twenty-six.
Marsden didn’t care that the mayor’s relatives were in town, or that they were from somewhere south of Glory and it was their first visit west.
She especially didn’t care that out of all the hotels and motels in town, they’d chosen to stay at Nina’s boardinghouse.
But Nina cared, which meant Dany had to care, which meant all of a sudden, nothing was good enough.
“Let’s go over the dinner menu again.” Dany pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and flipped pages in her binder.
At the sink, Marsden looked at the large assortment of mixing bowls still left on the counter, at the tiny dots of butter and sugar still sparkling on the backs of her hands. The entire room smelled of the lemon-berry pound cake that was now baking for that night’s dessert. It was one of the kitchen’s most popular summer desserts, and Nina had asked that Marsden make it specifically.
Marsden rolled her eyes and began to scrub dishes. “This is all because of the mayor’s family, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” Dany sighed. “Sorry, but I’m now wondering about our choice of salad. And it’s early enough in the day that we have time yet to make adjustments.”
“What’s wrong with a Caesar?”
“It’s pedestrian. I know Nina would prefer something more refined.”
Nina, wanting refined for the dining room while her prostitutes would be seated in it, dressed to the nines. “How about we just get more of that rocket? It’s spicy enough to be different.”
“Too different, I think.” Dany laughed, though she still looked slightly desperate. “What if they complain?”
“Okay, we keep the Caesar, but add avocados and grilled garlic shrimp, and then switch out the croutons for baked parmesan chips.”
“That sounds perfect—mind heading out to town to get everything? I’ll finish cleaning up here, and then I’m supposed to help supervise Wynn and her friends at a birthday party. I’m already feeling sorry for the poor mother who volunteered her house.”
“Sure.” And she would stop at Seconds afterward to ask Fitz about a certain photo.
After borrowing Peaches’s instant camera yesterday, she’d gone into the dining room right before dinner and taken pictures of the food, telling anyone who asked that she was getting a mock-up for a new brochure for the boardinghouse. Brom hadn’t even cared when she’d taken one of him, under the pretense of focusing on the table in the background—he’d been too busy telling Shine another story that had her mother laughing appealingly, appreciatively.
Marsden had hidden the photo inside a book in her room. She’d bring it today and show it to Fitz. Was this him? The man who might have destroyed everything? Over money, over my mother?
“Oh, one more thing.” Dany wasn’t done.
“Hmm?”
“Nina wants more flowers at the table tonight, and Evergreen has the best selection in town.”
•••
She locked her bike at the rack just outside of the garden center, double-checked that the paper bag of groceries stuffed whole into her backpack hadn’t self-combusted on the short ride over, and pulled open the door to Evergreen.
Her heart was pounding a bit faster than normal, and it sat in her throat like a tiny, nervous drum. She knew Jude was working, and she had no intention of disturbing him, but still. She’d never been on his turf before. Lunch at the Burger Pit had come the closest, but that had really been Abbot’s territory, and Marsden had walked away sure she’d held her own. She’d never really considered Abbot an enemy, though, or the person who would cause her the most grief for having known them.
That person would be, she was coming to believe more and more, Jude himself.
Every second of the day she regretted saying yes to him being in the covert, praying he’d find Rigby’s time capsule right then so he could finally leave her alone—just as every second she wanted to ask him if they were going to be friends come fall, if he was feeling safer at home and how his father was, if thinking about his brother was beginning to hurt less.
Inside the store, Marsden faced a sun-washed space, its yellow light afloat with bits of pollen and slow-wheeling motes of dust. Storefront window as wide as the room, crossed with panes. Blooms everywhere, their colors a spectrum that covered all ends of the earth: arrangements of dove-gray pussy willows, baskets heaped with pink and purple and blue cottage garden plants, a stand overflowing with freshly potted geraniums exploding into bursts of oranges and reds.
Used to the intoxication of wild ginger, it took a moment for her nose to react to the presence of other plants, and when it did, Marsden was positively steamrolled with scent, breathing in miles of it—lavender’s plushness, rose’s tang, the bright nip of sweet peas.
Evergreen wasn’t the only florist in town, but it was likely the most memorable—no other place seemed capable of being both so riotous and calming at the same time.
Unsure of what to buy—Dany had said something summery and casual—and wanting to leave before Jude saw her, she looked around and hurriedly decided on sunflowers. There was a huge table display of them off to the side of the room, generous handfuls of their oversize yellow blooms stuck into old-fashioned milk pitchers. They sang of picnics and lemonade and kites on the breeze, all kinds of summery things—they’d be perfect.
That Marsden had once heard Nina say snippily to Dany that she thought they were cheap looking only made them even more perfect for the job.
There were other customers at the display, a group of women swarming over the flowers like bees over honey, charmed by the burst of sunshine-hued petals. She decided to wait them out and moved over to poke at a nearby display of tall ornamental grasses, a fountain of blue-green plumes that went higher than her head. Pampas Grass, the label said, and Marsden wondered if it was Jude’s handwriting. She could trace out Rigby’s by heart, but she had never come across his brother’s.
When the chattering women were gone, she turned back toward the table, determined to finally get Dany’s flowers.
