Salt & Flowers: Chapter Eight

Samantha heads into the village to set the wheels in motion about selling Ida’s house. Later, she and Murphy avoid talking about the events from the evening before. Restless, Samantha later checks some of those notifications that have been sitting unread on her phone.

Samantha was awake at 5:40 the next morning, which felt ungodly, given that she hadn’t fallen asleep until sometime after one.

She lay in the brass bed and stared up at the frilly canopy as she conducted a review of the facts.

Fact: she had kissed Murphy.

Fact: technically he had also kissed her, though a jury may be divided on who had closed the final distance. She did not, however, intend to involve a jury.

Fact: it had been, objectively and extremely unhelpfully, the best kiss of her life.

Fact: at no point, in any version of her plan for the summer, had there been a line item for fall for an itinerant landscaping influencer while liquidating an old family estate.

She had double-checked her typed plan, hosted on the cloud, just after midnight. There wasn’t.

Her plan was simple, and it had been simple since the drive up from Boston: clean the house, clear the yard, list the property, bank the money, and return to her actual life a solvent and slightly sun-damaged woman. Her plan did not have feelings about anyone’s forearms. Her plan did not lie awake replaying kisses as you saw literal fireworks from behind your eyelids.

Her plan, she decided, needed her attention. Today. Now.

She was showered and dressed by 6:15, which was when she discovered George stationed at the bottom of the stairs like a small, disapproving mother who’d been calling her name for some time. He looked at her outfit with judgment (not work clothes), then at her tote bag (which meant leaving), then directly at her. He parked himself in her path.

“Errands,” she told him.

He did his unnerving, unblinking stare.

As she fed him, she texted Murphy — Running errands this morning, start without me! — and read the message four times before sending it to confirm the exclamation point struck the correct note of breezy and unbothered normalcy. Probably not, but she sent it anyway. She put the phone in her bag, face-down, as though that helped, and was out the door and out of the neighborhood before his truck could appear.

She was being a coward. She could acknowledge that and still drive away, which was one of the great underrated privileges of adulthood.

The village sat out on its own little island off of 1A, connected to the mainland by a short causeway bridge that Samantha had always loved as a kid, because for about eleven seconds you were driving directly on top of the water with just metal grids below you. This morning the tide was high and glassy and the whole thing was so storybook beautiful that she had to turn the radio off to see it better.

A Sunday after the Fourth, the village made it pretty obvious that no one was out of bed yet. Bunting still swagged the porch rails of the sea captains’ houses along the main lane. Small flags stood at attention in every window box, wedged in among the white and red geraniums.

She parked in the little dirt lot above the cove because there was nowhere else to park, the roads were too narrow, the houses built tight together before cars existed.

Strawbery Cove (missing an 'r', courtesy of the early settlers) was one of those places that didn’t even have to try, it was just picture perfect. Better yet, it was a bit out of the way, so it hadn’t become overcrowded with tourists like some of the other coastal villages. The harbor was a tight little pocket of water, working boats and pleasure boats crowded in together, lobster buoys stacked like candy on the docks. A footbridge crossed the mouth of the cove, which charmingly opened in the middle to let the larger boats through, and a laminated sign instructed pedestrians to please listen for the bell and get off the bridge as it opened, thank you. The shingled shacks around the water had once been for bait and gear, and about half of them still were. The other half had become art galleries, souvenir stores, and a candy shop, which had been one of her favorites as a child.

The general store was open, she was relieved to see, even on a Sunday morning after a holiday. It had a screen door with a wooden thwack to it, a bell that rang whether or not you wanted it to, and shelves organized according to a logic that she’d never been privy to: penny candy (now five cents due to inflation) beside marine hardware, sunscreen beside canned brown bread. She got a coffee from the pump carafe by the register, and it was terrible in the specific way she was beginning to understand was intentional. She hoped the homemade blueberry muffin would be better, it looked promising.

She paid a teenage girl in a bright blue tee shirt and a neat french braid who looked at her twice and then said, flatly, “You’re the garden lady.”

“I’m a garden lady,” Samantha said. “I don’t know if I’m the garden lady.”

“We have a house down the beach. My mom watches your videos.” A pause, in which some internal debate visibly occurred and resolved as to whether she should admit to knowing more. “She says you were right about the rhododendrons.”

“Tell her thank you. I was confident in my rightness, but it’s good to hear it validated.”

At the counter’s far end, a roughly-hewn older man in a sun-faded ball cap was studying a small collection of miscellaneous bolts with intensity, and Samantha understood, with something like affection, that he had pegged them both for summer people and would sooner get in his truck and drive it into the cove than join the conversation. She had forgotten this rule. The locals barely tolerated the tourists, unless they worked directly in the tourism industry, and sometimes even then the tolerance was shaky.

Outside, an early morning jogger had stopped on the footbridge and was holding her phone at the precise angle to photograph the boats bobbing in the morning light. It did make for a pretty picture.

