Chapter 2 bricoleur
bricoleur
Ten Years Later
Harriett would’ve loved the goose.
At first, I thought maybe she was the goose, but Harriett Fisher would never stoop so low as to chase an old woman out of a garden. No, she’d be the goose dog currently sitting at my heels, effortlessly useless.
“Damn it,” I sighed, grabbing my sun hat from my chair on the veranda, and hurried down the steps into the Central Garden.
Said goose dog, a border collie named Reggie, was right behind me.
“Leave her alone, Damnit!” I said as the Canada goose snapped at the heels of the poor older woman currently fighting a losing battle.
She was one of the few local artists who regularly came to Lilymoor to paint, and the goose hated the saffron color of her sweater.
Which, in this heat? That was maniacal. Even though I didn’t agree with the goose, I understood her rage.
Summers in Maine were supposed to be beautiful and mild, but for some reason today the air wasn’t moving. There was probably a storm brewing off the coast, gathering power, and the breeze would be back with a vengeance soon.
Damnit bit at me as I came to the woman’s rescue.
“Don’t you dare,” I scolded, and flapped my sun hat at her. “Go! Go! Or I’ll turn you into a feather duster!”
With one final hiss, Damnit shook her tail feathers and stalked away.
“Bless. Thank you, dear.” The older woman patted her chest above her heart, shaking her head. “That is Satan’s creature.”
“She’s just built that way,” I replied, picking up the drawing pad and pencil she’d dropped on the ground when the goose got after her. “Are you okay?”
“I am now,” she replied, taking back her art supplies. “Thank you, Miss . . .”
“Drear,” I introduced myself. “Sophie Drear.”
Recognition lit her face. “Oh! You must be a new volunteer.”
My smile thinned. “Head gardener, actually. Just came onto the team about a month ago.”
“And they have you wrangling geese?”
At that, I laughed. “Oh no. I do that for myself. At least it’s just the one goose.”
The woman shook her head, though more in admonishment than anything else. “It’s always just that one goose. I don’t see why Eula keeps her around. How is Eula?” she added. “Ever since her accident, we’ve missed her at our weekly bridge games.”
“She’s doing well,” I replied, though it was more a guess than anything else. I’d started after Eula Beck, the owner of Lilymoor, fell and fractured her hip. She’d been in outpatient rehab, and would be for almost the full duration of my stay. “Can I help you with anything?”
The older woman dusted off her sketchbook. “Oh no, no. I’m just here to wander and let my pencil talk. It helps clear the mind. I can’t wait for the Hedges to open—it’ll be soon, yes?”
“In the next week, probably,” I replied.
“Oh good! I missed them,” she said, and shuffled along toward the Rose Court. “It was nice to meet you, Sophie Dear.”
It was Drear, but I didn’t correct her and instead turned to glare down at the dog. “You’re terrible at your job, Reginald,” I told him. “She’s right, you know, I have a garden to tend to, not a goose to manage.”
Reggie, without a single brain cell knocking around in that head of his, licked my knee.
Apparently at first, everyone at the manor thought there was something wrong with the goose, but it turned out that she simply refused to migrate and made it everyone else’s problem.
So Eula Beck bought a goose dog to chase her off, but Reggie couldn’t even chase a fly.
Which meant that duty fell on everyone else. And we were all failing miserably.
From the pergola behind me, someone said, “You know he’s trying his best, Sunny.”
I recognized the voice: Wykofski.
I spun, pinning the same glare on him. “And where were you?”
“Here the whole time,” he replied happily. Wykofski was leaning against the pergola in the shade, snacking on a handful of sunflower seeds, and I went over to join him.
Without the wind coming up off the cliffs, it was at least cooler in the shade.
I didn’t know how Wykofski managed in this sort of heat in overalls and a plaid shirt, but it was the same uniform I’d seen him in every day so far, a green cap pushed back on his head with the words World’s Greatest Goose dad on the front.
He was a tall, heavyset white man with an oak-brown mullet and a formidable mustache, in his late thirties.
If I was the head gardener, then he was the head everything-elser.
