Chapter 9 #3
Near the kitchen door, rosemary and basil had grown together with mint that seemed determined to take over the corner. An old thyme plant had been there when Jake moved in and had somehow survived everything around it.
Emma broke off a mint leaf and rubbed it between her fingers.
The smell brought back Gloria’s kitchen so quickly that Emma stopped walking.
Her grandmother stood at the sink in Emma’s memory, rinsing mint beneath the faucet before dropping it into a glass pitcher of tea. Emma could see the pitcher on the counter and the condensation running down the sides.
She lifted her fingers and breathed in again.
“You okay?” Jake asked.
Emma nodded wiping a tear from her cheek.
“My grandmother used to put this in iced tea.”
Jake looked toward the mint.
“Take some.”
“What?”
“Take some with you.”
Emma smiled.
“I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
“Put it in iced tea.”
She laughed.
“I walked into that one.”
“You did.”
They came around to the front of the cottage.
The key lime tree sat in its clay pot beside the steps. The three small fruits Emma had noticed on her first day were still there, a little larger now.
“Tell me about this one.”
Jake considered the tree.
“It’s about two years old. I bought it at a garden center on North Roosevelt. I meant to put it in the ground, but I decided I liked it in the pot.”
“Why?”
“I could move it when the weather got bad. Then I got used to it there.”
Emma touched one of the leaves.
“It flowers twice a year,” Jake said. “I get maybe a dozen limes if I’m lucky.”
“My grandmother wanted a key lime tree.”
Jake looked at her.
“Did she?”
“Every summer she said she was going to plant one. Then she’d find something else she wanted more, or she’d decide she didn’t have the right place for it. She never got around to it.”
Jake looked at the tree.
“Well, there’s one now.”
Emma nodded.
The simple fact of it caught at her more than she expected. Jake couldn’t have known. He’d bought the tree because he wanted one, yet somehow he had done another thing Gloria had meant to do and never had.
Emma looked from the tree to the lilies and then toward the porch.
When she first arrived, she’d been amazed that the cottage looked so much like the place she remembered. She had blamed Arthur for lying about its condition, but she hadn’t understood the other half of it.
The cottage still felt like Gloria’s because Jake had cared for what Gloria left behind.
He hadn’t preserved it like a museum. His paintings were on the porch, his herbs grew by the kitchen door and his key lime tree sat beside the steps. He’d made a life here without erasing the one that came before it.
Emma wasn’t sure why that mattered so much to her, but it did.
“I’ll leave it in the pot,” Jake said.
She looked at him.
“So you can move it if you want to.”
“Move it where?”
“Wherever you want. Chicago, if you want to try.”
“It wouldn’t survive Chicago.”
“Probably not.”
Emma smiled.
“Keep it right where it is. It belongs here.”
“All right.”
She looked into his eyes, “Where you can look after it.”
Jake’s smiled, “If you wish.”
She’d spent the last several days fighting to prove that the cottage belonged to her, yet she had no desire to alter anything Jake had planted done to it. She was beginning to understand that ownership wasn’t the only thing that mattered.
By the time they finished walking through the garden, the afternoon light had softened. Emma checked her watch.
“I should let you have your evening.”
“I’ve got nothing to have.”
“I interrupted you. I’m sure you have to finish what you were doing when I arrived.”
“That’s about a five-minute job.”
Emma smiled.
“I should go anyway. Rachel wants me back at nine tomorrow to talk about what happens next.”
Jake picked up the bucket and walked with her toward the gate.
Emma slowed before reaching it.
The cottage looked different in the late light. The bougainvillea fell over the porch railing, and the lilies followed the fence in a long sweep of color.
Three days earlier, Emma had stood outside this same gate and wondered how Arthur could have been so wrong about the place.
Now she knew.
“Jake?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you for taking care of the property.”
He looked toward the cottage.
“I like taking care of it.”
Emma believed him.
She wanted to tell him about the will in her bag, and that somehow seeing the garden today had made the cottage feel even more like something her grandmother had deliberately left for her.
She decided there would be time for that.
“Good night, Jake.”
“Drive safe.”
Emma let herself through the gate and walked toward the rental car. Before getting in, she looked back once.
Jake was still standing near the path with the bucket in his hand.
Four days ago, he had been a stranger living in her grandmother’s cottage. Now, when Emma looked at the lilies and the freshly painted porch and the little tree beside the steps, she saw how much of what she remembered had survived because Jake had quietly preserved all of it.
She got into the car and drove back toward Winslow’s as the last of the daylight faded over Key West.