Chapter 20 mokita
mokita
Pulling the torn letter out of my pocket, I copied Cyrus Beck’s address onto a new envelope, then disposed of the evidence in the trash.
I had to be quick about this, since I was in the big house’s kitchen.
Every bone in my body told me that I shouldn’t meddle, that this wasn’t my place and I was getting in too deep, but I had lain awake for hours last night wondering how else to get him to stay away from Lilymoor.
This was my best bet. Eula had said he was thinking of coming, not that he had RSVP’d yet, so I still had a chance.
Now, staring down at a scratch pad I’d borrowed from the junk drawer, pen in hand, I had forgotten almost everything I’d planned to say.
Cyrus,
Please don’t attend the bicentennial. It’s for your own good.
No, I had a feeling he’d take it’s for your own good as a dare and come anyway. He seemed like the contrary type.
Cyrus,
I know you don’t know me, but it’s in your best interests if you take a vacation instead of coming to the bicentennial. Your aunt loves you very much and thinks you should definitely go to Cancún instead.
“Would he even want to go to Cancún?” I mumbled, because I couldn’t imagine Rus in that sort of party atmosphere. Honestly, I couldn’t even imagine him at a kid’s birthday party. He’d be the man hired to serve the husband divorce papers instead.
Cyrus,
I know you will read this and not believe me, but if you attend the bicentennial, you’ll be trapped in a magical garden where your aunt’s new head gardener will torment you for the rest of your days. I’d advise against that. (I’m the head gardener.)
Threatening, but probably not in the way I wanted. Scrubbing my head, I scratched out that letter, too, balled it up, and tossed it into the trash. It hit the rim and went bouncing out.
What was something I could say to make sure he didn’t come?
What did I know about Rus by now that would do the trick?
I knew he was a busybody workaholic who cared more about his job than himself, who had large warm hands and a bitter sort of humor that turned sweet at the edges, and he was impossible to get along with, and moody and awful. Truly awful.
Maybe I was thinking too hard about this.
It was probably as simple as—
Cyrus,
If you come to the party, you’ll waste your time.
There.
Perfect.
Even if it wasn’t, I didn’t have a better idea. So, before I could overthink this anymore, I folded up the letter, shoved it into an envelope, and sealed it with a lick.
“I hope this works,” I mumbled, putting a stamp on the corner, and hurried into the foyer to drop it off in the mail basket.
It was near lunch, and the mail carrier would be coming around soon, so I went ahead and put it with the rest of the outgoing mail in the foyer.
Eula had begged Wykofski to take her into town today, so the house was quiet.
Oliver’s car was missing, as it usually was at this time, and so I had assumed Juliette had broken for lunch, too.
Then I caught sight of her standing alone in the middle of the Central Garden with a thousand-yard stare.
“Juliette?” I called, coming down the steps of the veranda to meet her.
She quickly snapped back to herself, and it looked like her pulling on a coat. One moment her shoulders were rounded, her face slack, and the next she was all angles and smiles. “Sunny! Hi. I thought you were gone for lunch.”
“I had to go post something in the mail,” I explained. “You all right?”
“What? Of course. Why wouldn’t I b—” The ring of her cell phone cut her short. Her smile strained. She excused herself for a moment to go answer it, and by the time she came back, there was no disguising the overwhelmed look on her face.
So, I did something that broke every rule I had set for myself:
I invited her to lunch.
Since I hadn’t gone to the grocer’s for a week or so, and I still wasn’t sure what hours the grocery store held, I had just enough bread for two sandwiches, and just enough vegetables and turkey meat for us.
Juliette was a vegetarian, so she took the bell peppers and carrots, and I made do with a slice of cheese and the rest of the turkey.
Well, Reggie and I made do. He always seemed to come sniffing around during lunchtime.
“I should have known things were going too smoothly,” Juliette lamented, biting into her sandwich.
We were sitting on the swing outside my cottage, where a rabble of roses had grown up around the frame.
“Like, I used to work for a publisher, right? I had a boss who always told me, ‘Juliette, if you cry in the bathroom, at least make sure the stall door is locked,’ and ‘If things are going too smoothly, brace for impact.’” She looked forlornly down at her sandwich.
I fed Reggie another piece of turkey. “What happened?”
“I left the stall door unlocked too many times,” she replied, and then realized what I meant. “Oh! The string quartet had to pull out. Apparently their cello player went running in the woods at night, fell, and cut up his foot and his bow hand.”
“What was he doing running in the woods at night?”
“He said he felt like it.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it again. And then shrugged. “Sure, that’s fair. So, no more string quartet?”
“No, and they didn’t even have, like, a backup cello player!” She angrily ate a cut of bell pepper. “And everyone else I’ve called said it’s too short notice or they’re, like, booked up until Christmas. I’m so disappointed.”
I would hate to be someone who disappointed Juliette. “Is there anyone local we can ask?”
“Honestly, I don’t know local people all that well.
I’ve only been here about a year.” She fed Reggie a piece of carrot, and he ate it just as willingly as the turkey I kept sacrificing.
“Anyway, thank you for listening. I’ll figure something out.
Like, I always do. But are you all right?
Like, with the addition of the Willow Grove and everything . . . I bet you’re, like, mad stressed.”
The Willow Grove was something easy to manage. It was the discovery of a secret garden that kept disappearing with a man inside who couldn’t escape that had me worried. I shrugged. “It’s just been a weird week or two.”
“It has been,” she admitted. “And the Oliver of it all doesn’t help.”
I thought about his abs and the way his ass looked in sweat-pants. “No—no, he certainly doesn’t.”
