Salt & Flowers: Chapter Thirteen

Murphy has been taking mysterious phone calls, having unexplained lunches at the club, and measuring the east lawn while murmuring to himself. Added to that: a white folder and the word "partners." Some proposals go worse than others.

Samantha had the recording on her phone and had even backed it up on an external hard drive in a fit of paranoia. After naming it according to her meticulous file-naming protocol, she had done… exactly nothing.

It had gone into the proverbial drawer for now, along with the Remick Luxury Real Estate folder, but the something-new in her brain that had been growing all summer told her to do something with it.

She just wasn’t sure quite what yet.

Meanwhile, Murphy was up to something. He hadn’t pushed her on the recording, which she appreciated, but he’d seemed distant in new ways.

The signs accumulated over the week. He took two phone calls walking away from her, down toward the wall. He disappeared for lunch one day and brought her takeout from the Granite Point Club’s poolside bar, with no explanation. And on Wednesday, after he had taken the after photos and footage of the yard for days, she looked out the kitchen window and watched him walk the east lawn with a measuring wheel, pacing off long lines, stopping, writing in a little contractor’s notebook.

He was measuring her lawn and murmuring to himself.

There was, of course, an explanation. There were several possible explanations.

The one that she settled on was that he was getting ready to leave and anticipating any possible audience questions before he hit the road. That way, he wouldn’t have to contact her later on if someone asked him a question.

Which was fine. It had always been the deal: the project ends, the truck leaves. She’d known that in June, when knowing it had cost her nothing.

Just to find out for sure, like any mature woman in an undefined relationship, she tried to pick an argument.

But Murphy was immune.

“You’re acting weird,” she told him at lunch.

“No. I’m being normal.”

“You’re weird normally, and this is worse.”

“Friday,” Murphy said, with the alarming serenity of a man who was refusing to even play-bicker. “I have something to show you on Friday.”

“You could just tell me now,” she said, going for casual and arriving somewhere else. Was it his next project? “Whatever it is. I’m very difficult to surprise.”

“Friday,” Murphy said again, maddeningly, and stole one of her potato chips.

Friday came with gorgeous weather, because of course it did. She’d forgotten just how beautiful August could be by the sea, a salty breeze finally cutting through the humidity.

Murphy was quiet through the afternoon, quiet while they did the weeding, and then, while she was still drying her hands, he came into the kitchen carrying a white folder, thick with pages, and set it on the table between the two glasses of iced tea, next to the still improbably vibrant hydrangeas.

Samantha’s heart did several unscheduled things in a row, since at first glance, it had looked just like the folder for Remick Luxury Real Estate. But she quickly realized it wasn’t. Just a generic, glossy white folder.

“Okay,” Murphy said. He sat, then immediately stood again, then made himself sit. She had seen him nervous exactly once before, in a rose bed. This was that, amplified. “So. I’ve been thinking about this since… well, for a while. And I want you to hear the whole thing before you say anything, because I’ve only got one run at it. If I stop in the middle, I’ll lose my nerve. Deal?” His accent was thick like it always was when he was flustered.

“Deal,” she said, and her voice came out strange, and she genuinely did not know what she was braced for.

He opened the folder.

The first page was a rendering, and it stopped her cold, because it was beautiful. It was her garden — Ida’s garden, she corrected herself — but finished, dressed, and inhabited. There were rows of white chairs on the east lawn facing the gap in the stone wall, the ocean framed in it like an altarpiece. An aisle running down between the hydrangea bank and the perennial border. The carriage house with its doors thrown open and string lights running between its eaves, tables underneath. He had even put little people at the tables. Some of the people appeared to be dancing.

“I used my landscape design software, even played with the architecture side a bit for the carriage house. Weddings,” Murphy said, as if she hadn’t seen it.

She must not be showing much reaction. This was the version of him the camera loved, she noted as if from far away. Except there was no camera, there was just him, leaning over his own creation.

