Chapter 16
“You’ve got that look,” Sylvie said, hefting a flat of coreopsis onto the counter and eyeing Maris over the top of it. “That well-rested, faintly smug look. The look of a woman who is not telling her best friend something.”
“I’m telling you plenty of things.” Maris rang up the coreopsis without looking. “I’m telling you those are eight dollars a flat and you’re trying to argue me down to six.”
“Six is fair. They’re leggy.” Sylvie set two more flats down and leaned both elbows on the counter, mahogany hair swinging forward, the green in it catching the light through the greenhouse glass. “Don’t change the subject. How’s the manor?”
“Coming along. The roses are responding well to the pruning. We saved most of the original—”
“I wasn’t asking about the roses, Maris Calder, and you know it.”
She kept her eyes on the register, even though she could feel the flush climbing up her throat. That was the trouble with fair skin and a friend who watched everything like a hawk watched a mouse. “The job’s going fine.”
“The job.” Sylvie tasted the word like it was something faintly indecent. “The seven-foot job. The grey, brooding, absolutely-carved-out-of-granite job with the shoulders.” She sighed. “Is it true his eyes go gold? Robin swears they go gold.”
“How would Robin know?”
“So they do go gold.”
Damn. Maris punched the total in harder than she needed to. “I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t say a lot of things.” Sylvie’s grin turned wicked and slow.
“You didn’t say why you were humming when I walked in.
You didn’t say why you’ve got that particular—” she waved a hand up and down at Maris “—glow. That is not a hard-day’s-work glow, honey.
I’ve had a hard day’s work. It does not look like that. ”
Maris shoved the plants towards her. “Twenty-four dollars.”
“He stays and helps you, doesn’t he.” It wasn’t a question. Sylvie counted bills out one at a time onto the counter, watching Maris’s face for each one. “Big scary gargoyle out there on his knees in the dirt pulling weeds for you. Bringing you coffee. I heard about the coffee.”
“Who told you about the coffee?”
“So there is coffee.” Sylvie clapped once, delighted. “Oh, this is better than I hoped. You’re blushing. You’re actually blushing. Look at you, you’re the color of those geraniums.”
“I am not—” She pressed her cool hands to her cheeks and found them hot, which settled the matter.
She dropped them. “We had supper. Once. The three of us. Toby fell asleep in front of the fire, and it was—” She stopped, because the memory of it rose up warm and glowing and a little too tender to repeat across a register, even to Sylvie.
The bright kitchen. The boy breathing on the rug.
Garrick’s mouth in the firelight and the way he’d said we should stop like it was painful. “It was nice,” she finished weakly.
“Nice.” Sylvie put a hand over her heart. “You spent the evening with a male built like a cathedral and your baby asleep by the fire and it was nice. Maris. You’re killing me. Give me one real detail or I’m making up a better one.”
“There’s nothing to—”
“Fine. Then I’ll tell you my detail.” Sylvie put the flats to one side and produced a folded sheet of pale green paper from her back pocket with the flourish of a magician. “You’re in the newsletter again.”
Maris’s stomach dropped. “No.”
“Page two. Under Around the Falls.” Sylvie shook it open and cleared her throat with relish.
“Word from the Stonehaven grounds is that the restoration is progressing beautifully under the expert hand of our own Maris Calder—and that the notoriously private owner has taken a keen personal interest in the work. Very keen. We do love a project that brings people together.” She lowered the page. “Flora wrote that.”
“She can’t just—” Maris snatched the newsletter and read it herself, which was a mistake.
Reading it made it worse, and it also made a small traitorous part of her ridiculously pleased, and she hated that part of herself with a clean bright passion.
Taken a keen personal interest. She thought of his hand under her shirt on the terrace, his phone going off, and both of them laughing.
She folded the paper up small. “This is mortifying.”
“You’re smiling.”
“I’m not.”
“You’ve got a smile going. Right there.” Sylvie tapped the corner of her mouth. “That’s the smile of a woman who read very keen and thought, yes, actually, quite keen, thank you for asking.”
