Salt & Flowers: Chapter Six

It had been a surreal few days. Samantha and Murphy had been on several morning shows, via laptop propped on the kitchen counter. Doing the interviews remotely was Samantha’s condition for participating, not wanting to take time out of her month-long trip. Murphy spun it to needing to get back to work on the garden, which wasn’t untrue.

Their — well, technically Murphy’s — following had only grown from there. Though the segments had only been a few minutes long, the videos had gained another two million views by the time they were heading back outside with their gloves on.

“You were good,” Murphy said, as he set up the camera. It was a cooler day, a bit drizzly. He wore a flannel and looked like a local, she noted.

“I was just okay. You are actually good at this.” She clipped the mic to her collar. “There’s a difference.”

He looked at her sideways. “People seem to like us both.”

“I’m a novelty. I don’t actually want the attention, and people aren’t used to that anymore.”

He seemed to find this funnier than it warranted, and she tried to ignore the way her stomach warmed a bit from making him laugh.

They worked diligently and quietly until lunchtime, when Murphy said he needed to go run an errand.

She made the mistake of checking her phone. She’d been working on locking down her social media. Her DMs were closed, follow requests paused, the settings on her account tightened to the point of near-invisibility. Still, she was bombarded. Before she knew it, hours had passed, and she still hadn’t heard from Murphy. Weird.

She’d handled her parents. Her father’s voicemail — Sammy, we saw you on the television, call us — had not been returned, but she’d compromised by participating in a group text chat with them. Her mother had only mentioned Bradley once. Well, Bradley’s parents, who had apparently seen a segment and reached out to them. She’d made the now-familiar excuses about needing to get back to the garden after that.

Bradley himself had called twice more since the text. She would not be answering. There was also, she’d noticed with a cold and quiet dread, a new alert from her credit monitoring app. It was the one she’d set up eight months ago, after she’d finally understood the full scope of what he’d done. Whether it was a coincidence or not, she wasn’t sure. She hadn’t opened it yet. She kept moving it to the bottom of her mental list.

Later, she told herself. One thing at a time.

Samantha hated talking on the phone, but one call she’d decided to return for her own purposes was from her Aunt Caroline. Aunt Caroline wouldn’t text, as she couldn’t see the screen well and wouldn’t size up the font.

The call lasted forty minutes after Aunt Caroline had exhausted the topic of Samantha’s newfound fame. She was treated to Aunt Caroline’s detailed recap of a cruise she’d taken in April, what the twins — and their perfect husbands, ugh — were up to, a long-running dispute with her neighbor about a fence, and then back full circle to the interviews and her feelings about the current state of network television. Samantha made the appropriate noises and waited.

“Maude Aldrich,” she finally said, when there was an opening. “Do you know if she’s still in the area?”

A short silence. “Well,” Aunt Caroline said, with the particular intonation of someone who had thoughts. “I believe she’s still alive.” A pause. “She’d be in her late eighties now. I haven’t seen her in years. Since your grandmother’s funeral, maybe.”

“Do you have any way to reach her?”

“I wouldn’t have her number. That whole family was private. You know.” A meaningful pause. “Did you find something of hers in Ida’s things? I’m not sure she’ll be willing to talk to you about that.”

Samantha cringed at the clear dig for gossip. “I just found some photographs,” she said carefully. “I thought she might want them.”

Another pause, this one softer, more gentle. “That’s a kind thing to offer,” Aunt Caroline said, then she sighed. “It was a different time. Maybe, in this day and age…” she trailed off. Then her voice brightened. “You could try the phone book.”

Samantha hadn’t seen a phone book in more than a decade, but she supposed if one still existed, it would be in this house.

She hung up exhausted and no closer to an actual phone number or address than she’d started.

She sat at the kitchen table and opened her laptop. The branding mood board for the pretend wedding planning business she’d been dreaming up was still there. She looked at it for a moment, then deliberately didn’t close it, but opened a new tab instead.

A search for Maude Aldrich turned up very little. There was an old society page mention from the early 2000s, a charitable donation listing, a blurry photograph from a gala that might have been her or might have been anyone. The family had been private, as Aunt Caroline said. Whatever Maude’s life had looked like for the past several decades, she’d lived it without much of a digital footprint. Considering recent events, Samantha couldn’t fault the wisdom in that.

The cat jumped onto the table and sat directly on her keyboard, producing a line of unhinged characters across the search bar.

“Rude. I’m working,” she told him as she removed his girth.

He just rubbed his face on her chin, like she was cuddling him rather than evicting him. Sighing, she allowed him to remain on her lap, where he purred in contentment.

She closed the laptop halfway and sat back. Through the window, the late afternoon light was doing something spectacular to the garden. The long gold of it was catching the lavender, nepeta, and the roses that had started their abundant first flush. She could almost smell it from inside.

She’d been here for nearly three weeks. The house felt different than it had on the first day. The garden certainly felt different. But most of all, she felt different than she had on the first day, which was harder to sit with. And it had almost been a month already.

She opened her laptop again and looked at the mood board for a long moment. Those very flowers from outside the window were already there before they’d even bloomed, prominent in her inspiration.

Deciding not to read into that any further, she closed the laptop, got up, and went to start dinner.

