Chapter Twenty-Three
I’M STILL RIDING THE BUZZ OF IT ALL WHEN HELEN TEXTS.
I stare at the message. Nine. I should text her back something witty or charming.
Instead I type: Thank you. For everything, Helen.
We ended with a nightcap here at Lazy Daisy after a long and very late dinner at The Landing. Dawn, Allie, Dinah, Sloane, and me. A table full of love and rehashing and someone spilling a Ginger Fro, The Landing’s infamous cocktail, and insisting it was a blessing.
My Loeffler Randall heels from last night are still abandoned on the jute rug, and a prosecco bottle sits in the kitchen sink like it needed somewhere to hide.
I’m rinsing my coffee mug when I hear a soft scrape outside. I step onto the porch, expecting a delivery, maybe one of the girls circling back for something they left behind.
Instead, it’s Jack. He’s halfway up a ladder, one foot braced against the roofline, garden shears in hand. A palm frond sways, heavy and green, until he clips it clean and steadies himself against the shingles.
“Are you…pruning my house?”
He glances down, a sliver of a smile. “This one’s been dragging across your roof. Bad for the shingles.”
I step barefoot into the yard, shielding my eyes against the sun. “I didn’t notice.”
“You would’ve,” he says, climbing down. “Eventually.”
“You could’ve just told me,” I say.
He drops the frond down and dusts his hands against his shorts. “Relax,” he says, grinning. “I’m not auditioning for a landscaping gig.”
I laugh, shaking my head. “Yeah, but you didn’t have to do it.”
“It’s not a big deal.” He shrugs, already reaching for the next branch like climbing onto my roof with garden shears is the same as grabbing the mail.
And that’s Jack. Always fixing what no one else notices, brushing it off before anyone can thank him.
WITH THE SHOW OVER, FOR THE FIRST TIME IN WEEKS I DON’T have a deadline pressing down on me. No canvases waiting to be finished. No openings to prepare for. The quiet should feel like relief. Instead, it feels restless.
I’m perched on the barstool in the kitchen and pulling over the basket I’ve somehow ignored since I got here. A messy tangle of old receipts, pocket change, a Bahamian newspaper clipping, a pack of Coral Sands matches.
I thumb through everything absently. My mind keeps looping back to Graham Vale.
To the photograph in his hallway, my grandmother with her scarf and beautiful wavy hair.
To the way his gaze lingered on me during that toast. He must have realized who I was.
I can’t stop wondering what happened between them, what they were to each other. Whether anyone else ever knew.
And I can’t stop wondering if it was just a single photograph, a fleeting summer afternoon. Maybe Gran was just modeling. But I don’t think that was it. Graham Vale and my grandmother. How had it happened? Did she know my grandfather then? And why had she never breathed a word about it?
My fingers slip past a stack of yellowed receipts and catch on another photograph, tucked deep in the basket. I draw it out carefully.
It isn’t posed. Gran is in her sun hat, standing in the front yard, her hands braced on her hips, a smirk tugging at her mouth.
And beside her, kneeling at the fence line, dirt streaking his forearms, is Jack.
His head is bent as he presses soil down around the base of a bougainvillea, a laugh ghosting across his lips.
My breath snags as I pull back. It looks recent, but when was this taken? His hair is shorter, her smile is familiar and wry. I flip it over. Gran’s neat and slanted handwriting trails across the back:
For when it blooms.
I turn it back again, my eyes tracing the fence line, the thin stalks barely reaching the first rung.
Newly planted. I know that fall. I remember when the blossoms first began to take at Christmas.
My chest tightens. We’d broken up just before this.
I didn’t know he came back then. Gran never mentioned it.
The weight builds, a stinging behind my eyes. Because suddenly her words return to me, spoken in that offhand way she sometimes did, like tossing breadcrumbs I wasn’t ready to follow.
The one for you will plant something he might never get to see bloom. And he’ll do it anyway.
I hadn’t understood them at the time. It was last summer, and I was curled at the other end of the sofa, knees pulled in, still wearing the dress from dinner. Being here without him made it worse in a way I hadn’t expected.
The old house creaked around us, the way it always did when the wind blew in off the water.
Gilmore Girls murmured in the background, the soft glow of the TV spilling light across Gran’s sofa.
It was our forever comfort show. Gran said Emily Gilmore was misunderstood.
“She makes the show,” she’d claim, which I argued was incorrect, because clearly Lorelai made the show.
Gran reached for her glass, swirling the wine, studying me over the rim. “You’ll not like this,” she continued, “but sometimes love needs a little space to figure out what it wants to be.”
I tried to laugh, but it caught in my throat. “What if it figures out it doesn’t want to be anything at all?”
Out the window, the ocean breeze swayed the tops of the bougainvillea beginning to grow along the fence, rich magenta petals stirring lightly. Gran’s gaze lingered there a moment before she spoke again.
She smiled, soft and simple. “Then maybe it isn’t. Or, maybe it wasn’t meant to grow just yet.”
That moment had stayed with me, stubborn as roots. And now, staring down at Jack in the dirt, Gran smirking beside him, it feels unbearably, impossibly true.
Without thinking, I tuck the photo into my back pocket and walk the path up to Milly’s cottage.
“Hey Milly.” I hug her after she lets me inside, holding the photo out to her. “Do you remember this?”
She looks down at the photo, then smiles like she’s back in that moment.
“Oh, sure. You remember how your grandmother used to go on about how she wished she’d planted something colorful by the fence?” Milly rinses a dish, remembering. “Well, what do you know, Jack shows up one day with gloves and bougainvillea. Didn’t even knock. Just got to work.”
I blink. “She didn’t ask him?”
“No, honey,” she chuckles. “That boy didn’t need asking.”
Milly dries her hands and looks at me. I burst into tears.