The Gardens of Covington

by Joan A. Medlicott

  “You’ve managed to have Bob and not neglect us.”

  “Part of that’s Bob. He understands what we have here. He values our friendships, and he’s pleased that you and Hannah are willing to include him in some parts of your lives.”

  “Bob must think I’m a tramp. He can’t possibly respect me anymore. I can’t look him in the face.”

  “Bob hates how Lance treated you. He’d like to strangle the man. He just wants you to be happy.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” Grace nodded. “Think about it, Amelia. We’ve all done something, just in this last year and a half, that we regretted and felt ashamed of: I overreacted, behaved like a perfect ninny running away that time after Tyler’s party, remember? I assumed things. I didn’t even wait to talk to you or to Bob. I was a complete idiot. I was mortified at the immature way I acted.”

  Amelia’s huge blue eyes grew wider.

  “Didn’t you tell me you thought that Hannah overreacted, was quite immature when Sammy smashed the car? Remember how she demanded that Miranda come the very next day to get them? She didn’t care if they were in pain, and all bandaged up, or that the Gracious Entertainment Shop was about to have its grand opening. Later she was appalled that she had demanded such an unreasonable thing from Miranda. She was certain she’d permanently damaged their relationship, remember?” Grace reached over and with a corner of her bandanna wiped a tear from Amelia’s cheek.

  Amelia nodded.

  “So you see, my friend, life’s like that, up, down, we’re wise one minute, foolish the next. You didn’t love Lance, Amelia. You told me that.”

  No one spoke for a long moment. Then Amelia asked, “I did? When?”

  “That day in December, when we had the storm. We were in the living room.”

  Amelia bit the corner of her lip. “I did, didn’t I?”

  “You knew, but who wouldn’t be swept away by all that excitement? How many women our age get to be sixteen, and swept off their feet? Regardless of how Lance turned out, it was a glorious time for you.” Grace reached for Amelia’s hand and held it. “Some day, months from now, I’ll see you sitting there grinning to yourself, your eyes dreamy, and I’ll think, she’s sixteen again.”

  Amelia smiled. “Sixteen again!” Her eyes brightened and she looked down at the ladybug expiring near the cookie plate. “Ugh!” she said, “nasty thing.” With one quick twist of her wrist, Amelia swept the little creature to the floor. “Get you with my vacuum, later.”

  The following morning when Grace went to the box at the edge of their lawn for their newspaper, a sign had been taped to the box. Lowercase letters cut from newspaper read “yankee go home.” Grace snatched it off, and raced back to the house.

  “What is it, Grace? Seen a ghost?” Hannah was still in bed, propped up, writing a letter, or trying to write a letter to Laura, whose card and P.O. box address arrived yesterday postmarked from St. John in the American Virgin Islands. Dear Laura, was as far as she had gotten.

  “This.” Grace held the paper in front of her. “Yankee, not Yankees. It’s directed at you, isn’t it?”

  Wearily Hannah set the letter board and her pen aside. “Max warned me. What am I to do, Grace? I’m stymied. The U.S Fish and Wildlife Service won’t trespass on Anson’s land without a permit. We have no way to identify any endangered species if it were there.”

  “I feel awful not being more help to you. You need a lot of support from the community, petitions everyone signs, letters to the county commissioners and the mayor.”

  “None of which is going to happen, I’m afraid.” For a moment her fists tightened, then Hannah drew her knees to her chest and held them hard. “I’m totally discouraged. Most frustrating battle I’ve ever fought. Years ago I helped stop a dump going in close to a residential neighborhood. Another time we closed a plant polluting groundwater. With all we know about our environment these days you’d think there’d be more interest.”

  “Environmental degradation’s always driven by greed,” Grace said soberly. She flopped on Hannah’s bed and tucked her feet under her. There was a sudden scramble and a thud from inside the wall behind Hannah’s bed. “What’s that?” Grace asked.

  “You won’t believe it, but Harold thinks it’s a possum.”

  “What? How did it get inside your wall?” So many things, small things, big things happening in their home and she, Grace, run ragged and out of touch because of the tearoom. Not for much longer, though.