Murphy arrived at the kitchen door just as she was plating her spaghetti and meat sauce with a bag that he held out to her. Inside, she found new doorknobs.

“It will make us both feel better,” he said, before she could comment. “You can share some of that with me in payment after.” He was already pulling out the first doorknob. “You have a screwdriver?”

“Somewhere.” She opened the junk drawer, which had clearly been a junk drawer since approximately 1957, and began sorting through it without much hope. She found the screwdriver behind a collection of rubber bands that had all fused together and a notepad with Ida’s handwriting on it. A grocery list, she thought, though she couldn’t read the messy handwriting. She set it aside carefully and handed the screwdriver over.

“Sit,” he said. “Finish eating.”

“I’m not going to just sit there while you —”

“You cooked it. Sit.”

She sat, which she told herself was a practical decision and not because there was something about being told to do something in her own kitchen that temporarily short-circuited her objection reflex.

He worked quietly, comfortable with the task, not needing to fill the space. She ate her pasta and listened to the small sounds of it — the screwdriver, the knob testing loose, the quiet under-the-breath sound he made when something didn’t quite do what he wanted.

“How did you learn so many handy things?” she asked, finally. While she could probably figure out how to replace a doorknob, it would likely involve at least a month of procrastination, one YouTube tutorial, and countless swears.

“Grew up doing stuff.” He didn’t look up. “My dad was the kind of person who fixed things instead of replacing them. Which drove me crazy at the time.”

“And now?”

He turned the new knob, testing it. “And now I fix things instead of replacing them.” A pause, something almost wry in it. “Go figure.”

She ate another bite of pasta. Through the window over the sink, the last of the light was going out of the garden, the lavender holding onto it longer than everything else.

“You should cut some of those roses tomorrow,” he said. “Before the rain comes. They won’t last.”

She looked at him. He was still working on the door, not looking at her.

“Good idea,” she said.

“I know.” He tested the knob again. “You’ll like having them in here.”

She wasn’t sure why that landed the way it did. The small domesticity of it, him knowing what was in her garden, what she would make her happy, and caring about it enough to mention it to her… It felt like something she didn’t have a category for yet.

She set her fork down and picked up her water glass, and that’s when she noticed he’d gone still.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing.” He picked up the screwdriver. “I like your logo.” He nodded toward the counter behind her, and her laptop.

She went still.

He kept his eyes on the door where he was working. “The color palette is good. The typeface.”

She knew she had left that laptop closed when she’d moved it. Had the cat opened it somehow? She shot the creature a suspicious look as she felt the particular, prickling exposure of being caught at a disadvantage. The feline just returned her gaze with his unnerving lack of blinking.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “I was just playing around. It helps me think.”

“What are you calling it?”

She hesitated half a beat too long. “Salt & Flowers Wedding Planning.”

He nodded slowly, the way she’d noticed that he did when he had more thoughts than he thought she’d be willing to hear. “Good name.”

She waited for him to say something else. He didn’t. He just went back to work on the doorknob.

The name had come to her in the first week, on the evening she’d sat outside with her tea and the garden had hit her all at once. The salt air and flowers, the whole complicated sweetness of the place. The previous night, she’d opened Canva at 11pm and spent two hours making something she kept telling herself was just a thought experiment. A mood board. A mental placeholder for an idea she hadn’t committed to.

The logo was clean and simple. The words were stacked, a small sprig of something botanical dressing up the ampersand. The palette was the colors she kept seeing everywhere around her: the soft green of the stone wall lichen, the lavender, the particular blue of the ocean on overcast mornings. She’d made three versions without meaning to.

She’d just been playing, it hadn’t meant anything. Feeling exposed, she got up to fix Murphy a plate, and gently — casually, she hoped — closed the computer on her way by.

She was washing their dinner plates while Murphy finished up on the front door when she heard it.

A ring.

Not her phone. Something older, a physical bell-sound, coming from the direction of the sitting room.

She stood at the sink with water running over her hands.

It rang again.

She turned off the tap and went to look.

On the small table in the corner of the sitting room, tucked behind a lamp she’d been meaning to move, and half-obscured by the trailing leaf of a pothos that had taken significant territorial liberties, was a telephone. Cream-colored, rotary dial, the handset vibrating faintly in its cradle with each ring.

She had not known it was there. She had cleaned this room herself. She had no explanation for how she had missed it.

It rang a third time.

The cat was sitting beside it, watching it ring, with the calm attentiveness of someone who had been expecting this.

Samantha crossed the room and picked up the handset.

“Hello?”

A pause. Then a voice spoke — older, precise, with the particular diction of someone who had been raised to speak carefully.

“Is this Samantha Miller? Ida’s great-niece?”

She gripped the handset. “Yes. This is Samantha.”

Another pause. Uncertain, measuring.

“My name is Maude Aldrich,” the voice said. “I’ve seen the videos on the television. I hoped you might answer.” A beat. “I’d like to speak with you. The club — that is, The Granite Point Club — is doing their Independence Day celebration. It would be a very natural occasion to meet. I’d like to invite you. And your young man, if he’d like to come.”

Samantha looked at the cat. He looked back at her.

“We’d like that,” she said. “Very much.”

If something in this chapter spoke to you — a detail, a moment, a feeling you recognized — please tap the ♡ or leave a note below. I’d love to hear it!