Epilogue Orange Blossoms
Four times Lark reached for something that was not there, and only on the fourth occasion did he realize something was amiss. His pencil was on the ground, rather than in its usual place at his left hand. His level was on the worktable across the room, while his eraser was gone entirely.
When he couldn’t find his pad of draft paper, he pushed his chair from the desk and looked out the workshop’s open door to the yard. The blanket in the grass was more or less as he’d left it, a gnawed carrot and a stack of blocks strewn across it.
His missing pad was there, however, his daughter was not.
Lark went to the door and peered into the depths of Chamomile’s perpetually overgrown garden, which had been known to swallow small people who wandered into it. Nothing appeared to be rustling within, though he knew from experience this didn’t necessarily mean anything.
“Iris?” he called, now searching the side yard with his eyes. “Come out, daisy!”
A giggle came from behind him, somewhere in the shop. He spun around, handily blocking her exit.
“You’d better not be in the sawdust again,” he said warningly.
“I’m not!” came the muffled answer. “It’s too itchy.”
Several wood curls rolled from under the centermost worktable. Lark knelt to look beneath it.
Iris grinned up at him, red-handed and entirely remorseless. Her curly hair was, impossibly, even more tangled that it had been that morning, when Lark had given up on doing anything with it, and she had most definitely been in the garden without his realizing. Her dress (getting too short for her, his little weed) was smeared with soil.
She knew better than to go into the garden unsupervised, but in that moment Lark was mostly just happy she’d successfully extracted herself once more, and in light of that he simply asked, “Did you take your father’s pencils?”
“Maybe,” she sang, as she scrubbed at a doodle of a bunny on the floorboards with his eraser. The bunny was new, if not the flowers, humanoid figures, and suns all around it.
“I need one back,” he told her reasonably. “You can keep the rest. For now,” he added, because every discussion with his daughter was a negotiation, and her memory was superb.
She’d been sitting on them, evidently, for she reached beneath her and brought out four pencils, one of which he hadn’t seen in at least a month, and offered him the handful.
He pointed to the blue one. “May I have this one?”
“No, I like that one.” She extended another. “Take this one.”
“Thank you, dear,” he said gravely, taking it. “I will need the eraser in a moment.”
She nodded, humming as she went back to her drawing.
Lark returned to his work, keeping an ear out for small footsteps, and went uninterrupted for a while longer until squeals sounded from the garden.
“Iris?” he said, lurching up.
“Papa?” said his daughter, from beneath the worktable.
He rose to put eyes on her all the same, and frowned as she blinked curiously back at him. “But if you’re there...”
Lark looked to the yard. The bottom half of the kitchen door was open when it had not been before. Chamomile was meant to be in town, picking up ingredients for the next recipe they’d chosen to tackle (pot roast with potatoes and thyme), but it could only mean one thing…
“Daisy, did your mother return?” he asked.
“I dunno,” she said, at the same time another plaintive cry came from the garden.
“Mama! Papa!”
Lark scrambled to his feet and came up short at the edge of dense foliage. “Aster! Where are you?”
“Hot!” Aster wailed, which meant he’d trampled into the pepper patch again.
Lark became aware of Iris clinging to his pants, and put a hand on her shoulder.
“Aster!” she said fiercely. “You know peppers are bad!”
“Shush, daisy, don’t scare him more. Stay there.” Lark put one leg between tomato plants as he planned his route to the peppers in the back corner.
“Papa, one popped!”
“Don’t put your fingers in your mouth!” Iris cautioned, with questionable relish.
“What on earth is all this noise?” came Chamomile’s voice from the direction of the house.
Lark, who was of equal height to the garden at best, waved a hand over his head to communicate his position.
“Aster’s stuck in the peppers again,” Iris informed him.
“Oh dear,” said Chamomile. “Iris, I wish you wouldn’t smile so.”
It was then that Lark spied his son across the melon patch, legs caught in a vine and sitting between two pepper plants. Bright red fruits hung on either side of his head, as good as gleaming little beacons of death as far as poor Aster was concerned. Aster, who had crushed half a dozen in his hands when he was two and then, most unfortunately, attempted to suck on his fingers, as was his habit. Aster, who had then cried so loudly that the neighbors had come to investigate.
“Papa!” Aster squeaked, spotting him.
“Keep your hands away from your face,” Lark told him. “Don’t move, I’m coming.”
“Try not to get stuck too, Lark,” Chamomile called with a poorly muffled laugh. “Again.”
