Chapter 31
Nic flew into Kansas last night. He got a fresh haircut and a new shirt, because none of the ones in his suitcase seemed right.
He wasn’t going to be late. Not that there was something to be late for. For all he knew, Felicity had forgotten all about that night a year ago.
But he hadn’t. Not for a single second.
He didn’t believe anyone could fall in love over the course of several hours, but what he did know was those several hours had altered the entire course of his life.
He had planned on waiting until May first, but he couldn’t wait any longer.
Nic needed to see her. He had so much he wanted to tell her.
He also wanted to make sure she hadn’t changed her mind and started taking teaching classes or something.
But mostly he wanted to tell her how much that night had meant to him.
He knew from Courtney that Felicity worked at her aunt’s plant store while attending school. The semester wasn’t over, so he figured she’d still be around. If she wasn’t, he could wait. He would wait.
He chuckled at the sign on the front window.
He hadn’t noticed it any of the other times he’d been by.
The store was called Grow Away, and the painted image below the name looked like a stylized Oscar the Grouch, except the green head was made of plant leaves and angry googly eyes.
If you weren’t looking for it, you would think it was a normal potted plant.
SOIL, CUTTINGS, ROOTS, AND MORE SINCE 1994. (SCRAM!) Not a great sign.
Nic swallowed. Why hadn’t he brought a bottle of water? He cleared his throat.
He hadn’t noticed much that night. And it hadn’t been because of the tequila. He hadn’t noticed much any of the times he’d been around here.
A bell rang over the door as he entered. Two women were kissing at the potting bench. Old women.
“Oh shit, sorry. I was looking for—”
A greenhouse door in the back snapped open, revealing a sturdy woman with steel-gray hair and shrewd eyes.
“Don’t worry ’bout Maude and Ethel. I catch them at their shenanigans once a week.
Your husbands died years ago, and y’all are legally married now—quit acting like sneaky teenagers in my shop. ”
The two women cackled and grabbed two matching buckets before leaving through the back door.
“Goddamn lovebirds. I’ll be with you in a second, kid. I’ve gotta finish with this orchid, then I can help you out. Take all the time you need and look around. The plants in the back are fifty percent off.” She sat down on a swivel chair, digging into the soil of a planter she had set down.
A croak came out when he tried to speak. He coughed into his fist and started over. “Actually, I’m looking for—”
“Wait…” She spun around, unconcerned about the soil flying off her hands. “Nicolas Holm-Bozic. Seems like you did come after all.” Her eyes flitted to the wall behind him. He turned to see a calendar. “A couple days early, aren’t you?”
“Is she … is Felicity here?”
“Why?”
Why?
“We had a deal. I don’t know if she told you, but—”
“Oh, she told me a helluvalot, kid. Go ahead and see.” Her head twitched in the direction of the large row of plants.
He followed the row and found a green platform at the end with a beautiful tree on top.
It had several bright green leaves. The platform had the name FANNY painted in black letters across it.
The protective frame around the plant had several signs.
One read PLANT IN REHAB DO NOT TOUCH. Another said NOT FOR SALE.
NO TOBY, NOT EVEN FOR YOU. One of the signs was different.
There was a plaque mounted at the top of a measuring rod built into the back of the platform.
Felicity had charted the growth of Fanny like he’d seen parents do in movies.
Engraved into the plaque were the words AD ASTRA PER ASPERA.
Jeannie came to stand beside him. “It’s for you. You can take it.”
He blinked several times. “I don’t think I can. Look at what she did.” For me? “Is she here?”
“Why?”
“Why?” Urgency turned up the volume on his voice. “Why? Because she is the most magnificent person I’ve ever met in my life, and I only spent two hours with her.”
“She was sad you left that morning. Didn’t expect you to leave a note instead of saying goodbye.”
“I was a mess. I needed to go. I couldn’t—”
“How long have you been clean, Nicky?”
He looked anywhere except at the steely eyes boring into him.
She said clean, not sober, because she wasn’t talking about the tequila. But how…?
“Nicky. You know what I’m asking.”
“Three hundred sixty-four days and like ten hours, I guess.” He checked his watch.
“No.”
“What do you mean no? I came back when I said I would.”
“No.” The old woman crossed her arms over her bibbed apron. “You think I didn’t know exactly who you were when Felicity told me she’d met this tall, mysterious blond prince named Nicky with some other name ‘that was really long and she couldn’t remember’?”
“I didn’t say I was a prince.”
“I know that. And you’re not. And she doesn’t need one anyway. She can slay dragons all on her own.”
“Felicity’s a grown woman. I’m going to tell her everything. I swear.”
“You’re going to tell her you were high that night? High on pills you stole from your father and from your sweet cousin who had just been trying to help get you away from him?”
“Yes.”
“No.” Felicity’s aunt shook her head.
His hands curled into frustrated fists. She was looking at him like he was a little boy having a tantrum. “Please stop saying no for her. It’s her choice.”
“Felicity is not going to be the reason you got clean. You need to stay off the pills for yourself and not for a girl you spent a couple hours with one night.”
“I left and made sure I could stay clean. I wouldn’t have come back if—”
“No.” She stared him down, eyebrows lifted.
Nic fell silent. His hands relaxed.
“I don’t get the sense you’ve been told no very much in your life, except by that brutal-looking man Courtney showed me some pictures of on the internet.”
“Courtney showed you … Did you tell Courtney what happened with Felicity?”
“No. Not my story to tell, kid. Figured you would tell her yourself if you wanted to.”
