Chapter 14
Joss
Every spring, I plant early-blooming annuals along the walkway to the barn, and in the fall, I replace them with mums. In December, I uproot them and move them back behind my barn. The field attracts bees from the apiary a few blocks away and showcases a whole array of colors and varieties, whatever I can get from the local nurseries and hardware stores. Many have been gifted to me from patrons who love my mum field as much as I do.
This year, I left the relative safety of Camden to visit Wilmington shops and even took a day trip out to Wren in Salem to hit up the nurseries there for mums in Juggernauts ruby and saffron. Not just to show my support for Gabe, either. Foolishly, I thought this was an opportunity to show Wilmington I still love it.
But Wilmington does not love me. I was plagued by vandals the first few years after Brian’s self-deletion, and they’ve returned with my return to Wilmington.
The lush gold mum in my hand is an easy fix. It lays next to the hole I carved into the earth a week ago for it, and all it takes is righting it, packing soil around it, and patting dirt off its petals. But the nearly-ruby neighbor isn’t so lucky, split in half, its flowers stomped on, so I pass it off to Rose.
She sets it in the wheelbarrow that’s getting stacked high with destroyed mums while Iris hands me a fresh pumpkin-colored one to replace it with. I pinch my lips tightly closed and chastise myself for threatening to shed a tear over a wrong-colored mum.
“My son was telling me about these nets they’ve been putting over their winter squashes to keep the deer off them,” Iris says. “I could ask him to throw some over the flowers? Maybe he could rig something that you could put over them at night.”
I look up from where I’m scooping out the hole to make room for the bigger mum and offer her a helpless chuckle. When I first started my quilting streams out of the barn, it wasn’t anything but a way to pass the time and make friends with people outside of Wilmington. Instead of Jocelyn Page, Miss Alabama, or Jocelyn Edgars, wife of the devil himself, I could be Joss Page, just some girl. I made funny, trendy patterns, made enough money selling them online that I wouldn’t starve to death. That would have been my future if Rose hadn’t recognized me and emailed me to ask if, since we were in the same town, I’d be willing to teach her best friend to quilt.
Cora talked me into monetizing my tutorials, but Iris and Rose are the reason I was brave enough to open a shop and offer my space for classes. And they’ve been dodging church for the last five years by claiming they’re busy doing charity work, but really? They have the keys to the barn and show up with the sun to quilt. This was the first Sunday in a long time they had to wake me with the unfortunate news I’d been vandalized.
“I think the culprits are smarter than deer,” I tell Iris.
Rose runs her eyes down the row. Sixty mums ripped out of the earth. Some tossed to the side but others torn apart. There’s one thrown far enough away that the cheeky, self-effacing side of me wants to give Blaise one of the casualties to see if he could throw it that far.
“Doesn’t look that way to me,” Rose says with a huff.
I want to say something to calm the situation, a reminder that we’ve been through this enough times and always survived or that it’s never gotten worse than this or kids are going to be kids, but I don’t have it in me this morning. It’s a cool October morning, but I’m sweating my butt off. I was actually looking forward to going to today’s game after the last two were away.
I didn’t even have the heart to tell Gabe I’m bailing on the game. I texted Blaise instead, with the thought that I didn’t want to upset Gabe before the game but didn’t want to worry him if he notices I’m not with the other wives and girlfriends. They’re having a bonfire at the Jug House tonight; I’m just going to shower up after I finish this and head over there early, maybe crawl into his bed to make up for missing the game.
If I finish. By ten a.m., I’m not even halfway down one side, and already I’m exhausted.
Iris squeezes my shoulder with deceptively strong fingers. She’s the frailer of the duo, but she throws around king-sized high-loft quilts with the best of them. She’s also far more even-tempered than Rose. She gets it. I just want to fix my mums, curl up in my room for a couple hours, hand stitch some binding so I feel productive, and then have a quiet night with Gabe.
A quiet night of sex. He’s gotten really good at that.
“Why don’t I get the next one, dear?” Iris offers, and I have to lunge up to stop her from kneeling down. I don’t know if we’d ever get her up again.
