Chapter 17
“Dot’s grandmother can’t do it.” Maris had her phone trapped between her ear and her shoulder as she wrestled a flat of switchgrass onto the truck bed at the same time. “Apparently there’s a raptor demonstration at Biltmore House and her whole clutch is going.”
“They get some kind of weird kick out of criticizing the raptor’s technique.” Sylvie handed up the next flat, and squinted at the load. “You’ve got the install at eleven and it’s an hour and a half drive unless you get stuck behind a tractor trailer, then it’s two.”
“Two hours one way,” she muttered. It came out the same unhappy way it had come out all morning.
Four hours of Toby in a truck seat, most of it on winding mountain roads.
At the end of it he’d be car-sick and cross and she’d be trying to talk a client through irrigation zones with a five-year-old melting down against her leg.
She could do it. She’d done worse. But done worse was exactly the phrase she’d sworn off when she left Charleston.
“Are you sure you’re okay staying here to help Junie hold the shop? ”
“We’ve already agreed. We can hold the shop and gossip about you the entire time.
The question is the small one.” Sylvie tipped her chin towards the cottage.
Toby sat on the front step in his good navy sweater—the one his grandmother had sent wrapped in three layers of tissue paper—tying and untying his shoelace with tremendous concentration.
“You want me to take him? He can certainly stay with us, but if it’s busy I’m afraid he’s going to get bored and while I don’t think he’d wander off… ”
“No. God, no.” She dragged a hand through her hair. “I’ll figure it out. Maybe he can come and I’ll just—”
“He can stay with me.”
She turned. Garrick had come through the garden gate—wide open and swinging easily with the vines cut back to a soft green frame. He stood next to her with his hands loose at his sides and dust on his jeans, taking up more of the morning than seemed physically fair.
“With you,” she repeated.
“I’ll be here all day regardless.” He shrugged. “He likes the grounds. He asks fewer questions than my project managers and none of them are about payroll.” He hesitated, then added quietly, “He won’t be underfoot. And he won’t be car-sick on a mountain road for four hours.”
Sylvie made herself very busy with a flat of switchgrass and did not quite succeed in hiding her face.
Maris looked at Garrick, and looked at Toby on the step, and felt the usual impulse to refuse—I’ve got it, I don’t need, I can manage—but for once she let it go by. Because it wasn’t the same. He’d simply offered, and left the choice to her.
“You’d have to feed him lunch,” she said. “He’ll tell you he’s not hungry and then he’ll suddenly be starving.”
“Okay.”
“He won’t ask if he needs the bathroom. You have to ask him.”
“I’ll ask him.”
“And no power tools.”
He smiled at that one. “He can hand me things.”
“He loves handing you things.” She exhaled, and the last of her resistance went with it.
She couldn’t have said exactly when the male in front of her had gone from a client to someone she’d trust with the most important person in her life, but somehow he had.
“In that case, yes. Thank you.” She raised her voice.
“Toby. You’re spending the day with Mr. Garrick. Is that all right?”
Toby’s head immediately came up, the shoelace forgotten, and a wide grin covered his serious little face. He was on his feet before she’d finished the sentence. “On the grounds?”
“On the grounds.”
“With the—” He stopped himself, clearly remembering his manners. “If it’s not any trouble,” he said to Garrick, with a small formal dip of his head that would have broken her heart if she’d let it.
“It’s no trouble,” Garrick said. “I could use the help, actually,” he added. “There’s a job I can’t do alone.”
Toby stood up straighter under the weight of the help.
“Go get your boots,” she told him, and he went. She turned back to find Garrick already looking at her, grey eyes gone soft the way she’d stopped pretending she didn’t notice.
“Drive safe,” he said. “I’ve got him.”
I’ve got him. Three words she’d been saying to herself alone since Toby was a baby, and she had to get in the truck fast before her face gave everything away in front of Sylvie.
The install ran long, because installs always ran long, and there were two tractor trailers crawling over the mountain in front of her.
By the time she turned Doris back into the lot the sun was slanting through the trees and her lower back was complaining.
Loudly. She’d called three times. Each time Garrick had answered on the first ring and said he’s fine in a voice so calm she’d almost been annoyed by it.
Once she’d heard Toby chattering away merrily behind him.
It was so unlike the way her boy acted with most adults that she’d sat in the client’s driveway for a full minute just listening to the sound of it.
She didn’t go to the cottage after she’d parked the truck. She went straight through the gate.
