6. The Aster File
Chapter six
The Aster File
RUE
Sunday morning does not know it is Sunday. Not on my porch.
Six days out from the auction, I have coffee, a legal pad, and a list as long as my arm, because that is how I rest. Debbie Sue calls it a problem. I call it a calling with excellent hours.
The Hall is booked, the band confirmed, the roof motor is oiled. Saturday night we raise the money for that poor tired engine or I retire in shame.
And then there's the show nobody's paying me for.
The new firefighter and the traveling nurse.
Not clients. Neither one of them has set foot in my office, and if I ever suggested it, they'd bolt in opposite directions on principle.
But half of Willowbend has watched them fight at that hospital like it's a ticketed event.
Twice this week somebody has called me about it.
Millie called three times, but my cousin Millie calls three times about everything, including the weather she is currently standing in.
Here is what nobody understands about my job. When a client hires me, I never ask who they love. I don't ask their type, their list, their deal-breakers. Lists are testimony. People lie on lists, mostly to themselves.
Asking only gets you what a person chooses to tell you.
Watching gets you what they can't help showing you.
So I watch. I watch who they argue with.
I watch who they look for when a door opens.
That's the method, and the method doesn't come with an off switch.
Nobody hired me to notice that Owen Peterson has been in this town nine days and has picked one person, out of all four thousand of us, to fight with.
Nobody hired me to notice that Nellie Greer, who I'm told never learns a soul's name past what fits on a badge, knows his coffee order.
I noticed anyway.
Eleven couples matched out of my Hall. Zero divorces. Those two would make twelve, and they'd do most of the work themselves. All that pair needs from me is a well-timed door and somebody holding it open, looking innocent.
I'm not in a hurry. That's the other thing nobody understands. You cannot want it more than they do. You wait, and you watch, and when the moment comes you hold the door open and act surprised.
I set my mug down and stretch. My whole body says walk.
So I walk.
There's a back lane behind my cottage that runs along the fence line toward the creek, and three springs ago it went and covered itself in wild asters.
Blue-purple, Gran's exact favorite, blooming in a ribbon like somebody unspooled it there on purpose.
I found it a few weeks after I lost her, back when grief was still teaching me its schedule, and it has been my thinking place ever since. My secret. Mine and the asters'.
Except this morning my secret has a man in it.
James Parker is on his knees in my lane. Trowel in one hand. A flat of seedlings in the dirt beside him. His glasses have slid all the way down his nose, and there's a smear of soil on his cheek where he's pushed them up wrong at least four times.
He hears my footsteps and freezes like a deer. Like a lawyer, a councilman, and an ordained minister caught red-handed at seven in the morning.
"Rue." He says my name the way other men say your honor.
"James."
"I can explain."
"I surely hope so." I'm smiling already. Can't help it. "Because from here it looks like you're gardening my secret path."
His ears go pink. Thirty-six years old, three respectable jobs, and his ears go pink.
I go back for a second mug and bring it out to him, and we end up where I always end up, sitting in the grass under the big live oak with our backs against the bark. His hands are filthy. He holds the coffee anyway, careful, like it's evidence.
"How long?" I ask.
He looks at the seedlings. At the ribbon of blue running down the lane.
"Rue." He clears his throat. "It was never wild."
I hold real still.
"The path. I planted it. I plant it. Every year I add to it so it reaches wherever you walk." He pushes his glasses up and leaves another smudge. "And before you found this lane, there was another one. On the Hall property. The very first spring you were home."
The trail of asters. My first spring home. A line of blue leading off across Gran's land with a note that said find me where the wild asters grow brightest, back when I was too raw and too proud to follow anything, and I never walked it to the end.
"That was you." My voice comes out smaller than I planned.
"That was me." He turns the mug in his dirty hands. "You never followed it. So, I figured the trail could come to you instead. I moved it, year over year. Extended it out here so it would be waiting whether you ever came or not."
I look at the asters. Spring after spring of them. A man on his knees in the dirt before I ever said yes to a first date.
"Why asters," I say. I already know. I want to hear it.
"They were your gran's. Her favorite. She told me so about forty times, usually while I was holding something heavy.
She'd had me hauling and fetching since the week I came to town to help her put her affairs in order.
" A small smile. "I thought, Rue's going to grieve whether anybody helps her or not.
