message, but had he? What if he hadn’t given her the message? What if her answering machine was broken? What if that stain really was anthrax?
Why hadn’t she returned his call?
Only two things had slowed the swarming gnats of anxiety in the past two weeks: Tilly’s garden and Tilly’s smile. And he needed to see both.
* * *
James glanced at the fogged-up shower and tried not to think about previous tenants, about the dead skin cells they’d sloughed off, about the dirt they’d tracked in. He hadn’t lived in rented accommodations since he was a student. And then he’d been too fucked-up to think about anything. He rubbed condensation from the mirror and tossed the damp bath sheet into the shower. The laundry would have to wait. He tried to hold on to that thought, but it slipped away and doubt crept back in, roaming his gut, searching for a hold, second-guessing the decision he had made ten minutes earlier.
Decision-making was exhausting, a haze of uncertainty entwining one consequence around another. And there would be consequences for what he was about to do, but it was a risk worth taking. Tilly could help him—he knew it. And if the thought of seeing her again gave him a hit of pure desire, that was an inconvenience he could overcome.
The psychologist in Chicago had told him obsessions and compulsions were like wild mushrooms popping up constantly. That he needed to stay vigilant, always mindful of situations that could trigger his OCD, which didn’t help when he was attracted to a woman who lived her life in dirt. A woman who didn’t seem to care that the flatbed of her truck resembled a bag lady’s shopping cart. If Tilly agreed to work for him, would she let him clean out her truck?
James admired the small tattoo of a coiled, black snake on his right hip, his constant reminder that when it came to snakes, he was phobia-free. Possibly even brave. And he was lucky—might as well monopolize on this good mood—that his body had aged well. On the other hand, that wasn’t so much luck as a freakish amount of exercise. Was fear behind that, too, a determination to control his body if not his mind?
James stretched and enjoyed the air caressing his skin. Naked, he was released from fabrics that itched and scratched. Labels were the worst offenders. But then again, none of his clothes had labels for long. He amputated every one.
If he didn’t know better, he might say he was relaxed, which was not an adjective he ever used to describe himself. James didn’t do relaxed. Volted-up was how Sam, his best friend of forty-two years, described James. He liked that analogy. Besides, nervous energy had its uses. No to-do list was a match for James.
He leaned forward, the edge of the vanity cutting into his stomach. Retirement was playing havoc with his grooming. His hair hadn’t been this long since grad school and the beard still threw him. He barely recognized the face staring back. Or was that the point. If he changed the outside, would the inside follow?
Humming “Straight to Hell” by The Clash, James walked into the bedroom and slid open the closet door with his elbow. He reached into a rack of black, long-sleeved shirts and pulled his lucky Vivienne Westwood off its cedar hanger. Why not? He had nothing to lose except his pride, and that had never stopped him when a woman was concerned.
Chapter 5
You had to admire a middle-aged woman, even one as invasive as evening primrose, who accentuated her large breasts and rolls of stomach flesh with Lycra. No hiding behind plus-size smocks for Sari. Although her puce wedgies, adorned with large plastic flowers that flapped like dying lunar moths, pushed the limits of taste.
Bucking through a sneeze, Sari tripped over an exposed tree root. “Gesundheit,” she said.
What, she doesn’t trust me to bless her? Tilly continued marching toward the greenhouse.
“Time to fix the driveway, hon.” Sari trotted to keep up.
If you didn’t barrel down my driveway five mornings a week, screeching a duet with Bruce Springsteen and kicking up gravel, it wouldn’t need fixing. Tilly bit back the retort. Speedy-Sari-bumps, that’s what Isaac called the craters Sari’s tires had gouged into the driveway. Potholes and noise, Sari had brought both into Tilly’s life.
“You still pissed about the James thing? Is that why you don’t want a lift to the airport tomorrow?” Sari smiled, but the gesture was laced with menace. Her challenge might have worked three years earlier, before guilt became a constant companion. But now? Hey, good luck on that one.
“Sari, you’ll be too busy here to drive us to the airport.” Tilly’s voice dragged in the heat. “And ignore James if he calls.” Just as I’m ignoring my memories of Sebastian. But there he was again: her first love, taking up space in her mind.
“James is…loaded.” Sari increased her pace with a pant. “I…looked him up on Google.”
Sari rabbited on, sharing details of her Google search. James had invented an interactive web game that millions of people were addicted to, including Sari’s two teenage boys. She dismissed the game as having to do with accumulating assets and dominating the world. As always, it was the bottom line that interested Sari: James had made enough money to sell his software company in Chicago and retire to North Carolina at forty-five.
Sari batted away a mosquito. “Tils, you need to step outside your comfort zone, discover the world of clients rich and ready for the taking.”
Tils. A lazy word that slid from the side of Sari’s mouth, an abbreviation of an already abbreviated name. Tilly shook back her hair, forgetting she’d lopped it off a few weeks earlier with the kitchen scissors. Something clicked and scrunched in her head. Her brain rusting up in the heat? She shook her head again. Click, scrunch. What depressing sounds to come from the center of your consciousness.
“You have zilch vision,” Sari said.
“Yup. Visionless and proud of it.” There was no point disagreeing. Tilly didn’t want vision, she wanted survival—hers and Isaac’s. The jury was still debating the survival of Piedmont Perennials, a business that had sprung out of the infertility of grief. Her secret fantasy niggled, the one in which the business folded and she and Isaac retreated to England. Of course, Issac would be devastated, which made her daydream his nightmare. No, Piedmont Perennials had to survive, and for that Tilly needed the woman she longed to fire.
“Come on, hon. Look around you.” Sari circled her arms as if she were an overweight swimmer flailing in a rubber ring. “You’ve created five acres of landscaped heaven out of jungle. You know a thing or two about landscape design.”
How had Sari sneaked into Tilly’s life? Was it the tricolor cookies? She had already disarmed Tilly with a nasally slide of vowels and dropped r’s that screamed “Brooklyn!” before dumping the pièce de résistance: Sari grew up two blocks from David’s childhood home in Sheepshead Bay and still bought tricolors, moist and rich with raspberry, almond and semisweet chocolate, from the bakery in David’s old neighborhood. She even had a box in her freezer and had promised to share. The tricolors, when Sari finally brought them over, were stale.
The pileated woodpecker hammered into a tree then flapped away. He was the reason Tilly hadn’t hacked down the decapitated pine that, as Sari loved to point out, leaned over the propane tank. See? Sari was clued in. All would be fine, just fine.
“Sari, you’ve been a godsend.” True, until the James debacle. “If you didn’t load up my truck and not return till every shrub was sold, I’d be donating plants