The rose garden had never looked so much like something on the mend—but that wasn’t what stopped her on the path.
Off to the side, in the sunny pocket where she’d marked out a future kitchen bed with stakes and string, the string was gone.
In its place sat a low border of pale flat stones, curved into a soft-cornered rectangle no bigger than a bathtub, mortared clean and level.
Fresh soil filled the middle, dark and turned.
And crouched over it, dust to the elbows, was a seven-foot gargoyle crouched down on his heels like a mountain trying to be small, and a five-year-old boy with his sleeves shoved up and a smear of dirt across one cheek and an oversized hard hat sliding down over his eyes.
“—and this one,” Toby was saying, tapping a stone, “is the wonkiest one but you said wonky was okay because it’s character, and Dot says her nana has a whole wall that’s all wonky on purpose and it’s hundreds of years old, so wonky is—is distinguished—”
“It is.” Garrick’s low rumble was gentle and unhurried. He was listening, his head bent and one enormous clawed finger holding a stone in place while her son patted mortar around it with a child’s trowel. “Press there. Firmly. Good.”
“Is it distinguished now?”
“Very.”
Toby beamed at the stone like it had done something remarkable.
“Mama’s going to plant the rest of it but you said I could plant this part because it’s mine.
It’s my own bed, and I’m going to do carrots and the little tomatoes, the yellow ones, and—” He pushed the hard hat back up out of his eyes with a filthy wrist. “Can gargoyles eat tomatoes?”
“Yes.”
“Do you like tomatoes?”
Garrick considered the matter seriously, then nodded. “I do.”
“Then I’ll grow you some.”
Garrick’s whole body went still.
“I’d like that,” he said quietly, and Toby went right on chattering, already onto the wonkiness of the next stone.
And she knew. It wasn’t the coffee. It wasn’t little thorn or his mouth in the firelight or even the way he’d listened when she’d been furious with him. It was a seven-foot gargoyle on his heels in the dirt, promising to eat a five-year-old’s tomatoes.
Her eyes stung.
She let them.
“Mama!” Toby had spotted her. He rushed over, hard hat swaying, and grabbed her hand with both dirty ones. “Come see. I made a bed. A whole bed. It’s distinguished.”
“I can see that.” Her voice came out thick and she had to clear her throat. “That’s the finest bed I’ve ever seen, baby.”
“Garrick let me do the mortar. He said I have a… a steady hand.” He repeated the compliment like it was a medal.
“You do.” She pushed the hat back and kissed the dirty top of his head.
Then she looked over it at Garrick. He’d risen to his full height, and the look he was giving the two of them was warm enough to make her chest ache.
“Thank you,” she mouthed at him. He inclined his head a little, but he didn’t say it was nothing because he knew better.
She bent down to Toby’s level, her hands on his narrow shoulders, and knew the decision she’d made earlier that afternoon was the right one.
“Toby. How would you like to have a sleepover tonight?”
His eyes widened. “A sleepover?”
“With Robin and Eric. And Birdie.” She’d texted Robin from the client’s driveway, and Robin had answered with three exclamation points and a photograph of the baby grinning from ear to ear. “Birdie’s little, littler than Dot’s baby sister, and Robin says—”
“Dot’s baby sister can’t even walk, she just—” Toby demonstrated a wobbly step and then a dramatic collapse. “But Dot says babies are very interesting if you have the patience. I have the patience,” he said definitely. “Can I really sleep over? At their house? In the forest?”
“At their house in the forest. Eric’s going to come get you in a little while, bug.” She smoothed his hair. “I’ll give you a quick shower before you go, but you’ll need your bag. Go start putting your things by the door, all right? Toothbrush. The bear. Clean socks.”
“The bear,” Toby agreed, in the tone of a general listing his most vital troops. He rushed off towards the gate with the hard hat still jammed on his head, already narrating a list of necessities to himself under his breath.
She rose and found Garrick was watching her. The garden had gone very quiet around them, the light thick as honey through the roses.
“Sleepover,” he said, his voice carefully neutral. Gold surfaced in his eyes.
“He’s been asking about babies for a month.” She busied herself brushing dust off her thighs so she didn’t have to hold his gaze. “Robin thought it would be fun, and I thought it would be good for him.”
“It is good for him,” he agreed, evenly.
“So.” She made herself look up. Her heart was going like she’d run the length of the garden. “You watched my son all day and helped him build a distinguished bed. Let me cook you dinner.”