And grief needs somewhere to walk. I figured yours ought to be someplace Eleanor would've liked. "
I have interviewed a thousand people about love. I have a system, a method, a perfect record. And this man planted my grief a road, and never once took credit, and would have gone to his grave quiet about it if I hadn't caught him with a trowel.
"Tell me something about her," I say, when I can talk. "Something I don't know. Something that's only yours."
James laughs before he even starts. That's how I know it's a good one.
"Did you ever wonder where the yarn came from? For the scarf she was working on?"
"The periwinkle one." It's in my cedar chest. Unfinished, needles still in it. I've kept it all this time and never could say why, except that her hands touched it last.
"She came to my office at seven in the morning on a Saturday," he says. "Didn't ask. Appeared. Thermos in one hand, directions to Houston written on the back of an envelope in the other. Said no yarn within a hundred miles of this town was the right color and I was driving."
"Houston."
"Five stores, Rue. Five." He's grinning now, all the way. "She held skeins up to the window light in every one and said 'close' like the yarn had disappointed her personally. Made me hold colors against my forearm because, and I'm quoting, 'your skin's nearer to hers than mine is now.'"
My coffee's gone cold. I'm holding the mug with both hands.
"Fifth store, she goes quiet. Picks up one skein of periwinkle blue. Holds it to the light. And she says, 'There she is.'"
"There she is," I repeat.
"I asked who the scarf was for." James looks at me then, glasses smudged, dirt on his cheek, gentle as a Sunday. "She said, 'Someone who doesn't know yet that she's cold.'"
The lane goes blurry. All that blue, swimming.
I have that scarf.
Unfinished, needles still in it, folded over the arm of Gran's rocking chair the day I came home. Periwinkle blue. My color. I picked it up and knew, the way you know your own name, that she'd been making it for me.
I set my coffee down before I drop it.
"She never finished it," I say.
"No." James pushes his glasses up. "She ran out of time before she ran out of yarn."
He holds pieces of her I will never get firsthand. This morning that doesn't ache. This morning it is a gift with my name on it, years late and right on time.
I kiss him. Dirt on his hands and all. He makes a surprised sound against my mouth and then his filthy fingers are careful in my hair like I'm the seedling.
"I'm going to finish it," I tell him, forehead to his. "The scarf. Someday."
"She'd like that." A pause. His voice goes earnest, worried, entirely James. "Rue. Do you think I spaced the seedlings too close? The packet said eight inches and I did six, and I've been sick about it."
I laugh so hard I have to put the mug down.
Eight months official, since the Harvest Festival. Eight months, and this is the best morning of the whole run. Maybe the best morning I can remember at all.
I don't trust mornings with no flaw in them. Today I let myself anyway.
***
He goes home at dusk with a casserole dish and a kiss at his truck. I carry both cold mugs back to the porch and don't go inside.
The light does what it does out here, going gold and then bruised, and the oak by the porch fills up with dark. I sit on the step. And I do the thing I do when it's only me.
I talk to Gran.
"He planted me a road," I tell the oak. "From my very first spring home, Gran. You knew, didn't you. You were making me a scarf and telling him my color and you knew."
The wind moves the branches. High up, something shifts its weight.
"It's going too well." I say it quiet, like the yard might carry tales. "You know I know what too-well looks like. I've seen it. I lived in it a whole year once with a smile on my face."
I wrap my arms around my knees.
"I keep waiting for the other shoe. Tell me there's no shoe."
The wind stops.
And from the black heart of that oak, the mockingbird laughs.
Not sings. Laughs. Gran's laugh, the low rolling one she saved for when I was being a fool in a way that entertained her, so exact that every hair on my arms stands straight up and my heart slams once against my ribs like a fist on a door.
"That's not funny," I tell the tree. My voice shakes on it.
The bird laughs again, softer, winding down the way she used to, and then the oak goes silent and it is only a tree in the dark, and I am only a woman on a porch step with two cold mugs of coffee.
I make myself stand. Make myself gather the mugs. Make myself walk to the door like a sensible person who knows a bird is a bird.
But my hand stalls on the knob, and I stand there in the last of the light with my skin still prickling, because I asked my grandmother a question and something in that tree answered.
And it didn't sound like an answer.
It sounded like a warning.