Garden Spells

  “It’s getting late,” Fred said. “People are already putting out blankets. Maybe I missed him.”

  Evanelle saw James approach before Fred did. James was a tall, handsome man. He’d always been very thin, the way moody, creative poets with long fingers and soulful eyes were thin in days of old. Evanelle had never had a bad word to say about James. No one did, really. He worked for an investment firm in Hickory and kept to himself. Fred had been his one and only confidant for over thirty years, but suddenly that had changed, and neither Fred nor anyone else in town could figure out why.

  But Evanelle had her suspicions. You stick around long enough in this life and you start to understand its ebbs and flows.

  There was a type of craziness caused by long-term complacency. All the Burgess women in town, who never had less than six children each, walked around in a fog until their children left home. When their youngest finally left the nest, they always did something crazy, like burn all their respectable high-neck dresses and wear too much perfume. And anyone who had been married for more than a year could testify to the surprise of coming home one day and finding that your husband had torn down a wall to make a room bigger or your wife had dyed her hair just to make you look at her differently. There were midlife crises and hot flashes. There were bad decisions. There were affairs. There was a certain point when sometimes someone said, I’ve just had enough.

  Fred went still when he finally saw James approach.

  “I’m sorry I’m late. I almost didn’t make it.” James was a little out of breath, and a fine sheen of perspiration dotted his forehead. “I was just at the house. I took a few things, but the rest is yours. I wanted to tell you that I have an apartment in Hickory now.”

  Ah, Evanelle thought. That was the reason James wanted Fred to meet him here, so James would know when Fred wasn’t going to be in the house and he could take things out without having to discuss it first with Fred. One look at Fred, and Evanelle knew he’d figured that out too.

  “I’m taking early retirement next year, and I’ll probably move to Florida. Or maybe Arizona. I haven’t decided yet.”

  “So that’s it?” Fred asked, and Evanelle could tell there were too many things he wanted to say, all fighting to get out. Ultimately, the only thing that escaped was “That’s really it?”

  “For months, I was angry. Now I’m just tired,” James said, and he leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees. “I’m tired of trying to show you the way. I dropped out of school for you, I came here to live with you because you didn’t know what to do. I had to tell you that it was all right for people to know you were gay. I had to drag you out of the house to show you. I had to plan the meals and what we did with our free time. I thought I was doing the right thing. I fell in love with your vulnerability in college, and when your father died and you had to leave, I was terrified you wouldn’t be able to make it on your own. It’s taken me a long time to realize that I did you a great disservice, Fred. And myself also. By trying to make you happy, I prevented you from knowing how to figure it out on your own. By trying to give you happiness, I lost my own.”

  “I can do better. Just tell me—” Fred stopped, and in one terrible moment he realized that everything James said was true.

  James squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then he stood. “I should be going.”

  “James, please don’t,” Fred whispered, and grabbed James’s hand.

  “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t keep telling you how to live. I’ve almost forgotten how to do it myself.” James hesitated. “Listen, that culinary instructor at Orion—Steve, the one who comes into your store and talks recipes with you—you should get to know him better. He likes you.”

  Fred let his hand drop, and he looked as if he’d been punched in the stomach.

  Without another word, James walked slowly away, so tall and thin and stiff-legged that he looked like a circus performer on stilts.

  Fred was left to watch him go. “I used to overhear the checkout girls in the break room,” Fred finally said softly, to no one in particular. Evanelle wondered if he even remembered she was there. “I used to think they were such silly teenagers, believing the worst hurt in the world was when you couldn’t let go of someone who had stopped loving you. They always wanted to know why. Why didn’t the boy love them anymore? They said it with such anguish.”

  Without another word, Fred turned and walked away.

  Sydney sat alone on one of Grandma Waverley’s old quilts. Bay had made a few friends in the children’s area, and Sydney had spread a quilt near their families so Bay could play with the kids in the violet-blue dusk.

  Emma was sitting in a cushioned lawn chair with some other people Sydney didn’t know. Hunter John was nowhere to be seen. Emma would sneak glances at Sydney every once in a while but otherwise made no attempt to communicate with her. It felt strange to be so close to her onetime friends, only to find them strangers now. Sydney was making new friends at the salon, but new friendships took time. History took time.

  Sydney watched Bay run around the green with a sparkler, but she turned when she saw someone approach from the right.

  Henry Hopkins walked to the edge of her quilt and stopped. He’d grown up to be a handsome man, lots of blond hair cut close and practical, and tight muscles in his arms. The last she clearly remembered of Henry was laughing at him with her friends when he tripped and fell in the hallway in high school. He’d been a gangly mess in his youth, but he had a quiet dignity that she appreciated so much when they were little kids. They grew apart as they grew up, and she didn’t know exactly why. She just knew she’d been horrible to him once she got everything she thought she wanted in high school. She didn’t blame him for not wanting to talk to her when she went to the Hopkinses’ table that afternoon.

  “Hi,” Henry said.

  Sydney couldn’t help but smile. “He speaks.”

  “Do you mind if I sit here with you?”

  “As if I could refuse a man who gives me free ice cream,” Sydney said, and Henry lowered himself beside her.

