Ha. They would be confirmed. I had no illusions. But as I passed a bed of flowers like the ones I’d planted for Brooke, I wondered whether she’d liked them or not. When Gran had told me to choose species I’d thought Brooke would like, I’d reminded Gran that I didn’t know Brooke. So then Gran told me to pick flowers that reminded me of Brooke, and I’d get it right. That had been easy. I chose the most vibrant ones I could find, with lots of petals and color.
“Begonias,” the sign in the flower bed read. Terrible name, but the flower had felt right for her.
By Thursday dinner time, I was wondering if maybe I should go back to Gran’s this weekend, see if Brooke had kept the pots. I could ask Gran, but she’d tease me. Although... it wasn’t like she wouldn’t see through me when I showed up for the third weekend in a row. And I had mentioned to Brooke that I would be back.
I was dithering, Gran would say. And I wasn’t a ditherer. Hadn’t ever even used the word before suddenly becoming one. Which forced me to confront the truth: I’d grown interested in Brooke on her own merits. I hadn’t been interested in a woman in a good while, finding the last few I’d dated to be almost...interchangeable.
I winced at myself for even thinking the word. That was my fault for not getting to know them better. But they’d all had the same highly polished, coolly professional edge, and the conversations on the first couple of dates had all centered on their jobs—mine too—and DC gossip. I hadn’t left any of my second dates interested in asking for a third.
But Brooke had walked out on our first dinner before it was even served, and I had so many more questions about her.
No, for her. I was done asking other people to explain Brooke to me. I’d go to the source from now on.
Guess that meant I was going back to Creekville, even if it meant enduring Gran’s teasing.
A text vibrated my phone and I scooped it up, hoping it was Sherrie with a lead on one of our cases, but it wasn’t Sherrie’s name on my screen. It was Brooke’s, like thinking of her had summoned her. Her text was a simple, Thank you for the flowers.
I hesitated, thinking about what to say back. Finally, I tapped out, No problem. Least I could do. Sorry I got it so wrong.
There was no quick response. No typing dots. I woke my screen a few times, hoping I might have missed a text, but there was nothing.
“You are turning pathetic,” I said out loud. I got up and went to brush my teeth before I put my pathetic self to bed. My phone vibrated with another text, Brooke’s name flashing from my bathroom counter. I snatched it up, toothbrush still in my mouth.
Miss Lily confessed she misled you. I think I understand how you could draw all the wrong conclusions.
I grimaced and spit out the toothpaste. Another text came in.
Like, EVERY wrong conclusion. All of them.
I grinned. She wasn’t short on what Gran would call “moxie.” I texted back. So you’re saying...more flowers?
She answered fast. You should invest in a nursery, probably. Maybe a whole flower farm.
I searched for Gran’s favorite florist in Creekville and placed an order online for delivery the next morning. It would have to do until I could deliver the next bouquet myself, because I was definitely going to Creekville this weekend.
Chapter Fourteen
Brooke
I opened the door to a delivery person obscured behind an enormous spray of blue hyacinths.
“Delivery for Brooke Spencer?”
“That’s me.” I accepted the vase. “Who are these from?”
“There’s a card included, and the tip’s been taken care of,” the young man said. “Have a nice day, ma’am.”
He jogged back to his van. He was a teenager, maybe one of my new students starting Monday, working his last day of summer break.
I whisked the flowers into the kitchen and settled them on the island, immediately injecting some life into the room. I suspected they were from Ian after our texts last night, but I plucked the card from its plastic holder to double check.
“A stalk for every wrong assumption I’ve made about you,” it read. “I called a lot of people.”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or snort at the six separate hyacinth stalks packed into the sleek square vase. I tapped out a quick text to him. Got your flowers. You’re short at least three. I smiled as I imagined him reading it. Ian Greene was by no means my favorite person, but Miss Lily or his parents had definitely drilled him on how to do proper apologies.
I gathered up my teacher bag, a large tote that brimmed each morning with new whosits-and-whatsits for my classroom, grabbed my keys, and was halfway to my car before I went back and grabbed the flowers too. Those could come to work with me today.
At school, I stepped into my classroom and took a deep breath. I loved the smell of it. Smell was probably my favorite sense. I loved the sharp tang of weeds slipping loose from the soil in Miss Lily’s garden. I loved the musty odor of sawdust with each new mess I made in my house. I loved the scent of this classroom when I walked through the door each time, a mixture of the bulletin board paper on the walls that kind of smelled like sawdust too. Maybe that was what gave this room the feeling of home.
I studied the wall displays. One section showed all the major organ systems in the human body. Another section gave the taxonomy of the blue-footed booby, a goofy-looking bird from the Galapagos Islands that did indeed have blue feet. It would help the kids learn classifications. Another section showed famous women biologists, and a fourth—smaller, but important—gave information about vaping and showed the effect on human lungs.
Today I would have only half the day in my classroom. The rest would be filled up with faculty and department meetings, and like yesterday, probably lots of the other teachers popping in to welcome me to Lincoln High School and offer help with anything I needed.
