Violet Evergreen's Arc

Chapter 8 of 11

The new coffee sat between them and cooled again. Danny asked her about the drive up. Violet asked him about the house. Their words landed flat and stopped. Twice she opened her mouth and closed it. She could feel the letter on the table like a third person in the room, and she could feel how quickly it would go quiet again if she let it. She stood up. "Show me the yard." Danny blinked. "The yard." "You said your mom kept a garden. I want to see it." He led her out the back door. The lawn ran down to a fence, and against the fence stood six raised beds in two neat rows. The wood was weathered. The soil was dark and turned. Some beds held rows of small green starts. One bed had gone to weed. A trowel lay on the grass where someone had dropped it. "She planted in April," Danny said. "Before. I've been watering. I don't know what half of it is." Violet crouched by the nearest bed. She pinched a leaf and rubbed it between her fingers. "Basil." She moved down the row. "Beans. Those are carrots, the feathery ones. That's dill going to flower. You need to pinch it back." "I don't know how." "I'll show you." She worked her way along the beds and named what she found. He crouched beside her. She handed him the trowel and told him where to dig. She showed him how to thin the carrots so the rest could grow. His hands were clumsy in the dirt. Hers were not. She had run a greenhouse for fifteen years. She had never told him that. He had never asked. "You do this at home," he said. It was not quite a question. "For a living. I sell at a market on weekends." He sat back on his heels and looked at her like he was seeing her for the first time that day. "I didn't know." "You couldn't have." They worked until the sun moved off the beds. They talked while they worked, and the talk did not stop the way it had stopped inside. He asked her what to plant next. She asked him what his mother had grown last year. He remembered tomatoes. He remembered a squash that took over one whole bed. She wrote a short list on the back of a seed packet she found by the fence. When they went in, her knees hurt and her nails were black. Danny set the list on the counter beside the folded letter. He did not move the letter. He set the list next to it, and the two pieces of paper lay there together. "Come back tomorrow," he said. "We'll do the weedy one." "I'll come back tomorrow," she said. They had something now that was not the past. It was a row of carrots that needed thinning again next week.