  Hannah shrugged. “Sometimes they do.”

  “How do you get them out?”

  “Traps, I hear, lure them out.” She lifted one shoulder slightly and tilted her head. “What do I care about a little possum inside the wall?”

  Grace shrugged. “When Maxwell came over that night after the storm, what did he say exactly?”

  “Let me think. He said that I have to remember that this is a very independent, conservative area, and I am beginning to represent everything they resent and resist: government, zoning, whatever they perceive as infringement on their rights as landowners.”

  “All you’re trying to do is prevent Cove Road from turning into one big development,” Grace said. The possum in the wall scrambled again, as if for a foothold. “I think that would drive me nuts.”

  “What am I going to do, Grace? We so much wanted to be a part of this community, now see what I’ve gotten us into.”

  Grace thought a moment, then said, “I’ve come to agree with you and Amelia that we’ll never really be a part of this community. Maybe it would be like that anywhere in the country, in a small town where people have lived for an eternity. I’m ashamed to admit that I don’t recall ever making friends with anyone new who moved into Dentry. We’re outsiders here and probably always will be. The best we can hope for is pleasant tolerance.”

  “Maybe not even that anymore. They applauded me at the church hall when I spoke, but when they got home people talked it over, while I went charging off calling this government agency, that funding source. I turned them off good. It was a mistake telling anyone anything.” Hannah paused and looked over at the window. “Look at my Christmas cactus. It’s still in bloom. Pretty, isn’t it?”

  “Very,” Grace said, quiet now, giving Hannah time to collect her thoughts. After a time, Hannah threw up her arms. “I give up. We can all just sit back now and wait to see what happens.” But the pain in Hannah’s eyes was evident.

  “It’ll change everything on Cove Road. What will we do?” Grace asked, horrified at the prospect.

  For a moment, Hannah closed her eyes. “We could sell this place, buy something where everything we can see belongs to us. By the way,” Hannah said, “can you believe the map of Covington came yesterday by UPS, fifty copies?”

  “Show me,” Grace said.

  “Over there, those gray tubes.”

  Grace jumped off the bed, picked up one of the five long tubes, opened it, unrolled one of the maps, and spread it out on Hannah’s bed. Hannah held two ends flat, Grace the other two. “I told him not to make it exact. I wanted it to be fluid, informal.”

  “It’s very good,” Grace said. “I like the way he marked each homestead on Cove Road with our names, and look, he’s even got Lurina’s family cemetery up behind her house, and her old barn. Lord, that wasn’t used in years until Old Man and his pigs.” She continued to study the map, then looked up at Hannah. “It doesn’t show all the condos covering the hills in Loring Valley.” Grace chuckled. “Guess that’s what not being exact means.”

  “I’m not sure it matters. It’s the concept that counts.” Hannah released her ends of the map and it curled, then Grace let go of her end. “Guess there’s no need for a map now,” Hannah said.

  “Of course there is. It’s a fine map, and there are no maps of this specific area. The chamber of commerce in both Madison and Buncombe Counties will surely want to buy it.”

  Hannah rolled up the map. Then Grace said to Hannah, “We’ve decided, Bob and I, that th
e tearoom is too much for us.”

  “You’re selling the tearoom?” Hannah was astonished.

  “Yes. We both feel it takes too much time and creates too much pressure for us.” Grace curled up on the bed. “It was a nice adventure, a side trip you might say, and instructive.” Suddenly she sat upright on the bed and covered her ears. “You’re going to try to get that possum out of your wall, aren’t you?”

  But Hannah was concentrating on different matters, and as if she had not heard Grace, moments later she was back to talking about Anson’s land. “So, you think that I ought to just drop the whole land thing, including the cemetery Wayne found?” Hannah pounded her mattress with her fist, and clenched her teeth. “Damn, I hate to give up.”

  Grace touched Hannah’s foot. “I hate for you to have to give up.”

  “What’s better? Walking away from it, or having us all shunned by our neighbors?”

  Grace slumped. “But Hannah, you realize that if you do back off, the folks who put that sign on our mailbox will strut about feeling they’ve won. Question is, can you handle that?”