My room was in good shape going into Monday. The white boards were filled with the daily science standard we were working on, interesting science facts, and an inspirational quote, all in my neatest handwriting. I’d been wishing I’d found my way to teaching sooner, but maybe I was glad I’d come along in the whiteboard era and not the dusty green chalkboard one.
The rest of the day went exactly as I expected, meeting new teachers whose names I remembered using memory tricks I’d read about and planned to use for memorizing my students’ names. I sat in a faculty meeting where we reviewed the school objectives for the year, then a department meeting where everyone complained about their chronically underfunded labs. But they all sounded excited for the new year, ready to be back, ready to get to work.
This was exactly the kind of environment I thrived in, but I couldn’t shake a feeling of impending doom. For three nights in a row, I’d had stress dreams. In one, I’d spent the whole night filing papers and woke up feeling like I’d already spent a whole day at work. In another one, I showed up to discover the office had switched my classes at the last minute, and I was supposed to teach calculus instead of biology. Last night had been the worst of all: a rerun of a high school dream I’d had of going to school in my underwear. It was so much worse doing it as a teacher.
I should feel so good about Monday and my first day of teaching, but I couldn’t tell the difference between my excitement and my nerves. I took a long glance around the classroom again. Everything was exactly as it should be. Crisp new folders waiting to receive student work, lab desks polished free of fingerprints, walls bright and inviting.
Most days I would stay and rearrange, tweak, straighten. But today, on this last Friday afternoon before students came, what I needed most was to get out of the classroom and give myself some garden therapy, digging in Miss Lily’s soil and letting my senses take over to chase the anxiety away.
I scooped up my now-empty tote bag and paused at the door to survey the classroom one last time before turning off the lights.
Ready or not, Monday was coming.
I really, really hoped I was ready.
�
��They’re coming along,” Miss Lily announced from the end of the tomato row.
“I’m excited,” I replied, touching one of the fruits. It was turning orange, soon to deepen to red. “How much longer?”
“A week, I think. Your tomato sandwich is almost here. Maybe I’ll make you one to celebrate finishing your first week of teaching.”
“Can’t think of a better way to celebrate surviving it.”
“Did I use the word ‘survive,’ girl? I did not.” Miss Lily gave the final “T” some extra oomph. “I said celebrate, period. There will be no surviving. Only thriving. Like the tomatoes.”
I smiled at her. I appreciated the vote of confidence, but I suspected that it had been so long since Miss Lily’s very first week as a teacher that she may have forgotten how overwhelming it felt.
“Don’t think for a second that I’m forgetting how overwhelming it is,” Miss Lily continued, and I felt a slight thrill of terror that Miss Lily could read my thoughts. “Every first week is unnerving until you’re about twenty years in. But what I do know from my years of long observation are the telltale signs of a teacher who has what it takes to succeed. You want to know the only thing that might trip you up from having the school year you hope for?”
“Yes, please.” I definitely wanted to know but also felt kind of disappointed that any such thing existed. I was hoping the dread of getting it wrong was just my anxiety talking.
“Your dread of getting it wrong.”
This time, I stared at Miss Lily, my mouth slightly open in surprise. “Are you...can you read my thoughts?”
Miss Lily gave a big, happy laugh. “No, child. Not in the way you think. That’s experience speaking from talking many new teachers through the process over the years. You want everything to be perfect. It won’t be. If you measure yourself against perfection, you’re always going to come up short. Does that make sense?”
“Yes, ma’am.” It wasn’t the first time someone had talked to me about my perfectionist tendencies.
Miss Lily walked down the row and stopped in front of me to smile. “What experience gives you is perspective. By the end of the year, you will have a much better yardstick for measuring success. You’ll have a better sense of how much your students can do and what standards to hold them to. My best advice is that those expectations should always force them to stretch in ways they don’t think they can because that’s how they grow. But you definitely should not measure progress against the ideal you have in your head at the moment.”
Miss Lily leaned over and rustled the tomato plant nearest her for a minute, pushing back the leaves to expose a misshapen tomato. “Look at this, and then compare it to the one right next to it. You see how that one is shaped like every tomato you buy from the market?”
I nodded. I did see, and I saw where Miss Lily was going with all of this too.
“You know which one is going to taste better when we slice into them?” Miss Lily asked.
“They’ll taste the same?” I guessed.
“They’ll taste exactly the same,” Miss Lily confirmed. “So we’ll have grown two perfect tomatoes even if they look different.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.
“No, you won’t,” Miss Lily grinned. “Not until about the late spring, and then you’ll remember I said this, and it will make more sense in the context of your classroom. You’ll be exhausted and dying for the year to be over, but also completely excited for the next school year to begin so you can implement everything you’ll have learned by then.”
“I can’t tell if that’s overwhelming or encouraging,” I said.
“Both,” Miss Lily said, her eyes twinkling. “You’ve got what it takes, Brooke-girl. Hang in there. You’ll be fine.”
We settled down to do more weeding, working in companionable silence save for the chatter of birds and Miss Lily’s soft humming. Miss Lily tended toward happy hymns, and this afternoon was “For the Beauty of the Earth,” a good fit for the peaceful garden.