“No, no, it’s okay. At least I’m off today.”
“You certainly are not off today!”
I groan, not needing to look to know Cora’s barreling down the path. Now that fall’s here, she’s traded out her sandals for ankle boots, stylish even in jeans and the Briggs jersey.
I make skirts out of scrap material with ten extra inches on the waistband to prepare for my inevitable future.
“Were you going to hide this from me?” she shouts.
I only turn around then because I can hear both anger and fear in her voice, and I immediately feel guilty. It’s to Cora that I need to say, “It’s just kids being kids. But it’s Sunday, not like I can get someone else to come out and clean—”
“It’s not kids being kids, you know this!” Cora rakes her fingers through her hair, but she pays four figures to fly up to New York for the perfect layered, wavy balayage, so it lands itself right back where it was. “Did you call the police?”
I roll my eyes, same as I do every time we have this conversation. She was still living in Milan when the vandalism started. She didn’t see the cops taking photos with their personal cellphones to spam the desecration across social media. They hated me like everyone else did. They didn’t care that it was impossible for me to leave with my assets tangled up in the house and a baby on the way.
They didn’t care when I lost the baby, either.
“I just need to fix this.”
Cora hates this. She always has. She glares at the soft grass as she steps onto it, like her boots have depreciated, but she keeps going, heading toward one of the thrown plants. I ignore her, resuming my gardening, until she yells, “You can’t hide forever, Joss.”
“I feel like I was doing a bang-up job of it before!” I fire right back.
She picks up the mum, and thankfully it’s already wrecked because she flings it right back into the ground with a furious snarl. “Then get the fuck out of Wilmington!”
Iris and Rose gasp.
“You know I can’t.”
She flicks an angry finger at the second story, at the corner room with its windows facing both north and west, the room I demanded we make the nursery because I thought it was the perfect amount of sun.
“Because of that?” Cora yells across the lawn.
I swallow the stone in my throat. “It’s not just that anymore.”
Cora finally relents and returns to me, her irritation melting into concern. “The shop can be rebuilt anywhere,” she says, but I hear the hesitation, the finesse.
“You know it’s not just that either.”
“Is it fucking Jerry?”
I roll my eyes at her even though yeah, if I did leave Wilmington, I’d probably have to figure out if there was a way to transport a feral raccoon with me.
Cora blows out a gust of air that fluffs her bangs. “You know Gabe might not be here forever, either, right? He could get transferred.”
He might also not get signed at the end of the season. They’re two and two right now, and the losses have been to teams ranked high enough that Gabe says they’re actually doing well. From what I hear from others, they’re doing great, no reason for him to worry. But he does. And I’m not about to jinx it by saying it’s a possibility, so I shrug and resume planting the next mum. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. But I’m not uprooting my whole life and wrecking things with Gabe over some mums.”
Cora’s lips pull to the side as she drums her nails on her thigh. “Maybe he can say something to the press,” she says thoughtfully. “Wilmington likes him. If he asks people to leave you alone or remind them that you had no idea what Fuckhead was doing or–”
“He doesn’t know about Brian.”
Cora shakes a surprised jolt off. “You haven’t told him? You know there’s some locker room beef happening between him and Allore because of this?”
I do know this, but Gabe says it’s not a big deal, he was never that close with the Allores.
But I’ve stalked Keira’s social media. Tons of pictures of him with her baby, and he doesn’t even like kids.
“He told me he doesn’t want to know, and I respect that.”
“He can’t pretend that—what happens when he finds this shit in the morn—what about the nurs—gahh!” Cora flops down onto her knees next to me.
“What are you doing?” I gasp as Iris and Rose crowd around her, likely thinking she’s petite enough they could pick her up if she’s fallen.
“Give me some damn gloves. If you’re gonna be this stupid about this stupid man and his stupid heart of gold nonsense and how seriously perfect he is for you, you don’t get to hide from the public anymore. We’re gonna fix these stupid flowers, and then we’re going to go to that stupid game and you’re going to hold your stupid head high.”
“Here you go, dear,” Iris says as Rose gives her a set of gloves.