  Hannah nodded. “I’m weary of the whole thing.”

  “Come on,” Grace said. “Get dressed in grungies. Let’s pile on the layers and go outside and do some planting. You can show me how to divide daylilies.”

  “I usually divide daylilies in the fall.” Hannah pushed off her covers.

  “So what? If you can live with a possum in your wall, we can divide daylilies in the spring.”

  41

  Family Matters

  Dear Laura,

  Your postcard came today. I was happy to hear you’d arrived safely, and no hurricane barring your path.

  Hannah crumpled the sheet of writing paper and tossed it into the wastebasket, where it joined a growing mound of crumpled paper. Hurricanes. What was wrong with her? This was April. No hurricanes until summer. Her mind wandered. Across the way, at Maxwell’s, dogwoods bloomed above glorious clusters of salmon-colored azaleas.

  Why was this letter to Laura so hard? After all, it was merely to wish her well, to open some small communication between them. Probably, Laura’s response would be another postcard, perhaps from another island they had visited.

  Dear Laura,

  Spring this year is especially early and glorious.

  A vision of palm trees and beaches came to mind. How did anyone prepare gourmet meals in the small galley of a moving ketch? She could not imagine doing so, yet Laura did.

  What is it like living on a boat? Change that to ketch. Why was it so hard to remember to make that distinction? Hannah had never asked her daughter anything about her life with Marvin. Suddenly she wanted to know everything. Was he an educated man? How long had he been a sea captain? She bent to her writing again.

  The tropics must be quite a change after Maine.

  Hannah read the three lines. Trite. Stupid, but a start. She did not crumple the paper.

  Stay in touch.

  Inside her head, Hannah heard words she wanted to say and couldn’t. I’m so sorry for not being more a part of your life, sorry for my hardheadedness when you needed understanding and acceptance. Forgive me. Instead she ended her letter with, Enjoy the islands. Love, Mom.

  She held up the letter. No, it was a note, not a letter. Pitiful that this was all she could say to her child. Her instinct was to rip it to shreds, but instead, Hannah folded it, slipped it into an envelope, addressed it, and stamped it.

  Laura’s reply came ten days later. A letter, this time, written, as Laura said, by the light of a full moon on the fore-deck of the Maribow. The Maribow. Hannah had always thought of it as Marvin’s boat . . . Marvin’s ketch. She’d simply asked the man at the bait store to send a message to Captain Marvin’s boat. They must have laughed at her in that bait shop.

  In your wildest imagination, Mother, you can’t picture how beautiful it is here. All about me are islands, dark crested in the moonlight, rising from a shimmering golden sea, and by day these islands, large and small, become emeralds floating on blue velvet. Nights are magical. Breezes rippling across my skin soothe me. The salt air is sweet, not hard and coarse as it is off the coast of Maine. We’re anchored out off the reef at Trunk Bay on the north side of St. John. This week we’re hosting three guests, all divers, who enjoy exploring the underwater trail here. I don’t dive. Being underwater scares me, too frighteningly quiet.

  Sitting alone on the porch, Hannah closed her eyes. How had she failed to miss the poetry in Laura’s soul? Tears slipped from below closed lids and slid slowly down her cheeks.

  You may worry that Marvin is so much older than I am.

  How much older? Ten years, fifteen? Hannah wasn’t sure.

  But he’s hale and hearty, comes from long-lived people. I’ve learned so much from him: how to sail, to fish. Why, Mother, I could make my living lobstering if I had to.

  And then the letter ended abruptly with, Gotta go now. Wind’s picking up. People stirring. Love, Laura.

  Love, Laura. Hannah read the words again and again. Love, Laura.

  Laura had been a swift, easy birth, and she had loved her, but Miranda was a jealous older sibling, and as an infant and toddler, Laura had been so good-natured that Hannah’s energy and attention funneled into placating her demanding firstborn. Hannah sat back. A good letter, open and more sharing than anything she could have written.

  That evening Roger phoned Grace.

