“Would you mind if we sat?” He nodded to the bench beneath the cherry tree. “I’m exhausted.”
Tilly led the way in silence, her mind trying to unscramble the fact of James’s presence on the lawn at Woodend. Was he, indeed, a nutjob? After all, who jumped on a plane for such a capricious reason? David. David had tried to do the same thing after her father died. Would’ve succeeded, too, if Tilly hadn’t restrained him with a serious money talk.
She sat down, scooted to the far end of the bench and waited for James to settle with a respectable distance between them. But he sat butted up against her, his rucksack clasped to his chest. He glanced at the seat as if inspecting it, leaning into her as he did so. His thigh muscles tightened under his black jeans, and Tilly suppressed the impulse to fan heat from her face.
“I’m still in motion,” James said. “It’s been a long day. A long day. There wasn’t a single seat on the direct flight, not even in first class. I had to change at JFK.” He glowered at Tilly. “I never change planes.”
She would have pulled away, if she’d had anywhere to pull to.
James rubbed at a blemish on his forearm. “What’s your decision?”
“That’s it? Straight to business, no foreplay?”
“I don’t do small talk, Tilly.”
“Of course not. You’re driven by your need.” Tilly flexed her fingers. “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you. You’re free to hire someone else.”
“This is a heavenly spot.” James’s voice softened. “Quite heavenly.”
“Thank you. I think so.”
“May I ask why you’re turning me down? I felt as if we had connected.”
In the paddock, a woodpecker laughed.
“I can’t give you the attention you need.” A hopelessly inadequate response, but what else could she say?
“In that case I gambled and lost. I’m not in the habit of doing either. I shouldn’t have told you about my OCD. I realize that now. Normally, I wouldn’t. Life has taught me the value of concealing my quirks. But then, I’m usually an accurate judge of character.”
“This isn’t about you, James. It’s about me. I don’t care if you’re purple with large green ears and a tail. I can’t pander to any client right now. I have a truckload of my own problems to deal with. No room at the inn, I’m afraid.”
He gave a sigh, but it was a sigh of acceptance, not surprise. He glanced at the bench again and then heaved his backpack onto it. “Let me help.”
Was he for real? No wonder James was so successful in business. He probably never saw obstacles, just kept on trucking toward his goal. “Thank you, but I don’t think so. I’m sorry for the deception, by the way. My mother was spinning a yarn for my benefit, although you seem to have that sussed. She knows I’m out of sorts…she just doesn’t know why. And no offense, but if I haven’t confided in my mother, I’m hardly likely to turn to a stranger.”
“You’re not a stranger, Tilly. You’re someone I recognize.”
In the four weeks since they’d met, James’s beard had filled out and been trimmed. It now had shape and style. His hair, however, was shaggier, wilder, and he had more earrings than she remembered: two stainless steel studs in each ear. He looked like no one she had ever met before. But when he forced his hair behind his right ear and turned into her gaze, she sensed empathy, a tangible feeling she remembered from her young widows’ support group. Why had she quit? Had the oppression of other people’s grief driven her away, or had it been the horror of examining her own?
“And Isaac’s remarkable. Remarkable.” James continued to watch Tilly as she continued to watch him. “My mother died when I wasn’t much older than Isaac, but I never handled myself as well as he does. The most complimentary adjective anyone used about me was weird.” James gave a smile, but the edges turned down. “I understand the tenuous balance between an only kid and a grieving parent. How easily it can be tipped. How you might need someone to fall on other than Isaac.”
“No offense, but this isn’t A.A. You’re not the buddy I call when I slip off the grief wagon. My life’s taken a bit of a U-turn, which is fine. I can deal. But I need to close ranks, sort it by myself.”
“You told me gardening was your Prozac,” he said. “Are you gardening?”
Tilly drew up her legs, wrapped her arms around her knees and huddled into the arm of the bench. “Look. I appreciate the concern, but I’m trying to have a personal crisis here. Emphasis on personal. As in no audience allowed. As in go away. As in none of your business that I have some ocean-fearing megalomaniac running my nursery, that my childhood sweetheart materialized out of nowhere with two children and no wife, that he’s been spilling his guts to my best friend who forgot to tell me he’d taken up residence in a farmhouse she owns, that my mother wants to sell my childhood home, that I have a— Bugger.” A tear leaked onto her cheek. She rubbed upward, trying to force it back.
He reached into his rucksack and removed a small Ziploc of folded tissues. Without a word, she accepted the tissue he offered her and blotted her eyes.
“I want to be clear—I’m not crying. Crying is for wimps.” She sniffed.
“Crying is good for the soul. Everyone needs to cry, Tilly.”
“Do you?”
“I bawl over the slightest jab, physical or emotional. I’m so terrified of needles that I have to sedate myself before having dental work done, and I blubber through happily-ever-after movie endings, death scenes in literature…” He paused. “And coffee commercials.”
She raised her head. “That sappy one when the son pulls up in a taxi on Christmas morning, sneaks into the house, makes coffee, and the mother comes down in her dressing gown and says, ‘Oh, you’re home’?”
