Salt & Flowers: Chapter Nine

Murphy plans the perfect sunset picnic. Samantha ruins it, then finally tells him why.

By the middle of July, there was no doubt about it. The hydrangeas were showing off.

They had come into bloom quietly, on their own schedule, and then all at once, until the beds along the east side of the house were a solid bank of blue so saturated it looked retouched. The comments said as much daily. No way that color is real. Totally AI.

But Samantha could attest: everything about the hydrangeas was real. It was, according to Murphy, the acidity of the soil that made them so blue.

Ten days had passed since the fireworks, and the ten days had been… okay.

She and Murphy had perfected their slightly awkward new language, which consisted of working side by side all day, laughing at the same things, standing marginally closer than colleagues stand, and not discussing what had happened on the fourth.

Her other correspondence of the past ten days had been nerve-wracking in an entirely different way.

She had texted Bradley back the morning after the alert, one line, revised eleven times and finally sent in its shortest form: I received an alert. Stop taking money from my account. She was a person who wrote persuasive copy for a living, and it had still taken her forty minutes, because every longer version either explained too much or asked a question, and she knew better than to ask Bradley questions. His follow-ups had arrived over the following week on a leisurely schedule, each one a small masterpiece that admitted to nothing.

What? I didn’t.

We should talk.

I’ve been meaning to call you anyway.

We need to talk in person.

Talked to your parents, they’re worried too.

Are you okay?

She ignored them all.

Also, within the ten days: she had emailed HR to request an extension of her leave, unpaid, through Labor Day. It was a perfectly reasonable request. It took her most of a morning to write, came to four sentences, and made her stomach hurt to send, and she chose not to examine any part of that too closely. The reply had been prompt and pleasant. Everyone at the office, apparently, was watching the videos too.

The real estate listing folder stayed in the drawer under the phone book. George had taken to sitting on the counter directly above that drawer with a kind of fixed serenity, and she had decided this was a coincidence. What else would it be?

On Thursday, Murphy turned off the mower in the middle of a row, walked over to where she was deadheading the second flush of the roses, and stood there wearing an expression she’d never seen on him before. It took her a second to identify it, because on his face it was practically exotic.

He was nervous.

“So,” he said. “Hypothetically. Are you free tomorrow evening?”

“Um... yes. You know I’m free every evening.”

“There’s a thing I’d like to do. With you. The thing is a picnic.” He said it quickly, like it was something he had rehearsed but it was now going differently out loud. “On the beach.”

“Is this a content thing?”

He looked momentarily taken aback. “No cameras. Nothing filmed, nothing posted.” He shifted his weight. “I guess I should have led with that.”

Samantha looked at him, dirt on his forearms, an unfamiliar vulnerability on his face, and felt the held breath of the last ten days ask, politely, if it might finally be exhaled.

“Yes,” she said. “Hypothetically.”

The following afternoon at five o’clock, approximately one hour before he was due to arrive, her phone lit up on the bathroom counter.

Bradley: Saw your house on the news. Looks like things are going to work out well for you. We should talk. Fair is fair.

She read it three times. Fair is fair. She set the phone down with exaggerated care, as though it were the phone’s fault, and finished getting ready, and if she was somewhat quieter than usual on the walk to the beach, Murphy was polite enough, or nervous enough, not to mention it.

The thing about Murphy, she realized within four minutes of arriving at the little crescent of beach, was that he did not know how to do anything at seventy percent.

He had chosen the exact spot where the dune grass sat picturesquely behind them. He had timed things, she was fairly sure, to the light, which was just beginning to go long and golden in a way she had watched him chase across her lawn for a month. There was a blanket in a tasteful sage green that she recognized, after a moment, as the precise color of the font in his thumbnails. The cooler opened in courses: little marinated things in deli containers with the labels peeled off, a baguette, strawberries, two proper glasses rolled in dish towels. There was a playlist, coming softly out of a speaker the size of a soup can. It was the most beautiful date anyone had ever planned for her.

It looks like content, said a small ugly voice in her head, even though, true to his word, there wasn’t a camera in sight. She hated the voice, and told it to sit down, and it sat, but it did not leave.

For a while, it was lovely anyway. The rosé was warm because the ice hadn’t survived the drive to meet her, and he apologized for that twice, which was one and a half more times than it needed. An aggressive seagull made off with the end of the baguette, and Murphy took it personally, and that was funny. For a few minutes she was actually there, on the sand, laughing as he got up to chase the bird, like they’d want the bread back anyway.

Then the phone buzzed in her bag.

She didn’t look at it. Looking at it and not looking at it turned out to occupy the same amount of attention.