She leaned in toward me, her eyes bright. “But, like, he’s such a cutie, isn’t he?”
I remembered the moment in his car, him leaning toward me, sunlight bouncing through the windshield, turning his blond hair gold and his eyes caramel, his gaze settling on my mouth in an unanswered question. “He’s very pretty.”
“I’m just shocked he’s staying. From everything I heard, he hasn’t before. At least not for more than a few days. You know, he’s the head of the family’s architecture firm so, like, he’s super busy.”
Oliver? The man who seemed more likely to play hooky as much as he could was the head of an architecture firm? “He only told me that he helped restore old houses.”
Juliette rolled her eyes. “Helped? He’s like, the guy.
Eula Beck and her late sister started the firm.
She’s, like, super famous in her field, apparently.
” She cocked her head in thought. “I haven’t heard much of anything about her other nephew, though.
I think he’s a lawyer or something? Do you think he’ll show up, too?
” she asked in a tone more suited for Do you think the other shoe will drop?
I gave Reggie the rest of my sandwich, and he happily snarfed it down. “No, I don’t.”
At least, I hoped not.
“I don’t think so, either,” Juliette agreed. “It’s just so sad, you know. About the greenhouse. It was already sad with Mr. Beck, but . . .”
I’d heard bits and pieces about the Lilymoor greenhouse from online Reddit threads and the gossip mill at NYBG, but nothing solid.
I knew that Henry Beck kept all his sprouts and seeds there, and most of his blue-sky plans for Lilymoor in the shed attached.
But then, tragically, he passed away from a stroke while out in the Central Garden one autumn day, and the next summer the greenhouse caught fire.
I wished I could learn more, but it didn’t seem like a topic anyone liked to bring up—ever.
There was a word for that. I knew it intimately; since I’d danced around the topic of Harriett’s death for so many months afterward, the dance now felt like second nature.
Mokita. Agreeing to ignore a truth, no matter how painful.
“I feel bad for this family,” she admitted softly, scrubbing Reggie behind the ears before he started whining again.
“But I understand them, too. Why Eula stayed, and why her nephews left.” She said it with the weight of someone who had personal experience in the leaving.
It occurred to me then—why was someone as competent and talented in her profession as Juliette all the way up here? Then again, why was Wykofski?
Why was I?
My chest felt tight, and I absently rubbed it. “Yeah …” And it wasn’t the avenue I wanted to go down. “Well, I hope everything works out, but speaking of which, you never told me about your date the other week.”
At the mention of it, she perked up and grabbed my wrist. Her eyes sparkled. “Oh, Sophie, it was amazing,” she gushed, smiling. “His name is Myke—with a y.”
“Ah. The usual spelling.”
She rolled her eyes. “He’s nice. He owns his own dental office! And he asked about my job. Do you know how rare that is?”
“Honestly, no,” I admitted. “I haven’t dated in .
. .” I counted on my fingers, though I really didn’t need to.
I knew how long it had been, because the day Sanchez called me about Harrie was the day I was supposed to go out with some guy named Elliott.
The date never happened, because I booked a red-eye to California that night. “Almost two years?”
“Oh, you are much stronger than me,” she said, nodding seriously. “And then you come all the way up here to keep that streak going! I’m impressed.”
I barked a laugh at that. “It helps when you work all the time.”
“Maybe you have the right idea,” she admitted.
“Like, I don’t mind meeting people online, right?
But whatever happened to the old-fashioned way of finding a date?
In a book-store with someone who looks like a young Billy Crystal or Tom Hanks?
” Sighing wistfully, she looked down at Reggie slobbering all over the hem of her pencil skirt and said, “You’re the only good boy in this entire town. ”
“Myke with a y could be a contender,” I reminded her.
She laughed. “He could, couldn’t he? I like the idea. I hope he asks me on another date.”
“He hasn’t yet?”
Her mouth pressed into a thin line. “He’s busy, you know.”
“Yes, fighting cavities,” I deadpanned.
“I’m busy, too,” she added.
Once upon a time, Harrie would have rolled her eyes and said, “Stop making excuses for other people. They can make those themselves.”
But I didn’t know Juliette well enough to say that, and besides, she did have a point.
She was very busy with the bicentennial and the influx of interview requests about Eula’s retirement.
Her knees kept bumping up and down anxiously like she couldn’t quite sit still. Too much to do, too little time.
“But if he doesn’t text me by the weekend, I think I’ll follow up with—oh shoot,” she added as her phone vibrated in her lap. She looked at the notification and paled. “Oh no.”
“What?”
“Sorry, buddy,” she said, pushing Reggie off her lap and rubbing the drool away as she stood. “I have to go. Better Homes and Gardens wants to schedule an interview about the bicentennial.”
“Keep me updated on Myke with a y. Maybe he’ll pull through for us.”
She gave it a laugh. It sounded like a chime. “You should try to date, even if it’s bad. It’ll be a good story at least. My one rule is no musicians, and I promise you don’t want to know why.”
“I’ll think about it,” I replied, and she made a motion to let me know that she was watching as she gathered her trash.
“And while you’re thinking, if you remember you have a contact in an orchestra, let me know.”
“I don’t think I do, but I’ll ask around.”
“Teamwork makes the dream work!” she declared, and she hurried off to the house to go book that interview.
She reminded me of a hummingbird—flitting about, sweet and fleeting.
Myke with a y didn’t know what he had. Most people didn’t, I had come to discover, until they lost it.
You got so used to having something—to it being there—that when it no longer was you kicked yourself for wondering why you hadn’t spent more time talking with them, and sharing stories, and committing them to memory.
Hindsight was always sharp and bitter when you finally used it.