Chapter 26 hiraeth
hiraeth
There was a daycare group playing in the Spiral.
Most of the time I didn’t mind children—I had been a child once myself, so we had that in common—but I knew at a young age that children definitely were not in my illustrious future.
So I had never been very good with kids, despite the fact that my best friend had wanted two and a half kids and had named them by the time she was twenty-three.
I went up to one of the young daycare attendants—she looked like a college kid home for the summer—and asked politely for the five-year-olds not to run on the stones, because if they fell their knees would get eaten up pretty badly, and so they instead moved to the Lily Walk, where they ran through the flowers. At least their knees would be saved.
The lilies, on the other hand . . .
I sighed and went to ask the same daycare worker to please stop the kids from running through the flower beds, when Oliver appeared in the archway to the Lily Walk and hurriedly made his way over to the same woman.
He glanced at me, looking annoyed—not at me, I hoped—and then pressed on a perfectly immaculate smile.
“Sorry to bother you,” he said in a syrupy voice, “but I wonder if you’d like to take your kids to the Central Garden? They can play hide-and-seek there.”
And at least they wouldn’t ruin the flowers if they fell into a bush. Then again, Damnit was stalking the Central Garden today.
They’d figure that out eventually.
“Oh no,” the young woman said, “they’re fine—”
“I’m more worried about the flowers,” he interrupted in that same smooth voice, “mostly because some of them are quite poisonous.”
She gave a start. “Oh, they are?”
“Very.”
If you’re a cat, I thought, but decided not to correct him, because it did the trick. The daycare attendant rounded up the dozen or so kids, and they all filed their way out of the Lily Walk and to the Central Garden.
Oliver slipped up beside me as he watched them go. Finally, when they were gone, his fake smile dropped, as did his pleasant voice. “Sometimes I wonder if we were all given common sense,” he muttered tiredly, “or if some of us were just lucky.”
“You were really good with them.”
He shrugged. “I’m used to dealing with the public.
Out of everyone at the firm, I’m usually the one sent to talk to clients.
” He scrunched his nose. “We specialize in restoring older homes. There’s a funeral parlor I’m working on down in the Carolinas right now, in Mairmont.
Beautiful Second Empire–style house. Very Addams Family vibes.
Black mansard-style roof, immaculate gables—gorgeous, really. ”
“Nerd,” I teased.
He mock-gasped, pressing his hand to his chest. “Me? Never. I love football,” he said, and I rolled my eyes, only for him to laugh. Talking with Oliver was easy, I found. Maybe it was because he was so good at public relations, but it reminded me of Harrie. A sort of comforting, joking camaraderie.
It was very different than anything I felt around Rus.
Around Oliver, it felt … like the stakes were so low, they were in the ground. Maybe I blushed around him, but it didn’t feel the same as with Rus. Around Oliver, I felt surprised and flustered. Around Rus, I felt . . .
I felt like I couldn’t hide. Like I was seen.
A mother and her two kids wandered into the Lily Walk, though whereas the daycare had run amok, they took their time, pointing at the placards and the bees.
Oliver watched them for a moment before saying, “I miss the garden—back before Henry died. We used to always find him somewhere out here. It was like a hunt. He’d be gone all day and then wander in for dinner with dirt all over him, and the next day we’d find something new.
A boxwood shrub cut into the shape of a cat.
A newly dug pond. A flower bed. A tree swing.
The garden was always changing with him.
Now I miss something that doesn’t really exist anymore. ”
I watched the young girl pick up a flower on the pathway and stick it in her sister’s hair. “There’s a word for that—hiraeth.”
“That’s a pretty word. Hiraeth,” he repeated slowly, letting it languish on his tongue. Then he smiled, though it was bitter-sweet. “I like it. You know a lot of strange words.”
“My best friend used to collect them,” I supplied, picking at my nails. “So I guess I do now, too.”
He grimaced. “Ah, a falling out? I’ve been there.”
“Something like that,” I admitted, though I didn’t explain, and he didn’t ask.
How different Oliver was from Rus. Instead of confronting the topic, he just let it be entirely. I wasn’t sure which I liked better, though leaving it felt safer. It was the way I’d operated for so long, wiggling out of discomfort before I could sit and inspect it.
He turned to me, a strange look on his face. “I’ve a question.”
“I’ve an answer,” I replied.
“When do you want to get dinner?”
“When my calendar’s free,” I replied, because the truth was my evenings were pretty tied up with my golden-hour visits. Even if Rus furrowed his brow and grumbled about me wasting my time.
Oliver bit back a grin, shaking his head. “You’re trouble, you know that?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Mm-hmm.” He held up a piece of paper. “Well, Miss Head Gardener, guess I should get to why I came out here looking for you in the first place.”
“Oh? Not just to chase off some toddlers?”
“Regrettably I’ve been promoted to personal shopper.” He showed me the list on the memo paper. It was written in Eula’s long, elegant script. “And I was wondering if you knew what kind of tea she likes. She just wrote down London Fog, and I’m not a big tea person.”
“I’m not, either, but I think it’s loose-leaf.
The kind in a cylinder this big,” I said, making the shape with my hands.
“I think it’s in the back corner of the grocery store, where the imports are.
” He nodded, frowning, looking more lost than he had a moment ago.
This is what I’ve come to know as weaponized incompetence, though I regretted to admit that it looked somewhat cute on him.