Samantha took her terrible coffee to a bench by the harbor and watched a lobster boat idle out through the drawn-open bridge. She did not think about Murphy, in the sense that she thought about him continuously. The real estate office opened at nine, but with the living postcard in front of her, it wouldn’t be hard to pass the time.

REMICK LUXURY REAL ESTATE occupied a weathered clapboard cottage on the lane above the cove, wedged between a gallery that painted pets as old-timey sea captains and an ice cream window that wasn’t open yet. The sign was older than Samantha. The photos in the window were of ultra-luxury waterfront properties, which belied the humble appearance of the office. It was the New Hampshire Seacoast in a nutshell, as the odds were high that eight-figure deals were regularly struck without fanfare within those humble walls.

Diane Remick turned out to be a compact woman in her sixties with a gray bob, reading glasses on a beaded chain, and the surprisingly firm handshake of a woman who had spent forty years carving out her spot at the top of one of the most complex real estate markets in the country.

Her office smelled like coffee and paper, but there was a subtle sheen of polish below the deliberate kitsch. As she fetched Samantha a water herself, telling her it was “Solo Sunday,” Samantha took in the decor. There was a brass ship’s clock on the wall and a needlepoint pillow in the chair across from the desk that said WELCOME ABOARD. She appeared to have one of her next door neighbor’s paintings on the wall of an unidentified small breed with an underbite as an old-timey captain with a pipe.

“So. You’re in the old Whitmore place,” Diane said, before Samantha had finished sitting. “Ida’s.”

“You knew her?”

“Everyone knew Ida.” Diane took off the reading glasses and looked at her. “I’ve sold half this sixteen-mile stretch of waterfront twice over. But never anything in that neighborhood. Those houses don’t move for generations.“ A small silence, in which the ship’s clock ticked. “Ida told me that I might be seeing you.”

“Yes, she left your name as a recommendation if that’s what I decided to do,” Samantha agreed. “I’d like to talk about listing it.”

Something crossed Diane’s face and was gone. It wasn’t judgment. It was the deliberate, visible absence of judgment.

Diane simply said, “All right.”

What followed was forty minutes of the most bracingly competent conversation Samantha had had all summer. It almost comforted her in a way. Diane knew the house’s footprint from the memory of old parties. She knew about the porte-cochère, the rules of the road association, the neighbor two lots down who would absolutely make an offer just to control who moved in but likely lowball her because he was in denial about his tax value. She quizzed Samantha about the working order of the appliances. She knew, of course, about the videos. Everyone knew about the videos. They went through an extensive list of the work Samantha and Murphy had done so far.

“I’ll be straight with you,” Diane said, pulling a pad toward her. “A year ago, I’d have given you one number. Today I’ll give you a different one, and it’s different because millions of strangers have watched you untangle that garden.” She wrote something on the pad, tore off the sheet, folded it once, and slid it across the desk, a reflexive act of discretion.

Samantha unfolded it.

She looked at the number for a moment. It was a serious number. It was the kind of number that paid off every loose end of the last two years and left a margin wide enough to build a whole new life inside. It was, in fact, higher than the number her plan had been counting on, and she waited to feel the relief.

The relief seemed to be running late.

“There’s really no such thing as a ‘spring’ or ‘summer’ market anymore,” Diane said, watching her with bright appraiser’s eyes. “But you’ll want to make a move while the videos are fresh on everyone’s minds. Course, you knew that.”

“I did.” Samantha folded the paper again, matching the original crease. “But I also know I can’t actually close until the fall, regardless. The estate has to clear first. But it’d be smart to get it listed as soon as I can, so we’re ready to make a deal the day it does.”

“That’s about the size of it.” If Diane was surprised that Samantha had come in with the timeline already memorized, she didn’t show it. “Nothing to worry about though. Fall’s when the leaf-peepers come through and get ideas. And if you keep making videos, people will still be eating it up.” She assembled a folder while she talked, the efficient shuffle of a woman who had assembled ten thousand folders: the listing agreement, the disclosures, a marketing sheet with her own face on it. She squared the stack and slid it into a crisp white folder with REMICK in navy on the cover and pushed it across the desk.

“No rush,” Diane said. “Read it over. Sign it when you’re ready.” She put her reading glasses back on, a punctuation mark. “The house isn’t going anywhere. Houses like that never do. It’s the people that come and go.”

Samantha stood, folder in hand, and wasn’t sure what to say to that.

“It was nice to meet you,” she said.

“Give my best to the cat,” said Diane, already looking at her computer. “Ida said something years ago about him staying with the house. That should be interesting.”

Samantha decided not to address that for now, but she could hear Diane chuckling as she left.

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Murphy’s truck was in the driveway when she got home, and Murphy himself was visible around the side of the house, shirtsleeves and dirt to the elbow, fixing the last section of edging along the fountain bed. He’d also planted pastel perennials, daisies and astilbe, and pretty textural grasses, which accented Ida’s uncovered and newly blooming blue hydrangeas.

