeting date change.
They had planned their biggest event with the most social outreach for the beginning of June, hoping that the St. Clare Circle Summer Festival on the Plaza would create a final boost of buzz needed, making it impossible for the board to side with Bruce.
Without the momentum of that event, had they done enough to save this place?
From her spot beneath the tree, Felicity could see the pergola where she had begun to train climbing vines up and along the beams. She had hoped some would be blooming by the time the festival arrived.
Her gaze went to the heavy wrought-iron bistro tables she and Nic had driven hours to buy from an old restaurant that was closing and to the stone planters she had found online and nearly broke her back hauling out of her car until Nic revealed he had one of those fancy dollies with a hydraulic lift—of course he did.
The planters would be spilling over with native blooms in a matter of weeks.
They had built a platform for outdoor music.
Nic knew a guy who ran an architectural salvage.
In a fit of optimism, they had drawn up an idea for a mini amphitheater-like space on the far side of the courtyard—something that preserved all the natural charms of the green space and stone but created a welcoming atmosphere.
The last few days, Felicity had been stuck on the couch after the stone planter debacle irritated her old injury.
Courtney had found Felicity a new physical therapist who gave Felicity a strict set of instructions on how to handle bad flare-ups.
The shop had been closed, but at least her employees had kept the plant care half of the business running.
This period of physical therapist–mandated rest had given her two days for her mind to marinate in what-ifs in a way it hadn’t since the fall. Old fears trickled in slowly at first, but watching Nic prepare for a private event out her window had flooded all those worn crevices with new worries.
Nic’s job would survive even if the parking structure was built.
Maybe by then the restaurant would be so successful, they would simply expand into the plant shop.
Her aunt’s business would fall under the siege of a small army of ceramic cows.
C’est la Vache would be so successful that the neighborhood would forget that Jeannie Gallagher-Keegan had once filled the old sanctuary with a lush collection of growing things.
And Felicity’s reason for being here would be gone.
If she were a better person, she would be feeling anticipatory sadness about failing—angry at herself for fumbling her aunt’s local legacy. But instead, fear grew in an old hollow space in her gut.
“What the fuck am I going to do?” she said aloud.
When she was a little girl, she had imagined that large, grizzled tree had a face. The cracks in the bark looked like two closed eyes, and the large hole in the trunk could be a mouth. She’d pretended it was a sage crone and asked the old woman for advice about her problems.
Yeah, Felicity was a weird kid.
“About what?” said a man’s voice.
Felicity blinked at the tree.
Did I hallucinate?
It didn’t seem very feminist to be hallucinating a man’s voice for a tree that she always thought looked like a woman.
“Felicity?”
She stood and peeked around to the other side of the tree.
An old man with white hair was perched on the largest of the bent branches, the one that had been stabilized with steel rods as long as Felicity could remember.
If she hadn’t been nursing an aching spine, she would have crawled up there to read tonight.
“Mr. Greene?”
“Been a long time, firecracker.” Mr. Greene, the owner of the space occupied by C’est la Vache, longtime friend of Felicity’s aunt, and the pharmacist who filled Felicity’s strep throat prescriptions when she got sick that first summer she came to stay—that Mr. Greene—had just been casually hanging out in a tree at one in the morning.
He hopped down with a spryness that seemed preternatural for a man who was older than Felicity’s aunt had been.
He wore an olive short-sleeve button-down and linen pants in an earthy brown.
No wonder she hadn’t noticed him. He was basically camouflaged.
He slid his big feet back into a pair of worn leather walking sandals.
“How long have you been up there?”
“Oh, couple hours, I s’pose.”
“Why didn’t you say something when I sat down like ten minutes ago?”
“Didn’t notice you at first.” He plucked earbuds out of his ears. “Podcast on axolotls. Noise cancellation on these things is really nifty.” The modernness of the technology in his hands was at odds with the timelessness of the rest of his appearance.
“You look more like you should be sitting in a tree contemplating the meaning of life or the nature of the universe. That kind of thing.”
“Guess my beard really has gotten long.” He tugged on the white hair hanging down from his chin.
It had grown at least several inches since Aunt Jeannie’s funeral.
“Incidentally, I save my contemplation of the universe for Sundays.” He grinned.
“Too much for a standard”—he checked his watch—“Wednesday. What are you doing out here?”
“My AC died.”
He tugged at his collar. “Too hot for that. How’re you feeling? I came by the shop yesterday, and it was closed. That chef said you were taking a couple days off?”
Felicity nodded. “Old injury. Irritated it doing something dumb.”
“You and Jeannie always were two peas.” He plucked a stray leaf from his hair and flicked it away. “What were you asking the tree about? What the fudge are you going to do about what?”