“The club’s booked two years out, Sam. Two years. I asked Poppy some questions over lunch, because if there’s anyone who knows the details, it’s the meemaws.” He flipped the page: numbers, columns, dates. “May through October, one event a week, you’d clear — well, look at it. That’s conservative. That’s me being a coward about the numbers. This place, with this garden, with the ocean sitting right there in that wall like it was designed for it? People would get married here in a heartbeat. It’s a dream. You already creating the branding for it, I saw. It was perfect, you knew exactly what would fit. And you — “ he looked up at her, alight — “you’d never have to sell. That’s the whole thing. That’s the point of it. You keep the house, you keep the garden, you keep George, the place pays for its own roof. You wouldn’t need — “ a hitch, half a beat, “It’d be yours.”

The light was going gold over his drawing. Samantha looked at the little dancing figures under the string lights and felt two things arrive at once, at full speed, from opposite directions.

The first was that it was a good idea. It was, in fact, a very good idea, and the logical side of her brain — the marketer, the planner, the woman who had built campaigns out of less — was already three moves into it, seeing the bookings page, the golden-hour photos, the waiting list.

The second thing arrived when he turned to the last section of the folder, where the pages stopped being drawings and started being spreadsheets, and said the sentence he had clearly rehearsed most:

“And I’ve run what I’ve got. Savings, the sponsorship money, it’s honestly just been sitting there… and I want in.” He turned the folder toward her, and there it was in a tidy printed column with his name at the top of it. “Startup costs, the carriage house renovation, the first season’s overhead. Equal partners. You and me.”

The gold light stayed exactly where it was. Everything else in Samantha went very quiet and very cold, because underneath the porch, underneath the summer, a voice off a tiny tinny speaker said: there was no ‘your money’ and ‘my money,’ there was our life, which I was out there building —

“So, you already talked to Poppy about this,” she heard herself say.

“I — yeah. Just groundwork. She said she could float a partnership question to the club board, hypothetically, because her grandson — “

“The board.” Samantha looked at him. “There’s a board that may have already heard about this, before you’re telling me.”

Murphy’s smile faltered for the first time. “I doubt she said anything. It’s an idea, Sam. A concept. Nothing’s — “

“You measured my lawn.” Her voice stayed level. “You ran numbers with your name in a column next to mine, and you talked to a rich old woman at a Yacht Club, whose grandson is on the board, and you did all of it before you said one word to me. That’s not an idea in a folder. That’s a plan. For my house.” She stood up, because sitting had become impossible. “For my life.”

“That’s not — “ He stood too, the drawing sliding on the table between them. “You know that’s not what this is.”

“Do I? Walk me through it. Genuinely. A man I trusted made plans with my assets because he knew better than I did what our life should look like.” Her breath went ragged. “He also did the groundwork first and told me after, because I’d only have complicated things in the planning stage. So, walk me through the difference, Murphy, because from where I’m standing, the difference is that your folder is physical and just has better renderings than Bradley’s.”

The words landed the way she’d known they would while she was still saying them. Murphy went still and when he spoke, all the music had gone out of his voice.

“The difference,” he said quietly, “is that I’m asking.”

“Are you?” She gestured at the pages, the columns, the little dancing figures. “Because this looks finished.”

“I’m not Bradley. I watched him shrink you.” It came out low and fast, the accent thickening again, but differently. Angrily. “On your own lawn, in your own garden, I saw you turn into someone else, the person you must have been with him. I wanted to help you. And this is what I know how to do, Samantha. I build things, and I’m good at it. I’m not a con artist. I don’t have the words guys like him have, I have this —” his hand flat on the drawing — “I was trying to build you a door. So you’d never have to sell, never have to go back — ” He stopped. His jaw worked. “I was building you a door.”

“I have had enough,” Samantha said quietly, “of men ‘building things’ for me.”

The porch was very quiet. Down in the beds, the zinnias they’d planted together stood in their screaming colors, and the ocean kept up its arithmetic, and the two of them stood on either side of a beautiful drawing, breathing.

And then Samantha did it.

She would spend a long time afterward examining the moment. She’d hold it up to the light, but she never did find a way to make it anything other than what it was: no matter what he considered it, she was cornered again. She was hurt and being handed a future she hadn’t decided on. Again.