You name it—landscaping, maintenance, apparently he even played a pretty mean banjo.
He could fix anything, and if he couldn’t fix it he knew someone who could.
He was also the one behind the landscape topiary installations around the estate—the dancing swans in the Rose Court and the Adonis replica in the Lily Walk and the wild horses that galloped through the Wildflower Garden.
He even kept up most of the installations in the Central Garden, and that was the trickiest place with its gently sloping hills.
One, because it was the biggest garden, and there were so many old trees and tall shrubs, separating out each flower bed by type, it was an art to make it not look crowded.
And two, because it was so easy to miss something in the Central Garden, especially when confronted with the ancient marred oak in the middle.
I’d passed it a hundred times by now, and still I felt in awe of its will to live despite disease and lightning strikes and wind storms. He was the one who decorated the oak for holidays, too.
And on top of being a great topiary artist, just yesterday he soldered my broken shovel back together.
At this point, I was more shocked at what he couldn’t do.
He was . . . what was the word Harrie always used? A bricoleur? A handyman who uses whatever he has around him—a MacGyver.
Oh, and he gave everyone nicknames. Sunny was one he’d decided to ordain me with, because apparently Sophie wasn’t colorful enough. I didn’t hate the nickname, but it also meant that everyone else at Lilymoor had begun to call me that, too.
I guessed it was better than Dreary, the nickname I had throughout most of college.
“Besides,” he went on, popping another sunflower seed into his mouth, “I don’t think anyone can manage Damnit.”
“Then why doesn’t she ever chase you?”
He shrugged. “Couldn’t guess the wiles of a goose if I tried. Anyway, I left your shovel, shears, and wheelbarrow over by the Hedges for you. You sure you don’t need help?”
“Nah, it’s sort of a one-person job until I can figure out where the vines are coming from,” I replied.
The Hedges were slowly suffocating from a strange vine that had started growing through them.
I had ruled out kudzu because that hadn’t made it this far north yet, and it didn’t look like kudzu, but I was having a hard time figuring out what it was.
I was sure I would instantly once it bloomed.
“I bet they’re coming from the pond behind it.”
I shook my head. “I checked. Besides, we’d be able to see them from the shed.”
“Huh.” He shrugged, scratching the bottom of his chin. “Well, that’s just Lilymoor for you, then.”
Everyone kept saying that. I didn’t really get what they meant until I’d worked here a few weeks.
Oh, there’s an unexplainable sound in the attic?
“That’s just Lilymoor for you.” There’s a daisy growing in the middle of the parking lot?
“That’s just Lilymoor for you.” Mysterious vines?
Shovels that disappear in one garden bed and reappear in another? Flowers blooming in odd seasons?
That’s just Lilymoor.
“Oh, hey, before I forget,” Wykofski went on, turning to me, “me and the dudes are gonna game it out a little tonight—eat some snackaroonies, pop some Bud Lights—if you wanna join?” It was the same invite he had given me every Thursday since I came to Lilymoor, and while I never said yes, I learned “the dudes” were just Yafir, Lilymoor’s accountant, and a few of the volunteers.
Sometimes even Juliette, the Events Coordinator, showed up. The game was usually Scrabble.
And every Thursday I said, “No, thank you,” and wondered when he’d stop asking. A month in, and I was beginning to fear he never would. I added, “Let me know if you need help with the sprinklers?”
“I think that’s Tomorrow Wykofski’s job,” he replied with a wink, popped another sunflower seed into his mouth, and pushed off from the pergola to return to the shed.
Lucky him.
Unlike Wykofski, who protected his sanity with strict working hours, I hated leaving things half done, and I had too much to do and not enough time to do it in, so I often worked right up until dusk.
That was nothing new. Even at the Botanical Garden in New York, my supervisor left the lights on for me most evenings when he left.
I liked work. If I kept my hands busy, my brain stayed quiet.
That was more important than ever here at Lilymoor.
I was on loan for the summer from NYBG to help “revitalize” the gardens for Lilymoor’s two hundredth anniversary in August. Then I’d be shipped back to the city before the leaves even changed.
