Chapter 88 #2
I looked at it, then at him. He wasn’t looking at it. He was looking at me with those level gray eyes.
“June talked about you,” he said. Just that.
Something shifted in me. The warmth at my sternum moved, without permission, toward something that wasn’t going to be useful.
“What did she say?” I asked, before I could decide not to.
He was quiet for a moment, choosing carefully. Then: “She said you used to apologize to the seedlings before you thinned them. That you’d been doing it since you were four and she’d never told you to.”
I stood there with that for a moment. The October afternoon going amber around us, the harbor just barely visible through the tree line below, the spring still audible in the hillside.
You only repeated a detail like that if you’d been carrying it. Turning it over, revisiting it.
“She has tea,” he said. He pulled a pair of wire cutters from his tool belt and gestured at the antique chandelier that June had rescued from the old Halcott house when I was about nine, before the town bought it and turned it into the harbormaster’s office. “I’m just going to work on the light.”
I was in the kitchen making tea, trying to make it dark enough I could pretend it was coffee, when I caught him through the front window.
He’d climbed the ladder and was reaching over his head, working the wiring of the fixture, and the hem of his T-shirt had ridden up above his jeans.
A strip of skin. Taut, dark hair, tan in October.
I framed the shot without the camera. Old habit—the rectangle, the crop, deciding what stays in.
The kettle was screaming. I didn’t know for how long.
The estate attorney called at eleven the next morning, while I was looking through the books she’d shoved into every available space in her bookshelves.
The call was brief. A condition of the will, she said. The property could not be listed until a full inventory and assessment of the cottage and grounds had been completed and signed by the designated caretaker.
I looked up at Jonah on the greenhouse roof, where he was doing something to the flashing with the focused competence of someone who’d done it before.
He’d left the afternoon prior without saying goodbye, and I’d been unpacking my suitcase in the guest bedroom and avoiding the greenhouse when I felt him go.
How long, I asked.
Depends on the scope. A few days. Possibly more.
I waited until he came down the ladder.
“I need to talk to you about the will,” I said.
He looked at me with those steady gray eyes and said “Okay”—and listened, without interrupting, without his expression changing.
He hadn’t known about the condition either. Neither of us said what that might mean about June.
“Three days,” he said, when I finished. “If we’re efficient.”
Three days. I had a deadline in two weeks, a flight I hadn’t booked, a life in seven different time zones that ran fine. Three days was nothing.
I went to the garden hive after he left.
June’s bees—three boxes, going strong, the hum of them audible from the flagstone path. I stood in front of them for longer than was sensible, the October sun on my face. The copper tang of the season, leaves turning somewhere in the woods behind the property.
Tell the bees before you tell the neighbors, she had always said.
I’d told no one. I’d received the call from the attorney, booked the flights, driven five hours, and told absolutely no one the true thing, which was that June was gone and the world had rearranged itself around the absence of her. And I was finally unable to ignore it any longer.
I put my hand on the top box.
“June died,” I said. “In March. I should have come sooner.”
The hive kept humming. Not lessening, not increasing—just continuing, patient and industrious, the way they’d been continuing for years through whatever the Calloway women had needed to say to them.
They would cluster soon—form a tight, vibrating mass inside the box to keep the queen warm throughout the cold of winter. I was a little jealous.
I stood there until my hands stopped shaking.
My eyes went where they always used to go, out past the last of the cultivated beds to where the garden gave way to the old woods.
The foundation was still there. Of course it was still there.
A low rectangle of stone in the long grass, twenty feet by twenty-five, the same local granite as the oldest sections of the burying ground wall—what was left of the first Calloway workroom, three hundred years of it, the place Patience herself had built and worked and died still tending.
I’d grown up knowing not to make a thing of it.
The foundation was simply where the property ended and something older began.
June had taken me out there as a child the way other grandmothers took children to church—no ceremony, just presence.
This is where we started. You don’t have to understand it.
You just have to know it’s yours. I’d spent fourteen years pretending that I’d left it behind, along with everything else.
Something had climbed over the stones since I’d been gone.
A vine I didn’t recognize, dark-leaved and wiry, and it was flowering—small white blossoms, dozens of them, open in the cold.
Nothing should have been flowering out there in October.
I stood at the edge of the beds and looked at it for a long moment, and then I made myself look away.
When I went back to the cottage, Jonah had fixed the hinge on the kitchen door and left a pot of tea on the stove.
He hadn’t asked.
I pressed three pinches of salt under my tongue—June’s trick, for getting back inside my own skin when a feeling threatened to carry me off—and poured two cups. The first I left on the windowsill.
The first cup is for whomever you’re missing.
The second I drank standing up, looking out at the garden, at the foundation stones at the edge of the woods, at the vine with the white flowers that had no business blooming in October.
I was here to sell this cottage and leave.
I was going to need to be very efficient about that.