James’s loose smile said, Guilty as charged.
Tilly blew her nose, not that she needed to, but it gave her an excuse to look away. “How come you have pierced ears if you’re scared of needles?”
“You think suffering for vanity is a female prerogative?” James hooked his thumb inside his waistband and, lowering the edge of his jeans, revealed a small tattoo above his hipbone. Tilly shivered, but whether from the inked, coiled snake or from the glimpse of black underwear, she wasn’t sure. “I was drunk.” He gave the smallest of shrugs.
A pierced, tattooed pirate—the new best friend she didn’t want. Isaac would love this.
“Been a bad few days. Probably some hormonal crap. Womanhood’s a bitch, you know. But I’m fine now, really.” Her bottom lip betrayed her with a wobble. “Chip, chip, chipper.”
Her vision blurred; he handed her a fresh tissue.
“Don’t be nice to me.” She honked into the tissue. “It won’t help. And it certainly won’t make me change my mind about your garden.”
He laid his arm across her shoulder, the weight of it so unexpected. Without pushing her down or tugging her close, his arm was just there. And yes, she could dismiss what she was about to say as the math of timing: Good listener + need to talk = Tilly blurts out all. But it was more than that. He was a fellow survivor, a companion plant sharing the same pot, feeding off the same balance of sun and shade. He understood pain, not the kind that came with blood or broken bones but the kind that tore through your being, tunneled into your soul and exploded in some unseen place you hadn’t known existed.
“I have a lump,” she said, and all the pieces of butt-kicking optimism she had struggled to keep in place toppled. Tilly was shocked to realize that the gulping cr
ies were her own. What an awful sound, like that of a hungry baby ripped from his mother’s breast. And throughout James sat still, his body framing hers.
“Breast?” he said, after she lapsed into dry sobs.
She nodded.
“I can help.” He squeezed her shoulder lightly. “I can help. I’m a walking encyclopedia on breast cancer. It’s an old obsession, my original obsession.”
Tilly gave him a sideways look. “Girlfriend?”
“Mother. Everything goes back to the same starting point for me.”
So, he, too, had lost the person he loved most. Tilly sucked in a breath that seemed to bruise her internally. She had forgotten that breast cancer killed people with faces, people with names, mothers with young sons. She caught the corner of her lips with her teeth and bit down. A warm, rusty taste filled her mouth. She swiped her finger across her lip and inspected it. Blood, she was staring at fresh blood.
“How old were you?” Her voice sounded thick and phlegmy.
“Ten. The same age that I lost my life to OCD.”
“There’s a correlation?” She sniffed. “Between OCD and grief?”
“My family tree is a map of addiction, mental illness, hypochondria…enough red flags to suggest my OCD is genetic. But, yes. There is a link between grief and the onset of OCD.”
“Oh, dear God.” Tilly drilled her fingers into her temples. “Isaac.”
“Your son doesn’t have an obsessive-compulsive gene in him. If he did, I would have noticed. He’s fine, Tilly. He’s fine.”
“But if something were to happen to me?” She wanted to clutch at James, snatch his reassurance. “Couldn’t that push him over the edge? I mean, it’s a double whammy for a child who’s already lost one parent.”
“Now you’re awfulizing. You have to stop the thought right there.”
Pressure built between her eyes. “Awfulizing? Is that even a word?”
“If you have obsessive-compulsive disorder, yes.”
“You guys have your own language?”
“The fringe benefits are myriad.”
He smiled at her and Tilly felt some small measure of release. Her head drooped onto his arm, still draped over her shoulder, but she tensed immediately. Would he misinterpret her need for physical comfort, do something as inappropriate as attempt a kiss? If he did, that would be a shame, because then she would have to slug him. But his arm didn’t move, and she relaxed into the knowledge that James was someone she could trust.
“You do realize that nine out of ten lumps are benign?” he said.
“So the professionals tell me. But the waiting is chewing me up. I need answers so I can figure out where to go from here. I can walk around the supermarket without a list, but I can’t deal with a crisis without a game plan. I must have one for Isaac’s sake. And it could be another ten days before I get an appointment. How do I distract myself for ten days?”
“By gardening.”
It was the right answer; in fact, the only answer. But was it just a lucky guess? Or was he, once again, motivated by his own need?
“I realize you can’t design a garden long-distance,” James continued, “but I’ve loaded a virtual tour of my property onto my laptop. I was hoping we could explore some ideas together.”
’Course you were. Tilly rolled her cheek along his arm so she could stare down his smugness, maybe guilt him into wiping the victory smirk off his face. But his expression offered only understanding. Once again, she thought of her support group, and an idea began to form.
“Did you bring any luggage?” she asked.
“I left it at some quaint place called The Flying Duck,” James said, with a scowl. “A temporary measure until I find a real hotel. I had no idea that travelers in this day and age were expected to share a bathroom.”
“How long are you staying?”
