Chapter Twenty-Six
Viburnum: A flowering shrub or tree in the moschatel family with showy clusters of white or pink-tinged blooms whose spicy, almondy, vanilla scent stirs transformation
Cynthia continues on like a conductor drawing music out of a ragtag orchestra.
It turns out Vikram still has connections to a Sonoma winery from his restaurant days, and Cynthia persuades him to ask for a donation to the cause in the form of sparkling wine.
When Jill mentions she comes from a huge family, Cynthia convinces her to enlist her army of cousins to work at the party, serving the donated wine, Italian sodas, and the dozens of chai spice cakes that Adele and Vikram are planning to bake.
When she overhears Adele mention that her teenaged grandson, Peter, is a jazz cellist, Cynthia has her call him right then and ask him to bring a trio of musical friends to play music at the party.
It’s astounding, really, what she is able to do in such a short amount of time.
On Thursday, Cynthia and Marjorie have already joined Fitz and me at our usual lunch table when Louis walks over.
“Hot off the press,” he says, handing me a stack of glossy flyers. “Katie just stopped by with these. Aren’t they great?”
The flyer features a photograph of the restored gate to the woodland garden, with a stretch of the sunken garden in the foreground.
The image is captivating—the flower beds look elegant and vibrant, while the barely open gate reveals a peek of lush viburnum blossoms, conveying an air of mystery.
Below Louis’s photograph, the details for the party are written in a bold font, including Katie’s contact information to purchase tickets.
Save the Oceanview Home!
Spring Party
Come enjoy the historic home’s magical walled gardens—open to the public for the first time in history! Catering by Michelin-starred pastry chef Vikram Neel! Live music! Photography exhibit!
“These are great,” I say. “Did you take this photograph? It’s beautiful.”
Marjorie and Cynthia are leaning over the flyer now, too. “Oh, Louis,” Cynthia says admiringly. “What a talent you are!”
Even Fitz deigns to glance at Louis’s photograph and give a small, appreciative nod.
Louis tells us that Katie is sharing his photographs of the grounds and the residents on her social media accounts. The posts are getting even more views than she expected, and tickets for the party are selling quickly. “She thinks once we get these flyers up, we could sell out within days.”
“I’ll put them up in Bantom Bay tonight,” I promise. “We’ll just have to hope Donovan doesn’t ever stop in town on his way to the home.”
“He doesn’t strike me as a small-town shopper,” Cynthia says. “He probably gets everything he needs delivered to his home to save himself five minutes.”
“Yes,” Marjorie agrees. “I’m sure he orders from somewhere that overcharges and kills off the mom-and-pop competition.”
“Somewhere profitable, then,” Fitz says, but we all ignore him.
Soon Louis heads off down the ramp with his new camera in tow, leaving the four of us.
“Cynthia and I were looking at the website for the Redwood Village again yesterday,” Marjorie tells me. “We’ve decided that if we must move, we’ll move together. Everything is easier with a good friend at your side. Even, I hope, living in a place that appears to be made of cardboard.”
“It seems awfully dull,” Cynthia confirms. “But if necessary, we’ll change that with our sparkling personalities. I really don’t think it will come to that, though. I think we can turn this place around. We’re stronger than we realize.”
She looks at me then, her gaze level and steady and fully present.
“You showed me that, Lucy,” she says. “You and these gardens.
Who would have ever thought that they would flower so beautifully again?
It just proves that nothing is ever really gone.
We carry every turn of our lives, every version of ourselves, within us, forever. What a joy it is to understand that.
“I don’t know how long I’ll go on like this,” she continues quietly. “But that only makes me appreciate this more—this feeling of being myself again, this knowledge that my life is meaningful. It’s a gift to feel this way—to live once again with purpose.”
I nod, moved. Across the table, Fitz stares down at the chess set, but his body has gone still. I can’t help but feel that he listened closely to Cynthia’s speech and that he, too, was moved by it.
“You’re a true force of nature,” I tell Cynthia. “We couldn’t do any of this without you.”
She waves her hand. “Of course you could.” Then she adds, “Just not nearly as well.”
Marjorie seems to be laughing and crying at the same time.
Cynthia reaches out and pats her hand. “Well,” she says, “we didn’t come out here to let weeds grow over our feet, did we, Marjorie? Spirited gals like us need our exercise.”
“Quite right,” says Marjorie. “The gardens await. We’ll leave you two to your little chess club.”
“It’s not a club!” Fitz barks, but the woman are already walking away, their heads bent together, laughter trailing behind them.
Fog is racing over the Oceanview Home when I leave that afternoon.
I drive through the forest toward town, peering up through the windshield and frowning.
The spring party is a little more than a week away, and it’s the first time I’ve considered how the weather might affect the event.
You really never know what you’re going to get along the coast of Northern California in spring.
The past few weeks have been beautiful, though, with the occasional fog only present in the morning and evening.
I can only hope that the pattern will hold.
