Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Maya
I spent Sunday at the nature reserve. It was my favorite place on Eastshore, and now that the weather was so nice, it seemed like everyone else was out here too. I saw a lot of friends and neighbors, which was nice, but…
Don’t get me wrong, I love my neighbors. But for me, nature is about solitude, and that’s difficult when every time you turn around there’s someone’s dog sniffing at me, or a dad running after a screaming toddler.
I spent an hour sitting by the creek on the Gary property. Man, I was going to miss this place when it sold. I figured now that Old Man Gary was gone, his kids wouldn’t waste time in splitting it up. I just prayed it wouldn’t end up as high-rises.
The sun was sinking by the time the tide turned, and the water began to trickle back through the pluff mud. I watched the ripples of water that indicated the bait fish were heading back up into the marshes and smiled softly.
Circle of life, and all that.
With a sigh, I brushed off my pants and headed back to get ready for a week of work.
With Memnon.
Monday morning, I was up bright and early. Staring at myself in the bathroom mirror as I brushed my teeth, I tried to figure out why. I was excited to start work on my first landscaping job, yeah, but it was more than that. I’d worn another too-tight t-shirt from the shop—this one a bright yellow that Tati always said made me glow—and I’d spent some time making sure my braid was straight.
I was never going to pass for fashionable , not like Ro…but I figured I looked alright.
Humming, I got to work on her flower arrangement. Today was simple, but cheery, daisies and alstroemeria. When one of the stems bent, I snipped off each bloom and wove them into my braid without thinking.
“Well, look at you!” Ro cried as she bustled through the door right at opening. “You’re glowing.” She scooped up her arrangement and dropped cash on the counter. “And I love this. I love you .” She was always a bubble of energy on Monday mornings. “I want to hear all about your weekend and why you’re so smiley, but right now, I have to get prepped for a multiplication test. Love you, bye!”
When she whirled out of the shop, I gave a little laugh and collapsed against the counter…only to perk up again when Memnon limped in the door behind her.
“I came in the front,” he announced. “Not sure where you wanted me. When do we start?”
We hadn’t discussed that detail, or really any of the details of his job beyond the actual landscaping, and now I screwed my face into an apologetic grimace.
“We can’t leave until Sandra gets here to hold down the store. But I just realized we forgot to have you fill out your new hire paperwork.”
His dark eyes widened slightly, and he exhaled on a sound that might have been a huff of laughter from anyone else. With an abrupt nod, he turned right around. “I’ll be back.”
And he was. He returned with the paperwork, sat behind the counter, and filled it out between interacting with customers. You’ll notice I said interacting , not greeting or being polite . The dude needed to work on his people skills, is my point.
But I watched and listened as I bustled around the store, prepping it for Sandra, and I noticed that despite his abruptness, he wasn’t completely clueless when it came to gardening. He might not know much about the tools and chemicals and whatnot, but he was spot-on when it came to plants.
Not for the first time, I wondered what his life had been like, in the mountains, before he’d come to our world.
Once Sandra arrived and was settled in with her knitting behind the counter, I loaded Memnon and our gear into my little pickup—I managed not to giggle at the sight of him hunched in the passenger seat, but it was close—and headed for the reserve.
We shouldered our shovels and rakes and strolled along the boardwalk, pointing out areas that needed improvement. I’d put in orders for the muhly grass and saltmarsh morning glory yesterday, and would pick it up from the supplier later this week. For now, we could prep the area.
Once I explained what needed to be done, Memnon got right to work. Today was basically demolition, and tomorrow I’d bring in the loads of soil I’d arranged for. We’d pack it down tight around the walkway, anchor down some weed cloth, then add in the plants to hold everything in place and keep down erosion.
I dunno why some people put in pine needles or mulch when there’s so much stronger ground cover, like the morning glory or honeysuckle or even ivy.
Anyhow, in the time it took me to demo a hundred feet, he’d done most of the rest of the boardwalk. Here I was, dripping sweat and achy all over, and this male was working like a machine.
Like his leg didn’t hurt at all.
But when I finally straightened, resting on my shovel, I saw him limping back toward me. I wondered if he was as tired as I was. “Ready for a break?” I asked.
He glanced around. “A break? And then back at it?”
“Nah.” Grinning, I opened up the cooler to pull out a water for him. “We finished this much faster than I could have hoped on my own. We can quit for the day.”
Instead of drinking, he twisted toward the reserve, his gaze on the marsh that stretched into the distance. He seemed to be studying it. Finally he said, “If that’s what you want.”