“Two weeks. I had to pick a return date and two is a favored number for obsessive-compulsives. We like pairs.” He stretched out his long legs and crossed his ankles, but his arm stayed in place. “Two is a perfect number. Perfect.”
They sat quietly, losing time, and Tilly’s eyelids grew heavy. If she could just rest her eyes for five minutes…but the church clock chimed three. Where had the afternoon gone?
“If you’re staying, you can help me run an errand.” She yawned and stood. “How do you feel about mentally challenged springer spaniels?”
* * *
An impenetrable barrier of dog rose, seeded stinging nettles and six-foot-high hedgerow shielded the car on either side from fields strewn with black plastic bales of silage. Once, Tilly counted the species of shrub along this stretch of road and came up with eleven, which, at the rate of one species per century, dated the hedgerow back to Anglo-Saxon times, before the Norman Conquest. Hadn’t James mentioned that he was a farm boy? He might be interested in some English country knowledge, such as how to determine the age of a hedge. Or maybe not. He had remained silent since they’d collected Monty, crammed into the passenger seat with his head grazing the car roof, his knees pulled up and his arms pinned to his chest. Monty sneezed from the back and a stench, as pungent as skunk, wafted into the car.
“Fox.” Tilly tucked the car farther into the stinging nettles as the switchback road narrowed to one lane. “You might want to close the window.”
But James scratched at his black T-shirt, his fingers fluttering like a dazed bird that had crashed into her deck door.
“These roads close in on you a bit, don’t they?” Tilly said.
He didn’t answer.
“Omigod. You’re claustrophobic. How did you manage on the airplane?”
They reached a passing place carved into the side of the bank, and James blew out a shallow breath. “Yoga breathing and self-medication. Bourbon,” he added with a glance at his watch, a plastic object of clashing colors and sharp-angled design. “It’s 4:02. We’re going to be late to pick up your mother and Isaac. I’ve noticed you don’t wear a watch. Why?”
Tilly turned her attention back to the road, swerving to avoid a ragged line of pheasants staggering like Friday-night drunks. “Life is stressful enough. Why set a timer to it?”
“Because without one—” he inhaled loudly and then exhaled slowly “—how can you arrive where you’re meant to be when you’re meant to be there?”
Wasn’t the answer obvious? “You wing it.”
“Wing it,” he said, as if repeating a phrase in an unknown language.
“Don’t worry. Work with me long enough and you’ll figure it out. So, what else do I have to contend with, other than claustrophobia and severe punctuality? I thought you just had OCD.”
“No one has just OCD, Tilly. OCD likes to come with a buddy—bipolar disorder, ADHD. I told you, it’s all about pairs.”
The car whooshed past a gap in the hedgerow flanked by two massive oak trees, their trunks bandaged in ivy.
“Terrific. What’s your OCD partnered with?”
“Generalized anxiety disorder. More of the same. Does this mean you’re taking me on, as a client?”
They approached the cluster of two-up, two-down cottages that denoted the edge of Bramwell Chase.
“Nope. Better idea.” Tilly braked and they crawled under the fluorescent speed camera. “I’m going to teach you how to do it yourself.”
“I’m sorry,” James said. “I don’t understand.”
“I’m going to give you a crash course in gardening 101. By the time you fly home,
the gardening bug will have bitten hard and you won’t need to hire anyone. What better way to spend early retirement? You can sniff around local gardens, see what thrives and—” she grinned “—wing it. Oh, and start a compost pile.”
“Compost?” His voice rose sharply. “As in rotting food?”
“Absolutely. With broken-down horse manure mixed in. We have crap soil in our area of the Piedmont. You want to garden? You compost. Of course, some people will tell you to bring in truckloads of topsoil, but that merely masks the problem. Eventually the roots break through into what’s beneath. Gardening’s like life, you have to work with what nature gave you. Hey, don’t look so worried. I’m good at this. And I happen to know a garden that’s screaming out for help. I’m going to teach you how to get dirt under your fingernails, James Nealy. And once I do, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it.”
Tilly flashed James a smile, but he shot forward and grabbed the dashboard. Apprehension wormed through her stomach. Oh crap, was it too late to renege? Why was he gripping the car like that? And what was he doing now? Dear God, he couldn’t be serious. She reached across and grabbed his wrist, preventing him from releasing the door lever.
Okey-dokey, this guy wasn’t a sandwich short of a picnic; he was missing the whole ruddy picnic basket. But he wasn’t a crank, and she wouldn’t treat him as one. His spurts of energy weren’t firecrackers of anger. It was fear that kept him fiddling, twisting, tapping; fear that isolated him in a private cell. What was the description she had read of OCD, the one that had stayed with her? A crippling allergy to life. Although that was a pretty accurate description of grief.
“Bad idea,” she said, “leaping out of a moving vehicle. Land in those stinging nettles and I’ll have to rub calamine lotion into all your nooks and crannies. I might enjoy the experience, but I doubt you will.”
James slumped back and combed his fingers into his hair. “Thank you.”
The Unfinished Garden Page 14