  “I’m sorry about before,” Henry said. “I was surprised to see you.”

  “I thought you were mad at me.”

  Henry looked genuinely confused. “Why would I be mad?”

  “I wasn’t very nice to you in high school. I’m sorry. We were such good friends when we were little.”

  “I was never mad at you. Even today, I can’t pass a set of monkey bars and not think of you.”

  “Ah, yes,” Sydney said. “I’ve had many men tell me that.”

  He laughed. She laughed. All was right. He met her eyes after they’d quieted, then said, “So, you’re back.”

  “I’m back.”

  “I’m glad.”

  Sydney shook her head. This was an unexpected turn to her day. “You are, quite possibly, the first person to actually say that to me.”

  “Well, the best things are worth waiting for.”

  “You don’t stay for the fireworks?” Tyler asked as Claire was boxing up the empty wine bottles. He’d come up behind her, but she didn’t turn around. She was too embarrassed to. If she turned around, she would become that deeply disturbed woman who couldn’t handle a man being interested in her. As long as she kept her back to him she was the old Claire, the self-contained one, the one she knew before Tyler introduced himself and Sydney moved in.

  Sydney and Bay had already spread out a quilt, waiting for it to finally get dark enough for the fireworks. Claire noticed earlier that Henry Hopkins had joined them, and she was still trying to get her mind around it. Henry Hopkins liked her sister.

  Why did it bother her? Why did Fred helping Evanelle bother her?

  Her edges were crumbling like border walls, and she was feeling terribly unprotected. The worst possible time to deal with Tyler.

  “I’ve seen this show before,” she said, her back still to him. “It ends with a bang.”

  “Now you’ve ruined it for me. Can I help you?” br />
  She stacked the boxes and took two of them, planning to get the other two on her second trip. “No.”

  “Right,” Tyler said, picking up the boxes. “So I’ll just grab this.”

  He followed her across the green to her van, which she’d parked on the street. She could feel his stare on the back of her neck. She never realized how vulnerable short hair could make a person. It exposed places that were hidden before, her neck, the slope of her shoulders, the rise of her breasts.

  “What are you afraid of, Claire?” he asked softly.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  When they reached the van, she unlocked the back and put her boxes in. Tyler came up beside her and set his boxes beside hers. “Are you afraid of me?”

  “Of course I’m not afraid of you,” she scoffed.

  “Are you afraid of love?”

  “Oh, the arrogance,” she said as she strapped the boxes in to keep the bottles from breaking as she drove. “I refuse your advances so it must be because I’m afraid of love.”

  “Are you afraid of a kiss?”

  “No one in their right mind is afraid of a kiss.” She closed the back of the van and turned around, finding him closer than she expected. Too close. “Don’t even think about it,” she said, sucking in her breath, her back plastered against the van as he stepped closer still.

  “It’s just a kiss,” he said, moving in, and she didn’t think it was possible for him to be so close and not actually touch her. “Nothing to be afraid of, right?”

  He put one hand on the van, near her shoulder, leaning in. She could leave, of course. Just scoot away and turn her back on him again. But then he lowered his head, and up close she could see the tiny spiderweb lines around his eyes, and it looked as if his ear had been pierced at one time. Those things told stories about him, storyteller’s stories, spinning yarns, lulling her into listening. She didn’t want to know so much about him, but one tiny bit of curiosity and she was done for.

  Slowly his lips touched hers, and there was a tingling, warm, like cinnamon oil. So this was all there was to it? This wasn’t so bad. Then his head tilted slightly and there was this friction. It came out of nowhere, streaking through her body. Her lips parted when she gasped in surprise, and that’s when things really got out of control. He deepened his kiss, his tongue darting into her mouth, and a million crazy images raced through her mind. They didn’t come from her, they were images from him—nakedness and legs twining, holding hands, having breakfast, growing old. What was this mad magic? Oh, God, but it felt so good. Her hands were suddenly everywhere, touching, grabbing, pulling him closer. He was pressing her against the van, the force of his body nearly suspending her in air. It was too much, she was surely going to die, yet the thought of stopping, of actually breaking contact with this man, this beautiful man, was heartbreaking.

  She’d wondered what a kiss from him would feel like, if her jumpiness, her restlessness, would fade away, or would he make it worse? What she found was that he actually absorbed it, like energy, and then he radiated it like a firestone, warming her. What a revelation.

  The whistles slowly invaded her senses, and she pulled back to see some teenagers walk by on the sidewalk, sucking their teeth and smiling at them.

  Claire watched them walk away, over Tyler’s shoulder. He wasn’t moving. He was breathing heavily, each breath pressing against her breasts, which were suddenly so sensitive it was almost painful.

  “Let go of me,” she said.

  “I don’t think I can.”

  She pushed at him and slid out from between him and the van. He fell forward against the van, as if he had no strength to stand. She understood why when she tried to walk to the driver’s side and nearly didn’t make it. She was weak, like she hadn’t eaten in days, like she hadn’t walked in years.

  “All this from one kiss. If we ever make love, I’m going to need a week to recover.”