Maris opened her mouth to deny it—
—and the front of the nursery went dark with the shadow of something enormous rolling up the drive.
For one absurd heartbeat she thought it was Garrick, because she had gotten stupidly primed to think Garrick at any large shape.
But this shape had wheels. A Stonehaven crew truck, and behind it a trailer, and chained down on the trailer, yellow and squat and brand-new, sat a Bobcat.
The same machine she had stood at a rental counter pricing out the day before.
A young troll in a Stonehaven Construction cap swung down from the cab with a clipboard.
“Calder?” he called. “Delivery. Where do you want her?”
Maris walked out onto the drive slowly, the newsletter still folded in her hand. “There’s a mistake. I didn’t… I rented one. From Buncombe Rental. It’s coming Friday.”
“Nah, that got canceled.” The kid consulted his clipboard, cheerfully oblivious to her growing anger. “Boss called it off yesterday. Said no point paying rental when he had one sitting. This one’s yours.” He grinned at her. “Congratulations. Beauty of a machine. Where’s she going?”
The gravel felt very far away under Maris’s boots. “Mine,” she repeated.
“Yes’m. That’s what he said.” The kid flipped a page. “Assigned to you. Mr. Stonehaven’s orders.”
Mine. His orders. The words landed on something old and bruised and the shame she thought she’d left in Charleston reared its head.
She’d lived with the way money took over since Jeff’s death.
A problem she’d been carefully managing herself was suddenly solved over her head without a word—because to someone with enough money her struggle wasn’t a struggle at all.
It was an untidiness to be smoothed away so they didn’t have to watch her strain.
We’ve taken care of it, dear, her in-laws had said, every time they arranged her life without consulting her.
She’d rented that machine. She’d done the math. She’d decided. And Garrick had ignored her decision and canceled it.
“Where do you want her?” the kid asked uncertainly, because he was smart enough to see that she was not happy.
“Nowhere,” she said. “Don’t unchain a thing.”
Behind her she heard Sylvie murmur, “Uh-oh,” in a low, interested voice. Then gravel crunched again, and she turned, and there he was.
He’d come through the gate, big and unhurried, still in his work clothes with dust on the knees of his dark jeans. He came towards her like he expected her to be glad, and the coldness in her chest went white-hot.
“They’re a little early,” he said mildly, glancing at the truck. “I told them after—”
“You canceled my rental.”
He stopped and tilted his head, studying her face. Something in his expression recalibrated, as if his plan had met an obstacle he hadn’t drawn on the schematic. “Yes.”
“You bought me a Bobcat.”
“I didn’t buy it. The company already—”
“Do not.” Her voice came out shaking and she hated that it shook, hated that her eyes were stinging, hated all of it.
“Do not stand there and explain the logistics to me like the logistics are the point. You made a decision about my business. About my money, my job, the company I built with my own hands, and you did it without one single word to me. You went behind my back and you fixed it, like I’m a—a rotten joist, like I’m a problem on one of your sites you could just—”
“You needed the Bobcat.” He said it slowly, like it was obvious. Like he could not for the life of him locate the problem. “It didn’t cost me anything. It saved you the rental fee. I don’t understand why—”
“Because you didn’t ask me!” she snapped, loudly enough that the delivery kid took a step back towards his truck.
“Because it’s not yours to fix. And because I already told you.
” Her voice hitched and she fought it level.
“I sat in your living room with my son asleep on your floor and I told you exactly how the Pinckneys do it. They never ask. They decide, and then they tell me how grateful I ought to be, like I’m something they’re being very generous about.
You said they sounded terrible.” Her hands were fists at her sides, and the newsletter had fallen somewhere in the gravel.
“I came here so that everything I have, I earned. I’d rather rent a Bobcat I can barely afford than take one you don’t even have to think about, because at least the rented one is mine. ”
Silence. The truck ticked as its engine cooled. Sylvie hadn’t moved from the doorway, a flat of coreopsis forgotten in her arms.
