Chapter 3 - What I Came Back To
The morning of the wedding, my aunt Carol collapsed in her kitchen.
The ER team thought it was her heart. Grant and I were on the road within twenty minutes. I called Brooke from the hospital parking garage to tell her we wouldn't make the ceremony.
She managed to sound annoyed before she remembered to sound worried. "Okay. Fine. Just text me the code for the back door."
"The rules still stand, Brooke."
"Yes, Della. I will guard the sacred flowers with my life."
Grant heard it through the speaker. His face went hard and still, but a nurse called us back before he could get a word out.
Aunt Carol stabilized close to midnight. By the time they let us leave, neither of us could face another two-hour drive, so we went home and drove out to the lake in the morning.
I knew something was wrong before I got the gate open.
One of Grandma's hand-sewn cushions was lying facedown in the gravel by the driveway. It had rained hard overnight. The fabric was soaked through and gray with mud.
The yard was worse than the cushion.
Plastic cups all over the grass. Champagne bottles standing in a row along the dock. Confetti stuck to everything and floating in the shallows near the shore.
Deep ruts cut across the lawn where somebody had dragged heavy tables down toward the water. Mud tracked up the porch steps and straight through the kitchen.
Then I saw the arch.
It stood near the water's edge, wound with flowers that were already going limp.
Grandma's flowers.
The anniversary roses had been cut down to bare, ragged stalks. The lavender was pulled out in whole clumps, roots and all. The daisies from my first recital hung upside down off white ribbon, curling and brown at the edges.
The peonies were gone. Somebody had ripped them clean out of the ground. The roots lay exposed under the arch, wrapped up in floral wire and torn strips of fabric.
Grant stood next to me, looking at the empty beds.
"I told her." His voice was almost nothing. "I made her promise me."
Inside, the cushions were blotched purple with wine. The sink was full of paper plates. Somebody had hauled Grandma's rocking chair out onto the wet porch, and one leg had cracked straight down the middle.
I called Brooke.
She picked up on the fourth ring. "Can this wait? We're heading out for the honeymoon."
"What did you do to the garden?"
A groan. "Oh, we're doing this already."
"You tore out Grandma's plants, Brooke."
"We needed real flowers for the arch."
"I told you not to touch a single one."
"It was MY WEDDING, Della. I did whatever I had to do to make it beautiful."
I stared through the window at the wilting arch. "You're going to come back here and put every bit of it right."
She laughed. "Put what right? It's dirt and some flowers."
"The roses were for Grandma's anniversary. The peonies went in the year I was born."
"Flowers grow back. Honestly, instead of wasting my time on the phone, you should've started cleaning already. It's your house. The wedding's over."
Then she hung up.
I stood in the kitchen with the dead phone against my ear for a long moment.
Normally this was the part where Grant told me to breathe and promised he'd talk to her later.
This time he looked at the stripped flower beds. Then at Grandma's cushion dripping brown water onto the floorboards.
"What do you need?"
I set the phone down on the counter.
"Grandma's garden map."
"The big one?"
"The one with every plant on it. Every measurement. Every note."
I went to the pantry and took down the cedar box she'd always kept her seeds in. The little brass latch popped open. Inside were hundreds of paper envelopes, balls of twine, wooden markers, and the set of numbering stamps she'd used for decades.
Grant looked from the box to the window.
"What are you planning, Della?"
May you like
I picked up the first empty envelope and pressed a 1 onto the front.
"Brooke said flowers grow back." I set it down. "She's going to find out exactly what that costs."