For the moment. I hoped it wouldn’t venture into annoying.
“If you want me to come along, you can just ask.”
His eyebrows jerked up. “Whoa now.”
“Or do you want me to suggest it?” I added, folding my arms across my chest.
He shook his head. “See? I told you. Trouble.”
I plucked the grocery list from his hand. “We can take my Jeep. I haven’t driven it in a while.”
The only grocery store in town was a small mom-and-pop shop in the heart of Odette, across from a hardware store and a secondhand shop that often moonlit as the tourist center.
At the corner was the only coffee shop in town, an Italian restaurant, and Pinch, the lobster roll shack.
There was also the Bar-nacle, a motel that smelled of old cheese—I’d know because when I checked in, I got the distinct smell of Gouda in my room and no cheese plate in sight—beside the neon-lit dive bar, called the Wharf, that probably served cold beer even in a snowstorm.
Past the small hub of the town were houses inter-spersed between wide swaths of evergreens and a road that curled up to the main coastal highway.
So basically, it was almost impossible to get lost.
All the shops in town kept random hours, so it didn’t surprise me that once we parked on the street and arrived at the grocery store, the only cashier informed us that it would be closing in five minutes.
I tore the grocery list in half and handed one piece to Oliver. “You take those, I’ll take these. Meet back at the register in five?”
He plucked the paper out of my hand. “You’ve done this before.”
“See you in five,” I said. “Ready, set, go!”
Eula’s grocery list was a lot of the basics I’d seen her eat in the last week—butter bread, peanut butter, apples, a bar of Hershey’s chocolate, and her Earl Grey tea.
I checked everything off the list and returned to the register before Oliver and set it all down on the counter.
He wheeled a grocery cart up a moment later, filled with paper towels and pasta and a few different TV dinners and some popcorn, and I announced, “I won.”
“I got distracted,” he replied with a pout as the cashier began to punch the barcode numbers into the register. The grocery was so old, it didn’t even have a scanner. Oliver then grabbed a cardboard container and held it up. “They have fresh strawberries. I couldn’t say no.”
“We have strawberries back at the house,” I said. “In the kitchen garden.”
He made a face. “Like that’s enough.”
The cashier, a Black woman around our age with delicate microbraids and beautiful turquoise eyeliner, agreed. “Oliver has a thing about strawberries.”
He gave her a hurt look. “It’s not a thing. That makes it sound perverse.”
“You and your cousin,” she went on, and added to me, “every summer they’d come in here and clean us out of strawberries and watermelon. It was like clockwork.”
“Okay, but Lala refuses to plant seedless watermelon,” Oliver pointed out, “so I had no other choice.” Then he explained, “When we were younger, Rus convinced me that if I ate a watermelon seed, it’d grow in my stomach.”
I snorted a laugh. I could see him doing that completely straight-faced and not regretting it for a second. Trouble-maker, indeed. “And how long did you believe that?”
“I still might, who knows?” Oliver said loftily.
The cashier giggled. “You never change, Ollie.”
He smiled at her. It was like the smile he gave the daycare teacher earlier, though this one felt a little warmer. Familiar. “And you’re always as pretty as ever, Nicole. How’s the husband? The kid—what name did she pick? Delilah?”
“They’re doing great,” she replied happily, finishing at the register and ringing everything up.
She gave him the total and he took out his wallet and paid in cash, dropping the change into the trans youth charity jar.
She handed him his receipt. “Oh! Could you tell Eula thank you for the invite to the bicen-tennial? I was so surprised when it arrived in the mail. It was so thoughtful that she invited us.”
“I’ll be sure to do that, Nicole. Be seeing you?”
“I’ll be here,” she replied, handing the three paper bags of groceries to us, and we left.
Oliver told me that Nicole’s family owned the grocery store, and so because he lived here every summer he’d gotten to know her fairly well when they were all kids.
They’d go to the beach together and hunt for crabs.
“She used to have the biggest crush on Rus,” he said, buckling himself into my Jeep again, and took a glance at the receipt, “so she’d give us an employee discount for the strawberries—ah!
See? She still does it.” And he pointed to the discount. “I bet Rus hasn’t seen her in years.”
“It’s nice she still gives you the discount.”
“Of course she does. That’s just how Odette, Maine, is. Even if you leave, you really don’t.” He shrugged, pocketing the receipt. “Unless you’re Rus, I guess.”
“Have you ever tried calling him?”
“The phone works both ways. Besides, I have nothing to say.” He dug into one of the paper bags and took out the container of strawberries.
We drove out of town and up the state road toward Lilymoor.
It was only a few miles outside of town, but with how overcast the skies looked, I wanted to get back sooner rather than later.
Driving these roads at night wasn’t the kind of thing I wanted to do.
“But enough about that boring workaholic,” he went on. “Want a strawberry?”
“While I’m driving?”
“I’ll feed it to you,” he tempted me, taking one out.
I kept both of my hands planted firmly on the wheel. “I’m good.”
He shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said, biting into the fruit. He hummed, happy. “The only thing that’d make this better is someone to share it with.”
I eyed him. “You’re slick.”
He laughed. “I’m trying, Miss Head Gardener.”
And oddly, it might have worked on me, but I was already thinking of my next visit to the garden, and the strawberries I’d take with me.