We’d been at it for almost an hour, moving on to the bean plants and then the carrots, when the sound of a car door closing nearby stopped Miss Lily’s humming.
“Well, well, well,” she said, smiling, without even looking toward her driveway.
“Are you expecting someone?” My heart had started an odd skip-beat, knowing it was probably Ian.
“Always and never with this one,” Miss Lily answered, and before I could ask what she meant by “this one,” Ian appeared at the end of the row.
Unlike the previous week, he was dressed casually in gray shorts and a blue T-shirt that looked like the kind of soft only a thousand washings could get you.
“Hey, Gram. I see you roped Brooke into being your unpaid labor again.” He wrapped Miss Lily in a hug that made the petite woman grin.
“Good to see you, handsome grandson. What brings you out this weekend?”
“Wait, just ‘handsome grandson’? Can I be ‘most handsome grandson’? I mean, have you seen Landon lately?”
Gran laughed. “All of my grandchildren are unreasonably attractive, talented, and intelligent. But again, to what do I owe the pleasure?”
There was a sly glint in Miss Lily’s eyes, one I was growing to know meant she was angling to do some mischief. Probably some misguided matchmaking. I was about to interject and change the conversation in case Ian was on board with Miss Lily’s scheme, but he spoke instead.
“Mary promised me Mississippi roast again if I came out this weekend, and it’s not like I was going to turn that down.”
“Smart boy,” Miss Lily said. “Now help us pull these weeds.”
Normally, the space between rows was cozy to me, tucked in between the bean vines. But the idea of Ian kneeling in the dirt with us suddenly shrunk it from cozy to claustrophobic.
“I’ve got it,” I said. “It’s no big deal. Why don’t you two head in and visit while I finish up here?”
“Are you sure you’re all right if I go in?” Miss Lily asked. “I don’t want you to feel overwhelmed.”
“It’s no problem,” I assured her.
“Then I think I’ll go get myself some sweet tea while you two finish up out here.”
“That’s not what I...” I trailed off because Miss Lily had already beelined for the house as if she hadn’t heard me.
Ian laughed and settled on his heels beside me. “Give up,” he suggested. “She’s had eight decades to get that wily.”
I smiled. “I’m figuring that out. You know what you’re doing out here?”
In answer, Ian plucked five weeds in quick succession and displayed them on his palm. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, it’s not that hard when the tomato plants are already so big.” There was something about Ian’s sureness of himself that always made me want to bring him back down to size.
“Don’t worry, I can do it when they’re seedlings too. Gran kept us busy every summer out here. She called gardening the cure to ‘hooliganism.’”
“She thinks gardening will cure everything, as far as I can tell,” I said.
“She’s usually not wrong.” He flashed me a smile and turned his attention to the weeds, already moving down the row to the next section.
Not to be outdone, I picked up my pace, wanting to get out of the garden and away from awkward small talk as quickly as possible. But Ian didn’t engage in any small talk. He worked at his weeds quietly, and when I sneaked a glance at him, his face was relaxed, as if he had found the same Zen headspace I often did out here.
After several long minutes of silence, I felt a tickle somewhere inside, maybe in my chest, urging me to speak and break it. I tried to ignore it, but it didn’t go away, so I cleared my throat and waded in. “Hey, Ian? Thank you again for the flowers.”
“Least I could do.” He sounded mellow and didn’t look up from the weeds. Just kept tugging them out.
“You didn’t have to,” I said. But I didn’t mean it. It really was the least he could have do
ne after pulling up my past like he was yanking out those weeds.
“Of course I did.” He twisted so he faced me, both of us still kneeling in the dirt. “I’d like to do more if you’ll let me. All that investigation told me is that I definitely don’t know you well enough to figure out what might help me make restitution.”
He meant it. That was Miss Lily’s influence coming through. His sincerity allowed me to drop my guard in a way I hadn’t since he’d first shown up in the garden in a designer shirt and expensive loafers.
“It’s okay. For real.” I brushed my wrist against my forehead to catch a bead of sweat at my hairline. “I guess I hoped that all that stuff would go away once I left DC behind, but I can understand why you were being so protective of Miss Lily. I just think she can handle herself better than...well, anyone I’ve ever known.”
Ian gave a small laugh. “True enough. You’d think I’d have learned not to underestimate her at this point.”
I climbed to my feet. “I think I’m done out here for now. It’s been a long day already, and I have another one ahead of me. I need to eat a big dinner and fall asleep way too early.”
Ian rose too. “Gran said you start your teaching job on Monday. Still getting ready?”
“No. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be, which isn’t very ready.” I swiped at another bead of sweat. “Tomorrow I need to do more renovation stuff. It’s hard but mindless work, and sometimes that lets my brain problem-solve other things. Maybe tomorrow night I’ll fall into bed with my backsplash tiled and brilliant new lesson plans.”
“Why don’t you come over for supper?” Ian said. “We can at least feed you before you go unconscious.”
I waved away the offer. “That’s sweet of you, but I don’t want to intrude on your time with Miss Lily. I’m too tired to be good company anyway.”
Kiss Me Now: A Romantic Comedy Page 10