So she reached for the heaviest thing in the room to prove she didn’t need anyone’s door, because this time she had her own.

“You want to talk about plans?” she said, and walked over to pull open the drawer under the phone book. She dropped her own white folder on the table on top of his drawing.

REMICK, in navy. Bent at one corner from six weeks in a drawer.

“I have a plan,” she said. “I’ve had a plan the whole time.”

She opened it up, to the sticky note with the eye-watering sum that Diane had written, dated. Turned it, slide it across to him. Murphy looked at the small yellow square for a moment.

“July fifth. The morning after I kissed you.” He said it with no edge at all, which was the worst possible way for him to say it. He looked up, and did the math out loud, slowly, like a man checking his own change. “The tea with Maude. The picnic. The moon.” A breath. “Every morning I showed up here, that was in the drawer.”

“Murphy — “

“No, it’s… “ He held up a hand, gently. She could see it happen behind his face, an efficient internal folding, packing, everything going into boxes that were mostly boxes. “You’re completely right. This was what we agreed to. It’s your house. It was always the plan. You never actually said different, did you? I just — filled that part in myself.” He gathered his folder off the table, squaring the pages with terrible care, but left the drawing where it lay. “I’m gonna head out.”

“That’s it?” Her voice cracked on it. “You’re just — “

He stopped at the top of the porch steps, and for a second the flatness slipped and something younger looked out from behind it. “I want to be real clear, because you’ll rework this later and get it wrong: I’m not leaving to make a point. I’m leaving because this is my part in the plan. Garden’s done, resale value is maximized. It’s what I’m supposed to do.” A breath of almost-laugh, aimed at himself, with no fun in it anywhere. “I’m usually a lot better at it than this.”

He went down the steps. The truck door. The engine. The lane.

He had left the drawing on the table. She sat down next to it in the last of the gold light and did not review any facts at all, because not one of them helped.

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Things in the house felt weird, so she left the dinner dishes in the sink that night. One plate, one glass, one fork; she hadn’t managed much of a dinner. She left them on purpose, defiantly, the way you’d slam a door in a house where no one slams doors.

In the morning the dishes sat exactly where she’d left them.

She stood in the kitchen doorway for a long moment. The plate. The glass. The fork, at its abandoned angle. The first dishes in eleven weeks that stayed where she left them.

And the kitchen was warm.

Humid. August coming through the windows like it came through every other window. The impossible coolness gone like a held breath let out, and on the table the hydrangea dome, which had stood perfect and impossible for weeks, had wilted overnight. The petals curled in on themselves like closing hands.

“Oh, come on,” Samantha said to the room, and her voice did something embarrassing in the middle of it as she spotted the cat. “Not you too.”

George sat at the front window, a white shape against the glass, watching the empty driveway. He had not come to breakfast when she called him. When she went and picked him up, he allowed it. But he went boneless and heavy, and stared over her shoulder at the door, and his tail did not move at all.

She assumed it was his version of the silent treatment.

After the house, the next thing that changed was the weather.

In hindsight, it had been foreshadowed all week, but she hadn’t really been paying attention, distracted by Murphy’s behavior.

Murphy had been glancing at a radar app between taking his after photos and videos, a comment about a system down past Bermuda “getting a spin,” said the way you’d report gossip about a difficult relative.

It had seemed like background. Everything had seemed like background to whatever he was planning.

Saturday evening her phone lit up on the counter with an alert, and then, twenty minutes later, another one. She went to the social media page for the Boston news station, which had the latest weather report pinned. She stood in the too-warm kitchen listening to a calm voice say tracking northward and unusually warm New England waters and models coming into agreement, and the words those along the coast should prepare.

She looked at the table. His drawing, the aisle running toward a flower framed view of the sea, the little dancing figures. Her folder, white and navy, bent at one corner. A pen lying between them where she’d dropped it days ago, pointing at neither.

Outside, the first wind of it, way out ahead of the rest, moved through the fading hydrangeas like a hand trailed through water.

By the next morning, it had a name.