A perfect summer break, theoretically. Jeff, my supervisor at the Botanical Garden, said that he’d apply if he didn’t have two young kids running around.
A summer vacation in Maine? Sounded too good to be true.
Turned out, it was.
In the ten years since I’d been to Lilymoor, it’d fallen into the kind of disrepair that showed it was still clearly loved but not well tended.
Eula Beck had done her best with volunteers and Wykofski, but as the years went on, she closed off more and more of the garden as it grew too unruly, and now it was almost impossible to manage without some aggressive TLC.
The deterioration wasn’t all Eula’s fault, though.
Lilymoor was just an aging estate with aging plants, and a garden that even I had trouble understanding.
It would be easier if I had access to old records and blueprints of the garden itself, but those records had gone up in literal flames about sixteen years ago when the greenhouse burned to the ground.
It had been very soon after Henry Beck had died, and he’d been the last person to understand the garden, apparently.
Most everything at Lilymoor was particular.
The delphiniums needed shade, and the sunflowers needed too much water, and the climbing roses needed to be guided on where to grow over the arches they were planted for.
There was an infestation of mites in the dogwood trees, and an entire section of the gardens was full of abandoned willow trees that had been off-limits for years.
The estate’s decline had been steady and slow, like a portrait fading in the sunlight.
It was more work than Eula had let on, and more work than my department head had guessed, but I was here, and I didn’t like jobs half done.
Over in the eastern part of the gardens stood the hedge maze with pristine boxwoods at least eight feet high. Thankfully I didn’t have to upkeep those; that was Wykofski’s job. While Lilymoor was rather large, it worked with a very small staff and some volunteers.
I didn’t want to waste any volunteers’ time crawling around, squeezing between shrubs, trying to find vine roots, so I went about it on my own.
Technically, I was a degree-carrying hor-ticulturist, and most of us didn’t like to be called gardeners.
But I liked the whimsy to the word. Besides, a gardener flowed off the tongue a lot easier than a horticulturist.
I kept losing track of the vines in the dense boxwoods, and then when I thought I’d found them again, turned out it was another vine from elsewhere.
After a few tries, I threw my hands up in defeat, tore off my gloves, and went to sit in the shade with an aggravated sigh.
There, I took a deep breath.
“Every vine has a root,” I reminded myself. There was no sense in getting frustrated. And if I was being truthful, it wasn’t really the vines at all.
Today, ten years ago, Harrie and I had visited Lilymoor.
Silly, I chastised myself and closed my eyes. You knew today would be hard. No need to make it harder.
Finally, a breeze swept up the cliffs and through the box-woods.
It felt good and cool, bringing with it the smell of brine, and the telltale scent of a storm off the coast. I closed my eyes in relief.
At least the wind had returned. I just had to wait out the heat, and I had.
The bugs hummed around me, as if just as relieved.
Evening sunlight shifted in between the hedges, yellow melting into soft orange. It must have been golden hour already, and Lilymoor—or at least the gardens open to the public—closed at sundown.
There was still so much to do to get ready for the bicentennial in a month and a half. Entire gardens to open back up. Weeds to pull and roses to deadhead and trumpet vines to manage and I was still thinking of introducing ladybugs to take care of the aphid problem in the Wildflower Garden—
There was a soft creak, like a door opening.
My eyes snapped open and followed the sound.
Across the path, bathed in the golden light from the setting sun, a door stood against a wall of thick boxwood hedges. It was faded blue, its hinges rusted, looking old and tired. Another gust of summer wind pushed it open a little more.
Had there been a door there before?
Putting my sun hat on again, I propped my shovel up by the bench and went over to it, more puzzled than anything else. I’d walked this estate inch by inch. Cataloged it as I’d gone through the work to be done. How could I have missed this?
I glanced inside, my confusion mounting. Barren flower beds and snarling vines and half-finished paths. I didn’t remember there being a garden off from the Hedges, but maybe Eula had constructed it in the last ten years, and just forgot to tell me?
Curious, I pulled the door open the rest of the way and stepped inside.