  He talked of the future so easily. The images from him were so vivid. But she couldn’t start this, because then it would end. Stories like this always ended. She couldn’t take this pleasure, because she would spend the rest of her life missing it, hurting from it.

  “Leave me alone, Tyler,” she said as he pushed himself away from the van, his chest still rising and falling rapidly. “This never should have happened. And it’s not going to happen again.”

  She got in the van and sped away, jumping curbs and running stop signs all the way home.

  CHAPTER

  9

  More than a century ago, Waverleys were wealthy, respected people in town. When they lost their money on a series of bad investments, the Clarks were secretly overjoyed. The Clarks were wealthy landowners, with acres full of the best cotton and the sweetest peaches. The Waverleys weren’t nearly as wealthy, but they were mysterious old money from down in Charleston who built a showy house in Bascom and always held themselves better than the Clarks thought they should.

  When news of the Waverleys’ poverty reached them, the Clark women danced a little dance in the secretive light of the half-moon. Then, thinking themselves quite charitable, they brought the Waverleys woolen scarves riddled with moth holes and tasteless cakes made without sugar. They secretly just wanted to see how badly the floor needed polishing without the servants and how empty the rooms looked with most of the furniture gone.

  It was Emma Clark’s great-great-great-aunt Reecey who took the apples from the backyard, and that started the whole thing. The Waverley women, their clothing mended and their hair messy from trying to put it up without maids, wanted to show the Clarks their flowers, because tending the garden was the only thing they really had any success doing themselves. It made Reecey Clark jealous, because the Clarks’ garden could never compare. There were many apples around the garden, shiny and perfect, so she secretly filled her pockets and her reticule. She even stuffed some down her jacket. Why should the Waverleys have so many beautiful apples, apples they didn’t even eat? And it was almost as if the apple tree wanted her to have them, the way they would roll to a stop at her feet.

  When she got home, she took the apples to the cook and told her to make apple butter. For weeks after, every single one of the Clark women saw such wonderful and erotic things that they began to get up earlier and earlier each morning just for breakfast. The biggest events in the lives of Clark women, it turned out, always involved sex, which could have come as no surprise to their frequently exhausted husbands, who spent and forgave too much because of this.

  But then, quite suddenly, all the apple butter was gone and with it the erotic breakfasts. More was made, but it wasn’t the same. Reecey knew then that it had been those apples. The Waverley apples. She became insanely jealous, thinking the tree gave erotic visions to everyone who ate them. No wonder the Waverleys always seemed so happy with themselves. It wasn’t fair. It simply wasn’t fair that they got to have such a tree and the Clarks didn’t.

  She couldn’t tell her parents what she’d done. For anyone to know she’d actually stolen something, much less from a family so recently poor, would be mortifying. So she got out of bed in the middle of the night and crept to the Waverley house. She managed to pull herself up the fence, but her skirt got caught on the finials and she fell. She ended up hanging upside down on the fence for the rest of the night, where she was discovered the next morning by the Waverleys. Her family was summoned, and with the help of Phineas Young, the strongest man in town, she was helped down and immediately sent away to live with her strict aunt Edna in Asheville.

  It was there, two months later, that she had the most wonderful passionate night of her life with one of the stable hands. It was exactly what she’d seen when she’d eaten the apple butter. She thought it was fate. She was even willing to put up with her unlikable aunt Edna to keep up the incredible affair. But weeks later she was caught in the stables with him and she was quickly married off to a stern old man. She was never happy, or sexually satisfied, again.

&nbs
p; She decided it was all the Waverleys’ fault, and when she was an old woman, she made a point of visiting Bascom every summer just so she could tell all the Clark children how horrible and selfish the Waverleys were, to keep that magical tree all to themselves.

  And that resentment stuck in the Clark family, long after the reason faded away.

  The day after the Fourth of July, Emma Clark Matteson tried to use the time-honored Clark way of getting what she wanted. She and Hunter John made love that morning, pillows knocked off the bed, sheets pulled from their corners. Had the radio not been on, the kids would surely have heard. He was exhausted and slaphappy afterward, so naturally Emma tried to get him to talk about Sydney. She wanted him to think about how sexy Emma was compared to how old Sydney looked in her plaid shorts yesterday, which she had described to him in detail. But Hunter John refused to talk about Sydney at all, saying she had nothing to do with their lives anymore.

  He got up and went to the bathroom to shower, and Emma bit her lip tearily. She was distraught, so she did the only thing she could think of.

  She called her mother and cried.

  “You did what I said and you kept Hunter John away from the Fourth of July celebration. That was good,” Ariel told her. “Your mistake was in bringing Sydney up with Hunter John this morning.”

  “But you said to make him compare us,” Emma said, lying in bed and hugging a pillow after Hunter John had gone to work. “How can I do that without bringing her up?”

  “You’re not paying attention, sugar. I set that up so he could compare Sydney to you when Sydney was serving and you were the hostess. Just that once. Don’t keep doing it, for heaven’s sake.”

  Emma’s head was spinning. She’d never doubted her mother’s considerable knowledge in the ways of men, but this seemed so complicated. How could she keep this up? At some point, Hunter John was going to suspect something.