“You can get that,” Murphy said, easy, passing her the strawberries.

“It’s nothing.”

It buzzed again a few minutes later, during a story he was telling about one of the yards he was working on, when he’d kept his camper right on the job site, and this time she did look, angling the screen away. It was nothing, a promotional text, and the relief made her angrier than the text would have, because now she’d checked, and he’d watched her check.

“Sorry,” she said. “Go on. You went outside your camper to check. The raccoon.”

“The raccoon was the other story.” He said it lightly, but something in his posture had gone careful. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

The light did the thing he loved, and the tide slid out obediently across the good sand, and Samantha sat inside all of it like a woman watching a movie about a date on a beach. He asked if she wanted the last of the strawberries. She said whichever, which is not an answer to that question. He mentioned the hydrangeas might need water, since it had been so dry, and hydra, after all.

“I know, you’ve said,” she replied with an edge that surprised them both. She watched him decide to let it go, and something about being managed, even gently, was suddenly unbearable.

He seemed to sense it.

“Where are you tonight?” he asked. Quietly, not an accusation. “Because you’re not here.”

And Samantha, who had spent ten days in an uncomfortable dance with him, and eight months being quiet, and one hour repeating fair is fair, and her entire life trying to do the right thing, finally spilled over onto the wrong man.

“Is that a problem that I have other things on my mind?” she said. “Does it ruin the shot list in your brain?”

The words were out before she could inspect them. She kept going anyway, downhill now. “You timed this to the light, Murphy. The blanket matches your brand. Don’t stand there acting like one of us is having a real evening and the other one is ruining it.”

She watched her words land. His face did something complicated and then closed, which she had never seen it do in the five weeks she’d known him.

“Wow,” he said. “Okay.”

He began, very calmly, to repack the cooler. Lids on the little containers. Empty glasses back in their towels. It was the calm that stung, the deliberate gentleness.

“I checked the tide chart,” he said evenly, not looking at her, “not the light. I don’t storyboard my feelings, whatever you might think of the blanket. I just like the color.” He clicked the cooler shut. And then, with an edge she’d also never heard: “You’ve been somewhere else for ten days. But I kept showing up anyway. I get that kissing you might have wrecked things, but I thought I’d find out for sure. I’m not going to apologize for wanting one evening where you’re actually on the beach with me.”

He got up and walked down to the waterline and stood there with his hands in his pockets.

Mind clear now, Samantha sat on the sage-green blanket in the best light of the day. She conducted, because it was what she knew how to do in a crisis, a review of the facts.

Fact: Murphy had not done anything wrong, unless caring visibly was wrong, which it was not, whatever her nervous system had decided.

Fact: she was not angry at Murphy. She was angry at a man sixty miles south of here who was continuing to take her money, somehow, and who had texted her the words fair is fair, probably from a couch she was also financing.

Fact: she had aimed it at Murphy because Murphy was closer. And, said a quieter voice underneath that one, because Murphy was safe to aim at. Because some animal part of her had apparently concluded that this man could take a shot from her and stay, and she had tested that theory an hour into the first real evening he’d ever asked her for.

Fact: she was being a jerk.

She looked at his back against the silvering water.

“Well,” she said to the seagull, which had seemingly returned to survey her wreckage. “That’s a hell of a thing to find out about yourself on a Friday.”

She got up and walked down to the water. She stood next to Murphy and looked at the horizon with him. She did not touch him, and made herself say it plainly, without garnish, the way she would want it said to her.

“I’m sorry. That was unfair. And I said it to you on purpose, because you were here.” She took a breath. “Can I tell you what it’s actually about?”

Murphy looked over at her. The evening had gone soft and pewter at the edges, the famous light already leaving.

“Yeah,” he said. “Let’s go up on the rocks. The good sand’s going under.”

She told him all of it.

She looked out at the water, because it soothed her, as always. She started with meeting Bradley in Boston, at a bar — the financial district, of course. The wining and dining, the lavish vacations. They’d had common connections, mutual friends. So many coincidences, it had felt easy. There’d been a few comments from casual acquaintances about his ex-business partners, but she’d chalked it up to gossip.

Then there was the proposal at a restaurant she’d picked because he’d forgotten to book one for their anniversary, but he’d had the giant ring, so it had just felt like a funny story. The wedding that had gotten bigger the way weddings do. Then the line of credit, opened against her condo during the planning, because there were deposits, and he didn’t have the liquid. There was always another startup, another scheme, and she’d thought she was being supportive. The timing made sense, because we’re about to be married anyway, which she could still hear in his exact register, reasonable and warm and slightly wounded that she’d hesitated. Her signature on those first draws. Her social. That was the part she made herself say twice.