When I reach the Bantom Bay Community Center, I grab a flyer from the stack Louis gave me and leave Gully in the truck with the windows down and cool, damp air pouring in. After a moment’s thought, I select a pot of violet primroses from the bed of my truck and walk toward the building.
I spent so much time here as a kid, but I haven’t been inside the center since my mother died.
The outside, I notice, looks a little worse for wear, the paint peeling around the windows.
That’s not unusual for a building so close to the sea, though, and maybe it was always this way.
But I remember Roger saying he was meeting with some people to rehabilitate the theater, and I wonder if maybe the center is dealing with more challenges than just the perpetual lashings of salt air.
The answer is apparent when I walk inside.
In my memory, the small lobby of the community center was always bustling, bright, and welcoming, the efficient little hub of a building that held an art studio, meeting rooms, a gymnasium, and a theater.
Now, the room looks smaller and less tidy.
The walls—still the pale lilac I remember from my youth—could use a fresh coat of paint.
The colorful tiles on the floor look dingy, the grout between them now a shade of gray.
“These are a gift from the Oceanview Home,” I tell the teenaged girl at the reception desk as I set the primroses down.
Already, their soft purple color and fresh, airy scent make the lobby seem more inviting.
“There’s a party next week to raise money for the home to keep it from closing. Would you mind if I hung up a flyer?”
The girl breathes in the scent of the flowers and smiles dreamily. “Sure,” she says, gesturing across the lobby to where a bulletin board hangs at a precarious slant.
I pin the party flyer in a prominent spot and then ask if she minds if I peek into the art studio.
“No problem,” she says. “It’s down the hall, on the left.”
I don’t mention that I could have easily walked straight back to the art studio with my eyes closed.
At the entrance to the studio, I stop. There’s a brass plaque that I’ve never seen before beside the door.
The Nell McKinney Barnes Art Studio
I wonder if my dad is responsible for this, or if it was organized by the people my mom worked with here. Or maybe her students.
Inside the studio is much neater than it ever was when my mother worked there, but the shelves that used to be filled with painting supplies seem a bit bare. In a corner, there are a couple of easels that look like they need to be repaired.
Near the easels, hanging on the wall, is one of my mother’s paintings.
I step closer. The image is of a windswept beach, but the details are smudged and vague, veiled by a wash of blues cut through here and there by streams of golden sunlight.
Barely, just barely, I make out a figure kneeling in the sand, building something—perhaps a castle?
As I study the painting, a sense of determination swells within me, a strong impulse to find what lies on the other side of fear and self-doubt.
It’s the way my mother wanted her students to feel when they faced their own blank canvases, and so she painted the emotion into this image that her students looked at each time they entered her studio.
I look away from the painting, thinking of the stack of flyers Louis gave me and the potted flowers filling my truck bed. On the way out of the studio, I pause in front of my mother’s plaque. The brass is smudged a little, so I pull my T-shirt away from my stomach and rub the brass until it shines.
Ten minutes later, I find a parking spot right in the middle of the commercial stretch along Miramonte Drive.
For a moment, I just sit there, a familiar knot of shame tightening in my chest as I look out at all of the shops.
How long have I been running from this feeling?
Running from the place where I experienced my biggest regret, but also the place that is at the core of all of my best memories?
From the bed of my truck, the heady balm of phlox, primroses, daylilies, cosmos, and Persian buttercups tumbles toward me, steadying my pulse.
I think of my mother’s painting, and a feeling of determination spreads within me.
I take a deep breath, grab a flyer from the stack that Louis gave me, lift a pot of creamy white phlox into my arms, and head into Corde’s Hardware, Gully beside me.
“I see you’re putting those pots to good use,” Roberta says, nodding her head with gruff approval.
“This one’s for you,” I tell her, setting the phlox down on the counter.
The soft vanilla scent of the blossoms drifts arounds us, wafting gently through the aisles of the store.
“A gift from the Oceanview Home, along with an invitation.” I hand her the flyer and watch her eyes skate over the words.
When she looks up at me, I’m surprised to see that her eyes shine with excitement. “You might not know this about me, Lucy,” she says, leaning an elbow on the counter and lowering her voice conspiratorially, “but the only thing I love more than a good cause is a good party. Count me in.”
In Bantom Bay Books, Jody hangs up the flyer and assures me that she wouldn’t miss it. She tells me that the buttercups on the counter have filled the store with the most intoxicating fragrance all week, enticing customers to linger, leading them to discover books that they can’t resist purchasing.
In every shop I walk into along Miramonte Drive, store clerks familiar and unfamiliar to me breathe in the scent of the flowers that I set down on the counter, hang up the flyers, and promise to attend the party.
Many have never been to the Oceanview Home and are excited to finally see it in person.
Others have relatives or friends living at the home and are grateful to have an opportunity to help save it.
To my relief, not a single person mentions Jack Harris.
By the time I’ve stopped into every shop, the fog has lifted, the early evening sky is a gentle shade of blue, and the air of Bantom Bay shimmers with the soft, fresh promise of spring, transformed by the scent of flowers.