  “Had a call from Russell and his Emily. She sounds charming. She explained about having to make concessions to her mother, sounds like a tiger, so they’re going to have the wedding in a church in Asheville, but they were thrilled about our doing the reception. We’ll throw them the most gorgeous reception. We’ve rented a U-Haul van, and we’ll arrive in Covington by May eighteenth. That leaves us only two weeks or so. I need you to send me a phone book with the yellow pages. I could hunt on the Internet, but that would mean no personal contact with the vendors. We prefer to chat with the people we’re going to work with. We’d like to make a lot of arrangements ahead of time.”

  Charles picked up their extension. “Mother Singleton, how are you?”

  “Just fine, Charles, how about you?”

  “Excited to be seeing you. Tell me, what’s this Ginger like?”

  “Difficult at best.”

  “We’ll handle her,” Roger said.

  “Do me a favor, will you?” Charles asked. “Make us a little sketch of the yard, where the house is, the big oak, the stream, and if you could put some dimensions on it, distance of stream from the house, distance from the road to the porch of the house.”

  “We’ll send it to you by the end of the week, okay?”

  “Include it with the yellow pages, Mother.”

  Moments later they hung up.

  Grace sat there, looking out at the big oak, remembering how she and Hannah and Amelia had sat under that oak their first day in Covington, before even going into the house. That day, Amelia had told them about her nine-year-old daughter contracting a rare disease in India, and how she had died in her arms on the plane back to the States, and a year later, losing Thomas in a car accident. In those moments, as Amelia opened her heart to them, she ceased being a pretty face with a mysterious past but became real to them and lovable.

  Outside on the lawn, one rabbit, and then another, scampered by. They were cute, but prolific, and Hannah had had to wire-cage the vegetable patch, but not before the critters devoured most of the curly lettuce leaves the ladies expected to have for salads. The rabbits disappeared into bushes at the edge of the lawn, and Grace’s mind drifted to Emily and her mother.

  Russell had told her that the two women had had a drag-down fight, during which Ginger screamed and yelled about Emily giving up her practice in Florida, the dress, what it should look like, and that they would never find one and have it delivered by June 4. She had demanded that they defer the wedding to some time later in the year, or even next year.

  “I was proud of Emily,
” Russell said. “She may be a size six, but she’s tough. She gave it right back to Ginger. In the end we agreed to a small church wedding, and we got the reception. Emily will deal with getting a wedding dress, somewhere, herself, without Ginger’s interference and criticism.”

  When would Emily find time to get a dress? Grace wondered. She was back and forth to Florida: a case to wind up, a court appearance, closing on the sale of her practice. As Grace watched two more rabbits scurry across the yard, she remembered Lurina’s lovely gown, now stored upstairs in Grace’s closet. Hadn’t Russell mentioned that Emily was a size six?

  42

  A Walk in the Woods

  Amelia still rose each morning with the weight of a wrecking ball on her heart. Following her talk with Grace, she began to focus, not on the shame and disappointment of her relationship with Lance Lundquist, but, as Grace suggested, on the fact that it had been a glorious fling with youth. Reluctantly at first, Amelia conceded to herself that although she missed the excitement and the dancing, she relished not having to meet someone else’s deadlines. Still, there were moments when she lowered her camera and stared at nothing while feelings of regret, and loss, and humiliation rendered her immobile. Sometimes she cried. Then, she shook herself mentally, picked up her equipment, and proceeded with the task at hand.

  April had flounced in with a flush of green, followed by dogwood and azaleas, and in May came the laurels, which the locals called ivy, and the rhododendron, which they called laurel. On a fine May day, something, Amelia knew not what, drew her to the woods behind their farmhouse. She carried no camera, and her arms swung free at her sides as she negotiated the narrow path to the top of the hill.

  Between the pines, an unfamiliar glow caused her to stop. Amelia turned off the path. Carefully, for there were branches lying on the ground and a mat of rotting pine needles and dead leaves disguising hollows, Amelia rounded a thicket of rhododendrons. They were tall and impenetrable with dark, glossy leaves, and fecund buds primed for blossoming. How had she never noticed them before in her walks?