There was an iced coffee sweating on the wall by the gate. Whole milk, two pumps of vanilla, condensation ring already formed. He didn’t say anything about it and neither did she, which was its own entire conversation. She told herself to act normal.

“You missed a delivery,” he said, breaking the silence before she could. “Forty bags of compost for the plantings and a driver who wanted to talk about the morning show.”

“I’m devastated.”

“He does a very good impression of you. Better than mine.” He tamped a stone into place, sat back on his heels, and looked at her then, and there it was, the thing they were not discussing, arriving in the space between them and pulling up a chair. His eyes went, briefly, to the tote bag on her shoulder. “Good errands?”

“Riveting. I bought terrible coffee and got recognized by a teenager.”

“Fame’s a burden.” He stood, brushing his hands on his shorts, and if he noticed that she hadn’t actually answered the question, he didn’t say. “Hey, I keep forgetting to tell you. You know what Poppy talked my ear off about, at the club? Weddings. Apparently, the club’s booked out two years for them. Two years. She said she’s been to every ballroom from Boston to Boothbay and they all smell like old cigarettes.”

“They do all smell like old cigarettes,” Samantha said reflectively, having attended many of these. “Everyone used to smoke. Even Ida and Maude had a cigarette in their hands in like every photo.” The white folder, through the canvas of the tote, seemed to her to have acquired a temperature.

“Anyway. She got about one glass of wine deep into planning ours.” He said it lightly, already turning back to the bed.

Samantha felt a sensation like lead dropping in her stomach.

“Compost’s stacked behind the shed. Fair warning, it’s fragrant.”

“Thanks for the disclaimer. I’ll go change.”

She went inside and stood in the kitchen, which was cool the way it was always inexplicably cool, and took the folder out of the bag.

She put it on the counter while she made sandwiches for them both, which she wasn’t even hungry for. By the time she turned around, George was sitting on it. Entirely on it, arranged with geometric precision, tail wrapped, regarding her with the serene finality of a paperweight.

“You aren’t supposed to be on the counter,” she said.

George looked at her.

“Your name really fits you. You’re like a stubborn old man.”

George continued to look at her, and something about the look required her to be the one to glance away first, which she resented. She lifted him off and placed him on the floor (he kept his claws in, but made himself boneless and heavy, radiating barely contained tolerance), opened the shallow drawer where the phone book was kept, and put the folder inside beneath it. Out of sight. Not signed, not decided, not anything.

A plan wasn’t a betrayal. A plan was a plan. She had explained this to herself several times today and would be sure to keep doing so.

She was lying in bed at nearly eleven, restlessly replaying the memory of Murphy talking about their imaginary wedding, when she remembered the alert. George was a warm rumbling weight against her side, and she felt a pang of grief at the idea of him staying with the house. But she knew she couldn’t displace him from his home, especially if it was Ida’s explicit wish. Maybe she would get a cat when she got back to Boston.

She switched a lamp on, irritated with herself, and grabbed her phone. She intended to do a mindless social media scroll when the notification resurfaced at the top of the stack where it had been sitting, patient as a bill, since before the fireworks. The credit monitoring app. The one she’d set up eight months ago, when she’d finally begun to suspect that something was amiss.

She had been moving it to the bottom of the list for days. Tomorrow-Samantha’s problem. But Today-Samantha was looking to punish herself a bit.

She opened it.

It took her a moment to parse, because the app dressed everything in the same bloodless gray language, whether it was telling you your score had ticked up two points or that your life had another leak in it. New activity: Home Equity Line of Credit, account ending 4471. Her line, but with him authorized to use it, because she had been so stupid. The one she now, as a result, paid down every month, quietly, on schedule.

A draw. Six thousand dollars, even. July 3.

She sat very still in the lamplight, phone bright in her hand. George lifted his head, ears turning toward the door, toward the hallway, toward something in the quiet house, and held there, listening to it.

The draw was dated July 3rd.

For a moment, she couldn’t believe he’d drawn on it again. But then, she wasn’t surprised at all. After all, what had the repercussions been? Sure, he’d lost his fiancée, but she’d let him save face. Let him tell the story of her breaking things off, having cold feet, commitment issues. She’d let herself be the bad guy to all their friends, family, and acquaintances.

Because it was so much easier than admitting she’d been so gullible.

Samantha turned the phone face-down on the nightstand and looked at the ceiling.

“Okay,” she said, to the room, to the house, or to maybe no one at all. “I can handle this.”

Down the hall, the old floorboards ticked and settled, the way old houses do. George lifted his head briefly at the sound of her voice, made a few absent “biscuits” on her leg as if reassuring her, then put his head back down, purring sleepily.

She’d have to text Bradley back tomorrow, whether she wanted to or not.

If you just love George, you want to speculate about who might be washing the teacups, or you ship Samantha and Murphy, please share this post with a friend, tap the ♡ or leave a note in the comments below. Your encouragement is what keeps me writing!

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