CHAPTER TWO — ORANGE PEEL
The moss smelled like a cellar in early spring—cool, dark, patient. Philip breathed it in while he watched Simon Luray look at the crate the way some men looked at a hand of cards.
Not with greed. With accounting.
"You ordered all of this for her," Simon said. He hadn't touched anything yet. His hands stayed at his sides, which Philip found interesting. Most people pawed through a nursery crate within ten seconds.
"Morrow a greenhouse taught you that, everything growing in its own unbothered time, and grief apparently taught it too, though nobody thanked you for saying so.
The rain on the high windows had settled into a steady mutter. The old oak bench ran the length of the room under the north window, and on it, alone in a nest of acid-free tissue, sat Evelyn Brant's blue cup.
Evelyn herself occupied the ladder-back chair by the door, coat folded over her knees, hands stacked on the coat like she was keeping them from wandering. She was seventy-four and held herself like a woman who had spent decades teaching her face to be polite to strangers.
"Take your time, Mr. Luray," she said. "I've waited a year. Another hour won't kill me."
"Simon," he said, without looking up.
"Simon, then."
He reached into the crate.
Philip had braced for the collector's touch—the proprietary pinch, the lifting of a willow withe to the light as if it were a coin. Instead Simon slid two fingers along the cut end of a withy and stopped, frowning.
"These were cut green and kept damp."
"They were."
"For nine days."
Philip raised an eyebrow. "Ten. Cut them the Tuesday before last. First frost won't be far off."
"They're still live under the bark." Simon set the withy down with a care that had nothing reverent in it—it was the care of a man setting down a scalpel.
"Willow stays viable a long time. You can stick a cutting in the ground in November and it'll strike in spring.
" He looked at the cup. Then at the crate.
Then at the cup again, and something behind his face rearranged itself.
"She wasn't using these as materials, was she.
She was using them as material that was still deciding what to be. "
"I genuinely don't know," Philip said. "She'd order, I'd deliver, she'd pay me in exact change and tell me my pears were crooked."
"Were they?"
"My pears are magnificent."
Simon's mouth moved. It wasn't a smile, but it was the neighborhood of one, and Philip filed that away as a point in his favor.
"What was wrong with the adhesive?" Simon said. It came out neutral, a professional question, but Philip heard the edge underneath it—the sound of a man who had been stopped mid-procedure and wanted, on some level, to be told the stop had been reasonable.
"Nothing, probably. It's what I'd have assumed anyone competent would reach for.
" Philip pulled a stool over and sat, unhurried, making it plain he intended to stay.
"But Ada ordered living stock twice a year for thirty years.
Thirty years of a woman buying willow withies and flax straw is a pattern.
And patterns deserve the benefit of the doubt, in my experience.
It costs you an afternoon to respect one. It can cost more to ignore it."
"She was your customer."
"She was a difficult friend. There's a difference, and it mostly runs in her favor." Philip tipped his head at the crate. "I'm not claiming to understand her reasoning. I grow the plants. What people do with them after they leave my nursery is a long, private country I don't visit."
Simon looked at him for a moment—actually looked, a flat, weighing look, the kind that took inventory of a person the way he'd inventoried the crate.
Philip let himself be inventoried. He had nothing to hide and a greenhouse's worth of practice at being appraised by people who thought horticulture meant petunias.
"Okay," Simon said.
He worked.
Philip had watched a lot of hands in his life.
Pickers' hands, grafters' hands, the frantic hands of customers at the spring sale pulling labels out of pots and putting them back wrong.
Simon's hands were something else entirely.
They moved like they were listening. He pared the willow with a knife that appeared from a canvas roll so worn it had gone soft at the folds, and each stroke of the blade was short, angled, unhurried.
He split the withe lengthwise and soaked the halves in a dish of water he asked Evelyn to fetch from the little sink in the back, and Evelyn went, glad, Philip suspected, to be useful for three minutes instead of waiting.
"She used to come to the market," Evelyn said from the sink, over the sound of water. "Ada. Every second Saturday. Bought nothing. Looked at everything."
"I know," Philip said. "I sold her nothing twice a month."
The cup came apart under Simon's hands along the crack—Philip heard it, a small dry sound like a knuckle—and Simon laid the two pieces in the tissue with their fracture faces up.
The break was old and had been clean, a hairline that had finally gone.
He brushed the faces with a soft brush, then painted them—not with adhesive, Philip noticed, but with a thin slurry he made by chewing the end of a soaked willow strip and spitting the fibers into warm water, mashing them against the dish with the flat of his knife until the liquid went faintly cloudy and ropey.
"That's willow water," Philip said. "That's—I mean, I know what that is. My grandmother would have known what that is."
"Willow's full of salicin," Simon said absently.
"And the mucilage in the bark swells in warm water.
It's a binder. It's been a binder for about as long as there have been people sticking things to other things.
" He lifted one of the pared halves to the light, checking the grain ran true, and set it down again.
"It's also weak. Any conservator in the country would tell you it's wrong for a load-bearing repair on stoneware.
It will creep. It will fatigue. In fifty years this joint may need doing again. "
"And?"
Simon looked up at him across the bench.
The north window's gray light fell on his face and made him look tired, or maybe just concentrated; with a stranger it was hard to tell the difference, and Philip caught himself wanting to learn the difference and put the wanting down carefully, the way you'd set a seedling tray on an edge.
"And she ordered it twice a year for thirty years," Simon said.
He laid the willow splints across the fracture faces, tiny bridges of pale wood, and pressed them home with a bone spatula.
The slurry wicked into the joint. He fitted the two halves of the cup together and held them, thumbs braced at heel and rim, holding pressure with the patience of a man who had held pressure on things before and knew exactly how long a minute was.
The room got quiet enough that Philip could hear the moss in the crate breathing, which was a figure of speech he kept to himself, though any grower would have understood it: damp medium in a cool room does have a presence, a green slow weight in the air.
"What's she thinking about?" Evelyn asked, low, back in her chair. She meant the cup. Her folded hands had tightened on her coat.
"Her wife," Simon said, equally low, "is in the cup somewhere. Not a ghost. Just—use. Breakfast tea. Orange peel. Years of it. I could feel it when I picked the cup up."
Philip watched Evelyn's face do something complicated and generous. "Ada said something like that to me once," she said. "I thought it was her being eccentric."
"She was being accurate."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive, dear."
Simon's mouth did the not-quite-smile again. Then he took a slow breath, still holding the join, and Philip saw the change come over him.
It started small. Simon's jaw shifted, the way a person's does when a strong taste arrives unannounced.
His throat moved. The pressure of his thumbs deepened—Philip could see the tendons stand up along the backs of his hands—and his breathing went shallow and evenly measured, deliberately measured, a man walking a plank over something.
"You're getting it now," Philip said quietly. Not a question.
Simon didn't answer for a moment. His eyes had gone slightly unfocused, fixed on the middle distance about a hand's width above the cup.