Then the later draws, the ones he hadn’t asked her about. The statement she’d gone looking for eight months ago, three weeks before the wedding, because she’d gotten a weird call from her mortgage company about the line of credit. What she’d found. The fact that he’d taken all of it. What she’d found after that, once she knew what she was looking for. Loans in her name, using her social.

“I canceled the wedding eleven days out,” she said. The tide breathed in and out. “I let him keep the story. Cold feet. Commitment issues. Poor Bradley, she just bolted. Our friends, his mother, my mother. My mother still asks about him constantly.” She was quiet a moment. “She thinks he had an affair, which is small potatoes in the circles she runs in. If only. Instead, I was stupid.” She said it viciously.

Murphy made a noise, but she kept going.

“I paid the deposits back myself. I pay the line down every month, on schedule, out of my salary, like a phone bill. And I never reported any of it, and do you want to know the actual reason?”

“Yes.”

“Because paying is better than admitting how badly I miscalculated.” She said it to the horizon. It was the first time she had ever said it out loud, and it sounded exactly as bad as she’d suspected it would, which was probably why she’d never said it out loud.

Murphy was silent for a while. He had sat the whole way through with his forearms on his knees, holding his chin, still in a way she’d never seen him still. When he finally spoke, he did the most Murphy thing imaginable, which was to reach immediately for his mental toolbox, his Southern accent coming fast and thick.

“You need a lawyer. We should start looking them up. Sam, that’s fraud, the later stuff is straight-up identity—”

“I don’t need saving right now,” she said gently. “I need an ear.”

He stopped. Closed his mouth. Held up both hands.

“Right,” he said. “Sorry. Keep going.”

“That’s it. That’s the whole story. Except that he saw us on social media, saw the segment about the house on the news, and now he wants to talk, because apparently” — she made the shape of the words with her hands, like something distasteful held at arm’s length — “fair is fair.”

“Fair is fair,” Murphy repeated, very evenly, and she somehow understood from his deceptively thoughtful voice that if Bradley had been standing on this beach, the tide chart would have become relevant in a different way.

The last of the color went out of the sky. Somewhere behind them the seagull finally gave up on the baguette situation and left. Samantha felt both hollowed out and lighter.

“Slightly off topic, maybe,” Murphy said, to the water, “but I don’t think the fireworks were a mistake.”

She let that sit.

“I know,” she said. “That’s another thing I’m sorting through.”

He smiled at the horizon and didn’t push it.

Tentatively, she put her head on his shoulder in the last of the light. It felt just right, and so, finally, did the silence.

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Later, he walked her to the door and kissed her hand, unhurried. She stood in the hall listening to the truck back out of the driveway with her whole body ringing like a struck glass.

She should have asked him to come in.

She went into the kitchen for water and to feed George, but stopped in the doorway.

On the kitchen table stood an old, cut-crystal vase. She recognized it, distantly, from the butler’s pantry, third shelf, where it lived behind the pretty silver ice bucket she loved. It was full of hydrangeas. Blue ones, fresh-cut, a dozen heads at least, arranged in a full and spectacular dome.

Samantha stood very still.

She had not cut them. She had been on a beach ruining and then repairing the best date of her life for the last five hours, and Murphy had been beside her for every minute of it, which her nervous system confirmed by replaying the hand kiss. Alfred was in Florida until August and had never had a key to the new locks anyway. The new locks. She crossed the kitchen and checked the back door: locked. The side door off the porch: locked.

She opened the trash cabinet. There were leaves and a scatter of trimmings on top in a neat little pile, as though someone had cleaned up after herself out of fifty-plus years of habit.

George was sitting on the table beside the vase, a flagrant violation of every rule she had failed to establish, tail wrapped around his feet, and he was not looking at Samantha. He was looking past the arrangement, head tilted slightly.

The strange thing, the thing that she would turn over while staring at her canopy later, was what she felt standing in that cool kitchen, and what she did not feel. She did not feel afraid. Instead, she felt comforted. She had sat on a beach tonight and said the quiet things out loud for the first time in eight months, and she had come home, and… someone… had cut her flowers. It felt like approval.

“Thank you,” she said, to the kitchen, feeling ridiculous, but meaning it.

George blinked at her voice, slow and warm, then looked past the flowers again, into nothingness.

The hairs on the back of Samantha’s neck stood up.

On the counter, her phone buzzed.

Bradley: I need to see you.

Samantha stood between the two of them, the flowers and the phone, for a long moment.

Then she filled a glass with water at the sink, turned off the light, and went up to bed. She left the phone on the counter where it lay.

If you just love George, you want to speculate about who might be arranging hydrangeas, 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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