Did I want to head back to the shop and get changed into something clean? I mean, yeah…but I didn’t want to lose this either. This camaraderie.
Inspiration struck.
“Before we head back, would you like to see something special?”
He blinked, met my gaze, and merely said, “Yes.”
So we loaded up the equipment, posted a sign with my shop’s logo on it and a handwritten “Landscaping division” beneath it, and each grabbed another water.
And I took him along the deer track that led through the Gary property.
When I took this track, I used to pretend I was one of my ancestors, ghosting through the forest on the trail of some elusive prey. I did my best not to make noise and remember Tati’s training, but it had been many years since the summers I’d spent learning the old ways from him.
It took me a bit to realize that Memnon wasn’t making any noise. I paused to grin over my shoulder at him—in his work boots and hair tied up in a bandana—and figured this was part of the knowledge he’d brought with him from his world.
The deer track led us to my favorite spot on the property: a little bluff—no more than seven feet high—that overlooked the creek. At high tide, the water almost lapped at the grasses, but now the water was on its way out and the mud was covered in periwinkle snails and fiddler crabs.
“Wow,” Memnon murmured, and I grinned, loving that he was amazed by the view.
“Here.” There was a fallen oak tree I liked to sit against, and he settled next to me. We watched the water flowing out of the marsh across the creek into the dwindling stream in the middle, heading toward the distant ocean. It was cool in the shade, the air scented with pluff mud and salt water.
I exhaled, feeling the tension leaching from my shoulders, as I waited for him to speak.
He didn’t.
After about five minutes, I glanced over at him. He was sitting with his injured leg stretched out in front of him, his left leg drawn up, and his forearm resting on his knee. He was watching the marsh contemplatively.
As if he could sense my gaze, he turned to me, and I felt my breath catch. There was something in his dark eyes, something intense . A little spark of green I’d never noticed before.
“This place is special,” he said in a tone not much louder than a whisper.
I nodded. “It reminds me of…”
“Home.”
I hadn’t expected that. “This place reminds you of the Rocky Mountains?” I couldn’t think of any place less like the Rocky Mountains.
His lips twitched, and he turned back to the view. “A bit, yeah. Not the landscape. But the feeling. Peace. After the last decade, I’m not the type to believe in the gods…but sitting here, I could imagine them living someplace like this.”
“That’s how I feel too.” I shifted and ended up pressed against his side. Neither of us moved. “I grew up in Wilmington, but my parents were members of the Lumbee and Catawba Nations. American Indian tribes,” I clarified, knowing he’d never taken the obligatory state history course in elementary school. “ Tati —my grandfather—still lived up near Pembroke, where our people had lived for generations. I used to spend my summers there with him.”
Memnon hummed, then he shifted. And when he was done, his arm was stretched out along the fallen tree, at my back. I told myself the move was only because he was more comfortable like this and had nothing to do with me…but the back of his thumb was tickling my shoulder.
“And what did you learn from your tati ?”
I smiled, hearing his pronunciation. The Lumbee people no longer had a distinct language, although there was a lot of effort to reconstruct some of the extinct languages. So Tati had proudly taken the Catawba term when he’d become a grandfather, and my cousins and I always called him that.
“I learned…” Sighing, I pressed my shoulders back against the oak. “Everything. I learned how to appreciate stillness and patience, and when I needed to act. I learned how to go after my dreams, and how to dig deep roots, and how to nurture what I wanted to thrive, and cull what I didn’t.”
“Can’t tell if this is a metaphor or if you’re talking about a garden.”
“Both,” I laughed. “That’s what makes nature—gardening—landscaping—whatever so important. Thanks to Tati and what I learned on his farm, I went to school for botany, but switched to landscape architecture, because I wanted to be able to share what I loved with others.”
“And it’s working.”
“Yeah,” I whispered. “It’s finally happening, thanks to you.”
He didn’t respond, but his arm, the one behind me? It wrapped around my shoulders so his hand dangled near my arm, and I felt… safe .
“Look,” he rumbled quietly, and nodded upstream where a heron was carefully picking its way through the small stream of water, its long beak darting down to snatch up the little finger mullet.
I smiled and dropped my head against his arm, content.
Finally.
This land would soon be gone, sold to some high bidder to strip into something useful. The heron would have to move into the nature reserve next door, and the blue crabs would have to find other marsh to inhabit.
Soon, this landscaping job would be done, and I would pay Memnon, and he’d go back to his reclusive lifestyle as I tackled bigger jobs on my way to my dream.
But here and now, they had a home, and I had a companion who understood the glory of this place, and all was at peace.
Here and now.
Just like me.