“Oh … I … I guess you know the meeting about the parking garage got moved up?”
He sighed. “Sure do. Bruce always was the worst sort of pest. My late wife went to high school with him. He’s never changed in sixty years. Never changed his opinion on a thing.”
“God, that’s a shit way to live.”
“Sure is.” Mr. Greene sat down beside her. “You’ve had a lot of changes over the last few years. What’s it like going from being an ER nurse to running a plant business?”
She shrugged. “I love everything about it, except the spreadsheets part. Though Nic and Sam have been helping me with that. Turns out loving plants and working in a shop in the summer doesn’t exactly prepare someone for running a business.”
“I reckon that’s the same lesson my son figured out when he first dipped his toe in the restaurant industry. It was quite a learning curve.”
“Well, he’s killing it now. All that press for the restaurant. You must be proud.”
Mr. Greene’s chest seemed to swell in time with his sparkle-eyed smile.
“Sure am. Mainly, I’m happy my kids seem happy with who they are.
And…” He cleared his throat. “If you don’t mind me saying, I think Jeannie would be real proud of everything you’ve accomplished around here.
She didn’t leave you with an easy task.”
She opened her mouth to make a socially acceptable reply, but nothing came out. Lump in her throat, she fixed her gaze on the sign with the new meeting date taped over the old one.
“Whatever happens with the shop, Jeannie wasn’t trying to trap you here.”
She whipped her head to face him. “Trap me?”
He nodded. “I know when someone leaves you something it might feel like a mandate or a duty—especially if the person it was left to was going through some tough stuff of her own. No matter what happens at that meeting and to the business, I don’t want you to think that Jeannie would—”
“Ugh.” Felicity’s attention snapped away from his lined blue eyes and dropped to the Viking book she had clenched in her hands.
“God, does everyone around here know about what happened to me before I came out here?” Her tone became more bitter than was fair.
“Gosh, have one little year-plus-long depressive episode, and everyone treats you like…”
“Treats you like what?”
“A broken glass that someone tried to glue back together but still leaks and might be a little too sharp around the edges.”
He whistled low and arched a fluffy eyebrow. “Quite the metaphor.”
“Honestly…” Felicity grimaced. “That came out a little more melodramatic than I meant for it to. Jesus, always a little too much. That’s the story of my life.” She tapped the book cover.
Mr. Greene chuckled and looked up at the branch he had recently vacated. “You know how I knew that would hold my weight?”
The non sequitur question had her shaking her head with a furrowed forehead.
“Jeannie was worried that branch would break while you were on it, so she hired an arborist team to come out and add the structural supports before that first summer. Jeannie wasn’t one for heights, so I tested it out every year until you got too grown-up for climbing trees.”
“She did that for me? She didn’t even know until last minute if I was going to come out.
” For all those years, Felicity had never known her aunt fixed the tree up and protected it with fake Champion Tree paperwork, just for her.
She had assumed when she found it that it was because of Bruce’s plans, but it didn’t occur to her until this moment that the timing was off with that assumption.
“She knew you liked reading in trees. She didn’t do it because she wanted to protect you like you were made of glass.
You were a kid, and she knew that kids are resilient.
She did whatever she could to keep a person she loved a little bit safer.
Being protective of a big heart isn’t the same as treating someone like they’re fragile.
” A whisper of chastisement came with the words, as if Mr. Greene knew even more about Felicity’s life than he was letting on.
He and her aunt had been close for a long time.
“And I hope this goes without saying, but Jeannie never thought you were too much. She wanted you to be everything you are all the time.”
“Oh.” The word came out as a feeble breath of air.
After a long, piercing smile, Mr. Greene yawned with a sound so big it echoed across the tree branches. “Well, looks like my jet lag might finally allow me to get some sleep.”
“Ah. Yeah. That’s good.”
“I’ll be around town for the next few months.
Let me know if I can help.” He gave a small nod toward Bruce’s sign.
“But good golly, you kids have made something special here. Can’t believe y’all got all this done in just a few months.
” His eyes shone glossy as he scanned everything Nic and Felicity and their friends had built since the fall.
He rubbed his beard. “She’d be proud.” He patted Felicity’s shoulder once and headed down the path without waiting for a response.
When his footsteps were no longer audible, she opened her book.
Maybe the catastrophizing could wait. Maybe this big unknown openness full of question marks in front of her wasn’t a problem that could be solved with her persistent perseverating.
Maybe, for the next hour, she could simply focus on finding out what happened to the prince and the outlaw so she could lord it over a green-eyed chef in the morning.