He did, in the sweet potato vines, but only briefly.
Chamomile washed Aster’s arms and face in the kitchen sink as Lark held a squirming Iris in his lap. Seated on the counter, his son’s blond head poked over Chamomile’s shoulder, as curly and wild as his twin’s.
Not for the first time Lark wondered at Aster’s wheat gold shade. It confounded them both that he should be so brightly colored when Iris’s hair, black at birth, had lightened to a red just a bit darker than Lark’s, and Chamomile’s brown hair was so dark as to be essentially black. Aster’s brown eyes, though, were very much his mother’s, and Chamomile was adamant that both twins had Lark’s nose and mouth. Lark looked at their children and only saw Chamomile, and that pleased him just fine.
“I cannot think why you would go anywhere near them after the last time,” Chamomile was chiding their son.
“I wanted blueberries,” was the petulant reply.
“My daisy, we have perfectly good blueberries in the house.”
“Iris says the ones in the garden are better.”
Lark looked down to his daughter, who met his gaze with wide, guileless eyes.
“Must you torture your brother so?” he asked her. She only grinned at him disarmingly.
He sighed. It really was unlucky she was such a charming child; she’d wriggled out of many a scolding with that very smile. One could only hope some of sweet Aster’s good nature would rub off on her.
Chamomile scrubbed Aster up to his elbows before letting him down and handing him a towel to dry himself. Lark waited until it was returned before allowing Iris to wiggle free, to give him a head start. The pair of them dashed from the room like a pair of scrambling puppies.
“You were back later than expected,” Lark said in the children’s wake, sitting back. "How did your visit go?”
Chamomile cast eyes at him over his shoulder, wiping the counter down with Aster’s abandoned towel. He nodded to the paper-wrapped parcel on the table near Lark’s hand.
“I picked that up from Isagail Littlebird on the way back,” he said, by way of answer.
Lark raised his eyebrows and pulled it to him, unknotting the twine. Inside was an embroidery hoop, the bright threads depicting a family tree framed by braided daisies. A chamomile blossom and minuscule lark, marked by its black and yellow throat, were connected by little tendrils of ivy to first an iris, then an aster bloom, then to a…
He touched the threads with a light finger. Many thoughts and several questions sprung up at once, but all Lark said was, “What is this last one?” though he saw quite well what it was.
Chamomile, his life and love, his motivation, wore a self-satisfied smirk. His arms were crossed and his hands pinned to his sides. Or else, Lark expected, they would lay themselves over his stomach.
“You tell me,” Chamomile said, teasing.
“Well, I see gloxinia,” Lark drawled, as he rose and drifted across the dividing space. “Ivy. A tiny iris, and an aster…”
He came forward until they touched, and then came more, until Chamomile was pressed back into the counter, pinned by Lark’s hips against his. His belly was plush and yielding as ever, but it would grow out again.
He caught Chamomile’s chin in one hand. “Could it be a wee robin?” he said, sotto voce.
Chamomile shivered, nuzzling their noses. “You guess correctly.”
Lark set the hoop aside carefully, his hands full of cuddling husband. “I notice there’s quite a bit of space left over,” he murmured, stretching his neck for Chamomile’s peppered kisses.
“I asked Isagail to do that,” Chamomile mumbled against his throat. He leaned away to narrow his eyes up at Lark, sly-faced as a fox. “I told her I might need it for the future.”
“Did you?” Lark laughed.
“It’s a big house,” he reasoned.
Lark could only say, “So it is,” as Chamomile got an arm around his neck and pulled him level.
Small, loud voices sounded in argument further in the house. Lark took the chance while he could to press Chamomile into the counter, tilting him back with the force of his kiss and goosing him for good measure. “Luckily,” he added, and Chamomile, a little starry-eyed, laughed.
“Shall we?” Chamomile said, offering a hand.
Lark accepted it into his own, and took up the embroidery hoop once more in his other. He admired the neat stitches of the iris, the bright color of the aster, the little robin and its promise. The gloxinia that crowned the top of the daisy braid was the same shade as the one in Chamomile’s bouquet—this he knew well, for he saw that very flower every day. The bouquet in its entirety had been pressed by Chamomile, and mounted by Lark in a frame etched in the fashion of Chamomile’s wedding cuff. It had hung over their bed in private display for four idyllic years.
Chamomile laid his head on Lark’s shoulder, and Lark squeezed his hand. He was so full, so happy, that he had no words to answer. He only nodded.