And then she saw it happen. She watched him stop looking at the Bobcat and start looking at her, watched him remember his front room and the fire and everything she had told him that he had heard only as history, and watched him think about a hundred and forty yards of loaded wheelbarrow and thin margins and pride held together with baling wire.
His jaw worked once. Gold came up in his eyes, and then it banked back down to grey.
He took a slow breath in through his nose.
She braced for the justification. For but it’s practical. For but I can afford it. For the patient, reasonable, unbearable voice of a male used to being right about numbers.
“You’re right,” he said, and she blinked.
“I made a decision that wasn’t mine to make.
About your work. Without you.” He didn’t move towards her.
He stood where he was and let her have the distance between them.
His voice stayed low and even and stripped of everything but the facts.
“I saw a problem and I fixed it because fixing things is what I know how to do. I didn’t think about what it would feel like to be the person I fixed.
You told me, and I didn’t hear it. That was arrogant. I’m sorry.”
The white heat in her chest guttered, confused, with nothing left to burn against.
“How about this? The Bobcat stays with the company,” he went on, his voice still level.
“The Bobcat belongs to Stonehaven Construction. I’ll assign it to the Stonehaven grounds project the way I’d assign equipment to any subcontractor on any job I’ve ever run, because that’s what you are.
A subcontractor, with expertise I’m paying for because it’s worth paying for.
When the job’s done it comes back to the company.
You don’t own it. You don’t owe me for it.
It’s simply a tool the general contractor put on the site for you to use. ”
She stared at him. Her ears were ringing a little.
“The rental,” she said. “You canceled—”
“If you’d rather have the rented one, take the rented one. I’ll call them and put it back. Your call. It’s your site to run.” He tipped his head, one degree, almost gentle. “It was always your site to run. I forgot that yesterday. I won’t again.”
The delivery kid looked between the two of them with the expression of a male who very much wanted permission to leave.
She rubbed the heel of her hand over her chest. The anger had gone somewhere and left her shaky and hollow.
Underneath the hollow was something warm and unbearably raw, because he hadn’t argued.
He hadn’t been reasonable at her. He’d heard the reason behind her anger, the in-laws and the terror of being held worthless because of someone else’s generosity.
He’d said you’re right and I’m sorry and meant both.
God help her, that did something for her no gift ever could have done.
“It’s paid for by the project,” she said slowly, testing the words. “Assigned. Like any subcontractor.”
“Like any subcontractor.”
“And you’ll ask me. Next time. Before you decide anything about my work.”
“Yes.”
“Say it like you mean it, Garrick, because I will pull every plant off this site and let your mother’s roses grow back into brambles.”
The half-smile curved his lips. “I’ll ask you. Before anything. I mean it.”
She let out a breath that took most of the shakiness with it and turned to the kid, who straightened up hopefully.
“Fine,” she said. “Unchain it. Put it around the side by the equipment shed. And you—” she pointed at Garrick without much force “—tell whoever needs telling that the paperwork says assigned, not given, or I swear to God…”
“Assigned,” he agreed immediately. “I’ll have the amended paperwork to you today.”
Of course he would. She shook her head and bent to pick the crushed newsletter out of the gravel, because she needed something to do with her hands that wasn’t reaching for him in front of the delivery kid.
Behind her, Sylvie set the coreopsis down on the ground with exaggerated care, then straightened up and looked at Garrick with her mouth slightly open and both eyebrows climbing towards her green-shot hairline.
“Okay,” Sylvie said. “Okay. No, that—” She pointed at him, then at Maris, then at him again.
“A male who says you’re right and I’m sorry and does not follow it up with a single but?
And not only a male but a rich male?” She retrieved the coreopsis and hitched it onto her hip, backing towards her van with the air of a woman carrying important cargo.
“Oh, that’s going in the newsletter. That is absolutely going in the newsletter. Flora is going to lose her mind.”
“Sylvie,” Maris said.
“Very keen,” Sylvie sang, and got in her van.