There was still another customer there, a tall, broad-shouldered man with a stern expression that was, at the moment, annoyed. Cool blue eyes, hair the shade of wheat, pale skin that had somehow escaped the sun. He wore a dress shirt and black pants and carried a briefcase, clearly about to head into an office somewhere. He looked at his watch and grimaced.
Leo Ambrose had never been a patient man.
Marsden’s mind went blank, and before she could question what made her do it, she simply turned back around and ducked behind the stand of ornamental grasses.
Apparently, she didn’t mind waiting him out, either.
Her bag with its ingredients for dinner was starting to pull at her shoulders, and over the scent of flowers that permeated the space, she could smell the garlic that coated the shrimp, the smokiness of parmesan.
Marsden nudged two fat, feathered plumes of grass apart and peeked through.
Jude’s father, still surrounded by summer, was glancing at his watch again, his impatience now nearly a glower.
She could see Jude in the man’s features. He’d gotten his tall, lanky build, his intricately sculptured hands, his easy-to-curl mouth from his father. From his mother, his dark skin and eyes and wavy near-black hair.
So it deeply confused Marsden how Leo could look at his sons, be reminded of his wife, and still be able to hurt them—as the story went in Glory, he’d been shattered when Isabel had died. She’d been everything to him—shouldn’t his sons by her be just as important?
But maybe it wasn’t so much about love as it was about hate—or, at least, trying to get over that love. After all, Shine looked at her daughters and was reminded of a man who’d left her in the worst position possible. Maybe it was just about survival.
“Roadie says you were looking for me?”
Through the blue-green grass, she watched Jude approach his father. His eyes were cold, letting Leo knew he wasn’t welcome. Weeks rewound, spun back, and she was looking at the same boy who’d walked the halls at school.
“You’ve been making yourself scarce at home, so I had no choice but to come to your work. We’ll talk here if we have to.” Leo’s voice was stiff, tinged with resentment for finding himself where he was. Still Marsden could hear the elegant clip of his accent beneath it, still hear its smooth, carefully cultivated tones. Leo, clinging to his East Coast roots despite more than a decade of living in Glory—or, perhaps, because of it.
Jude took off his work gloves and shoved them into his back pocket. “Well, I’m still on the clock, so what’s up?”
“I admit I haven’t been around as much as I could be, either, since your brother. But I think we should make more of an effort to spend time together as a family.”
“I don’t think so.”
Leo sighed. “You’re not going to make this easy, are you?”
“Am I supposed to?”
“Yes. Who else do you have left now?”
“I’m fine.”
“You have to stop blaming me for Rigby.”
Jude went still, the sudden silence heavy in Marsden’s ears. Beneath it, she was vaguely aware of the rest of the shop, of customers continuing to linger over blossoms and blooms and other living things, their soft, approving murmurs a near chant. Her breath made the blue-green grass at her face shimmy and flutter.
“You beat the living hell out of him for years, Dad,” Jude finally said. “Don’t think you had nothing to do with it.”
“I didn’t pull the trigger.”
“Then you held the gun.”
“You’d have to be blind to believe him going to that damn covert with a gun wasn’t a long time coming.”
“Eight years coming—science fair when I was nine, remember? Are you finally going to tell me what you guys argued about that night?”
“No. It’s over. Let it go.”
Jude shook his head, his face hard. “I can’t.”
Marsden had had the same conversation with Shine about her father’s death, why she couldn’t let it go. The echo of that moment in the washroom of the boardinghouse lobby rang in her ears now, pushed right up alongside the echo of Jude’s and Leo’s words, until it all became hard to tell apart.
“You need to.” Leo’s knuckles were white around the handle of his briefcase, and his words came in a sawing kind of rasp, their elegance shattered. “There are far worse things than choosing to see only what’s good and ignoring the rest. Some things are meant to stay buried, and some people should not have to be changed. Trust me.”
“I can’t do that, either.”
“Will you just—”
“Hey, Jude—sorry, but where are these supposed to go again?”
Jude and his father turned to look at the worker who’d come up behind them. He was pushing a wide dolly full of flats of herbs, the colors of the plants all greens and silvers. Marsden recognized mints and basils and thymes, their branches starting to sprawl out of their individual baskets.
“Um, by the bedding plants.” Jude gestured with his thumb toward the back of the shop. “Cleared off some space on the display unit for you already.”
The worker nodded his thanks, and he wheeled the dolly away, leaving Jude and Leo still gripped by silence and Marsden not daring to move as she peeked at them through grass.
“You know, your mother used to grow plants like those herbs,” Leo said quietly. Marsden felt a twinge of pity for him—his attempts at healing things with his remaining son were more than awkward. She thought it was like watching someone try to reach shore in a leaky boat while turned halfway around, and then someone standing on that same shore yelling at them to not bother. “After she died, your brother did his best to save them all, even though she had dozens growing everywhere, scattered all over the house and yard. He even went and planted one out in the covert when he saw that it needed shade, not sun, to thrive.”
Marsden’s pulse leaped at the words, knew Jude’s was doing the same by the stunned expression on his face.
With a slightly shaky hand, she pushed the blue-green grass at her face a bit farther apart, leaned in closer toward Jude and his father, and learned how a seven-year-old Rigby Ambrose, in the name of mourning, came to be the one who changed her family’s covert forever.