has one look at her and doesn’t dare another. Her hair is mussed up from sleep, and in her fuzzy sweater and acid-washed jeans, she looks so gorgeous it makes him short of breath. He turns his gaze instead to her feet, which are white and clean and bare and dainty.
Her brow furrows when she sees the plants in their pots. The mums already have felty green ears tufting up out of the dirt, big as hands.
“Huh! Well, I wonder if that ol’ be-yotch ripped you off, kiddo.”
“They aren’t mums?”
“They look like ’em. But they haven’t had time to grow so much. Not in ten days. I don’t know if these are mums or salad, but I have dark suspicions. I suspect this stuff is crap. Do you want to keep our great garden experiment going or chuck ’em?”
He narrows one eye at her, as he has seen Connor do when he’s about to crack wise. “Lettuce consider. Do you carrot all what we do?”
She needs a minute to get that one. When she does, she raps his shoulder with one knuckle.
“I guess weed better move them outside then. Get it? Weed? Get it?”
“Mm-hm,” he says. “Did you walk up here in your bare feet? They must be cold.”
“Yeah. You know I’m always in a hurry to get up here and start another day of whipping your scrawny ass into shape. Speaking of. Let’s chuck some food into you, huh? These aren’t the only things shooting up around here.”
His heart is so light and his spirits so high that he’s annoyed with himself for wondering why there was no dirt or grass on her feet if she walked up from the cottage barefoot. It’s like a mouthful of sour milk—there’s nothing to do with a thought like that but spit it out.
7.
They pat the earth down around the plantings and then sit together on their knees in front of Bloom’s grave marker. The air is rich with the mineral scent of fresh-turned loam. Her headstone is rose marble and by some modern alchemy has a photograph printed right on it: a nineteen-year-old Bloom smiles demurely, eyes downcast, flowers in her hair, on her wedding day.
The breeze stirs the green leaves of what might or might not be mums, bunched together below her waist-high stone.
Jack is pleased with the effect and proud of the work they’ve done this morning and is taken off guard when he sees tears dripping off the end of Beth’s upturned nose. He puts an arm around her—a not entirely unselfish act.
Beth wipes her hands across her cheeks and snuffles in a delightfully unfeminine way. “I wish I could have her back. She didn’t just love you. She loved me, too, more than I ever deserved. If I loved her as well as she loved me, she’d still be alive.”
“No,” Jack says. “That isn’t true.”
“It is. I knew what would happen to her if she left us. I should’ve got on my knees in the dirt and begged your father to let her come back home. I knew she couldn’t be out there on her own, not with all the rotten stuff banging around inside her head. And I let her go anyway, and what kind of person does that make me?”
Jack puts both arms around her and squeezes. “Don’t be sad, Beth. You didn’t make her slip in the bath.”
Beth makes a sound somewhere between a sob and a croak and squeezes him back. Her whole lean body, with its wiry muscles shifting under the skin, shudders.
“Besides,” Jack says, “you helped with the flowers. You’re telling her how much she meant to you now, just by planting them with me. Nothing says good-bye better than flowers.”
8.
Jack wakes from restless, overheated dreams and discovers he is sick. There is a great feeling of weight, of heaviness, in his chest. He sits on the edge of the bed, in the dark of his bedroom, taking stock. He coughs, tentatively, and produces a gravelly rattle.
He needs to be watered, he thinks. No—he frowns. He needs water, not to be watered.
He crosses the cold plank floor in bare feet. At the doorway he thumps his breastbone with one fist and clears his throat and coughs again. He coughs brown flecks into one palm. Blood? He turns his hand this way and that in the gloom and decides he’s looking at dirt.
Jack sways down the staircase. He feels pressure building in his chest, another cough getting ready to explode. He hears