“And Felicity doesn’t know anything else about me?”
“Would you have wanted her to know what I know about you?”
Nic’s head bowed forward.
“Courtney told me all about her cousin and his drug problem last summer. His cruel father who left him black and blue, usually in places the public wouldn’t see.
Courtney had her own things to worry about—leaving that marriage of hers was hell—but still, she was worrying over you.
Courtney didn’t want you in LA. She knew you couldn’t be trusted there.
Yet, you want me to trust you with my twenty-year-old niece? ”
Nic sat on the ground with a sigh. Right in the middle of the plant store. Right up against the platform that Felicity had built for Fanny.
“I’m sorry about your mother, and I know you were dealing with a lot that night, but Felicity’s not going to be the thing you latch on to right now. She’s got the biggest heart in the whole world, and she would love you with every single piece of her fiery soul.”
He looked down at his hands. Such different hands than the last time he had been here. Now they had knife and burn marks, and he was missing the tip of his right pinky after not being careful enough with a mandolin.
Nic wasn’t careful enough. Even now.
He was impatient. He was impulsive. In so many ways, he was the same stupid-ass punk he was less than a year ago. It’s why he’d shown up early.
“You’ll both fall in love so hard, with you barely a year outta rehab and that wicked angel just starting to figure out who she is, and it won’t be right.
I know what that…” Felicity’s aunt trailed off, gripping the protective frame around the fig tree tight enough to blanch her knuckles.
Then she extended her hand out to him. “Guess I shoulda introduced myself. I’m Jean Gallagher-Keegan. Jeannie’s fine though.”
“Nicolas Holm-Bozic. Nic, mostly, these days. My mother called me Nicky.”
“Now stand up and come with me over here for a second.”
“Okay,” he said feebly.
She sat back on the same swivel chair from before. The backing looked worn in the shape of Jeannie’s spine. “How do you feel about orchids?”
“They’re fine, I guess.” In truth, orchids reminded him of stodgy dinners with stodgy, self-important people who only gave a shit about him because of who his father was. Orchids were better than lilies though. Lilies smelled like his mother’s funeral.
“Trouble with them is those instructions they give on the pot. Total horseshit.”
He snorted a wet laugh.
“Half those orchids you buy at the grocery store are nine-tenths rotten in the roots the day you bring them home.” Jeannie’s hands dug into the orchid pot and lifted out a large mass of soil and twisted roots.
She slowly loosened the compacted areas and separated the cordlike roots one by one, evaluating each part with shrewd eyes.
She grabbed a pair of pristine clippers from the pegboard and snipped off blackened, gray, or dried-out sections.
“You leave all this fuckery in here, and it’s going to die.
Sometimes you even gotta trim off this part too.
” She pointed to the entire top of the stem with the pink flowers.
“That’s not gonna bloom again. You see?”
Nic didn’t see, but he muttered a yes anyway. Were there people who would argue with Jeannie Gallagher-Keegan?
She plopped the orchid in water. “You want just enough to cover the bottom. It’s like that with a lot of plants. You find one you love and you’re tempted to water it too much. All that ‘love’ will kill it, because it’s too much all at once. Plant’s not ready for it yet.”
She washed her hands and put the orchid on the shelf in the greenhouse.
A pang of fear mixed with nausea roiled in his gut. “Where—”
“Felicity’s older sister had her third baby a bit premature. She took her exams early so she could go home and help out with the older kids. She’s flying back tomorrow though. Hoping that a tall, blond, European prince will be stopping by looking for a rehabbed fig tree.”
He buried his face in his hands. After a few moments, he lifted his wet eyes to the tree. “It’s going to break her heart if I don’t come back.”
“Can you promise not to break her heart if you do?”
“I’d try not to.”
“Felicity is fierce and stubborn. Now, I can’t tell anyone what to do.
And you’ll both do whatever you want. I’m certain of that.
But I had to say my piece first.” She took off her apron and hung it on a hook.
“What do I know? I’m just a woman who got her heart broke by a man she thought was her prince who chose them fool pills over her heart in the end. ”
Nicky sat still and silent, the passage of time marked by Jeannie’s hands and shears as they excised bits of rot he couldn’t even see.
When he found the courage to stand, he pulled out a small notebook from his back pocket. He’d been using it to scribble out ideas for dishes and future restaurants. He flipped to another page and wrote words he might regret for the rest of his life.
If I stay now, I’m going to mess it all up. Keep Fanny for me a little longer, and I promise I’ll come back if you want me to.
He added his number at the bottom and folded the note.
“Can you give this to her?” She wiped off her hands and slid the piece of paper into her pocket.
He headed to the door. A familiar urge to run, to escape, to scream came over him. Something he hadn’t felt in three hundred sixty-four days and like ten hours.
“You’re not taking the tree, Nicky?”
Nic looked up at the tree. “I can’t take her after all the work she put in.”
“She’d want you to have it.”
“I can’t.” Avoiding her gaze, he shook his head and headed out the door. “I’ll fuck it up. You’re right.”
“Sometimes.”
“What’ll you tell her about me stopping by?”
“Well, I can be downright taciturn when I want to be.”
“You’ll lie. Lie by omission at least.”
Jeannie huffed out a laugh. “Never said I was an angel.”
Nicky’s blush was a mixture of embarrassment and genuine shame as he left without another word.
A week later, Fanny appeared on his Texas doorstep.
No note.
No call.
No nothing from Felicity.