Salt & Flowers: Chapter Twelve

Flats of late summer zinnias. Stolen kisses behind the potting shed. Pulling weeds. And then a dark sedan with Massachusetts plates comes up the crushed stone drive, and two worlds that were never supposed to collide...

The first week of August arrived, and with it, a new problem: they were terrible at staying on task. It seemed like all it took was a glance from one of them to the other, and suddenly the garden was forgotten. She was half-worried that one of his followers was going to see them from the road and record them.

Not that they had discussed hiding. They had not discussed anything, which seemed to be their habit. But some unspoken agreement had been reached on the beach under the Buck Moon that whatever this was, it belonged to them and not to eight million strangers, and so they had spent a week conducting a covert operation with all the subtlety of a marching band.

Murphy kissed her behind the potting shed, where the camera couldn’t see, tasting like coffee and spearmint gum. She pulled him into the old carriage house between the paint cans, in the mudroom with her gloves still on, once at the top of the beach stairs with the whole ocean in front of them. And she had finally asked him to stay the night. George supervised them from various elevated surfaces with the expression of a disapproving chaperone who had lost control of the situation. But his tail also flicked in the way that it did when he was pleased.

On camera they were professional. Off camera, the exact things were happening that were being predicted by the commenters.

People were savvy, Samantha had noticed before making herself stop looking and had begun to observe that way Murphy smiled at her, the way she had softened her sarcasm (sometimes, at least) and the overall change in body language.

It was the happiest she had been in… she’d tried to do the math, standing at the sink one night doing their dishes (now that she knew Ida’s pet peeve), and had abandoned the line of thinking when the answer started looking less like months and more like a longer unit of measurement. Also, when Murphy had come up behind her and kissed her neck and thoroughly distracted her. The dishes were neatly finished the next morning.

The listing folder stayed in the drawer. She was aware of it the way you’re aware of a dentist appointment. Well, maybe not that, as Samantha enjoyed having her teeth cleaned. A gynecologist appointment. She simply was going to try not to think of it, although it was looming. But there was still time.

On Thursday, Murphy had planned for the “late-summer refresh.” Samantha, who was still actively telling herself there was plenty of summer still ahead of them, didn’t love the term.

But she couldn’t deny that the June annuals had given what they had to give, and Murphy had come back from the nursery with flats of zinnias in every color zinnias came in, which was all of them. His plan seemed simple: out with the spent, in with the fresh, weed the beds hard, freshen up the mulch (she loved fresh mulch) and let the wide camera catch the whole bank of the east border transforming for a time-lapse. He’d set the tripod up on the lawn that morning hooked up to power so it wouldn’t die, framed the shot, and pressed record — the little red light settling into its patient blink — and then abandoned filmmaking entirely to haul mulch. Samantha was still mic’d, because apparently, she sometimes talked to herself and swore in a very unladylike way, which the followers found hilarious.

Which is how Samantha came to be alone, kneeling in the dirt in the eleven o’clock sun, digging under the crabgrass she’d been creatively and crudely insulting under her breath, when she heard tires on the crushed stone.

She looked up, expecting a delivery. They had a patio set coming to set up on the pea gravel.

The sedan was dark charcoal. Massachusetts plates.

Bradley got out of it the way he did everything. Unhurried, sunglasses pushed up into his hair, surveying the property like a J. Crew model in a coastal shoot. He was in what he had called “weekend clothes” — loafers, linen shorts, a quarter-zip slung over his shoulder, the whole soft costume of it. Normal Samantha would have a remark about the August temperature and need for cashmere. But the sight of him standing on Ida’s driveway — her driveway — produced in Samantha a sensation she would need the entire rest of the day to name: the feeling of two worlds colliding that were never, ever supposed to.

“There she is,” Bradley said, warm as anything.

Samantha felt herself — the self she’d been getting to know again all summer — begin to disappear.

She watched as if from slightly outside her own body, with a kind of clinical horror. She stood. She stripped off her gloves. She tucked the loose hair behind her ears and brushed at the dirt on her knees, grooming herself for inspection, and heard herself say — to a man standing uninvited on her property, who stole from her — “It’s a mess out here, we’re mid-project.”

Apologizing. As if to company. Maintaining the façade.

“It’s — “ Bradley looked around, and did the thing he did, the small pause before the compliment that turned the compliment into a measurement. “It’s a lot. Wow. It’s really — you did all this?” A smile. “You look tired, Sam.”

To her relief, irritation flashed through the numbness, proving she could still feel things. “It’s ninety degrees. I’m working.”

“Sure, sure.” He strolled closer, hands in his pockets. On the porch steps, George materialized from wherever George materialized from and watched, expression even less friendly than usual.

“You have a cat,” Bradley said, in the voice other people used for you have a mold problem.

“His name is George.”

“Of course it is.” He stopped a polite distance away. He was always careful, she realized, had never once in his life been anything so crude as looming. He looked at her with soft, managerial concern. “Your mom says you’ve been hard to reach. People are worried, Sammy. This whole — “ he gestured at the garden, the house, the summer, her — “sabbatical thing. The videos. It’s a little weird, isn’t it? You have to admit it’s not really you.”

There it was. The old translation software booting up in her head, unbidden, fluent after all these years: not really you meant I do not approve.

People are worried meant people are talking.

It was a familiar language, because her parents were also fluent.

She felt herself getting smaller to fit inside the version of her he’d brought with him, felt her shoulders finding their old apologetic angle, and some distant part of her — the part that had knelt in this dirt all summer, that had crowbarred a stone wall out of bittersweet, come up with sassy comebacks for the idealistic landscaper, and been thoroughly kissed behind the potting shed — stood off to the side, watching, appalled.

“Why are you here, Bradley?”

“I wanted to see you. Is that a crime?” He said it lightly. Then, when she didn’t fill the pause the way she used to: “Okay. Look. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. About us, about how everything went down. And I think — Sam, I think we owed each other a real conversation, and we never had it, because you bolted. I get it, I do, the wedding stuff got overwhelming…”

“I didn’t bolt because of the wedding stuff.”

“… and now all this has happened,” he continued, as though she hadn’t spoken, turning to take in the house with an appraiser’s sweep, “and honestly? It feels like a sign. Timing-wise. You’ve got this place, which, congratulations, seriously. And there’s still the condo situation to untangle, the line, all that boring stuff… I just think we could resolve everything, together, like adults. Clean slate. Start fresh.” He turned back to her with the smile that he had once worked at every restaurant in the financial district to court startup funds. “I’m here about us. Our future.”

The sun was very bright. Down the border, the zinnias sat in their flats, waiting to be planted, colors screaming. Samantha looked at the man she had almost married and understood, with a clarity that arrived like cold water, that both sentences were lies and the second one was the delivery vehicle for the first.

“No,” she said.

It came out quiet. It came out shaky. But it came out.

Bradley tilted his head. “No? Which part?”

“All the parts.”

She watched the recalibration happen behind his eyes, watched charm get filed away and something leaner take its place. This was the part she remembered from the nights after a dinner hadn’t gone his way, after someone had made a joke at his expense and Samantha laughed. The part that no one else ever saw, the part she’d never been able to prove to anyone, because it only came out when there were no witnesses.

“Okay,” he said, in a new voice, reasonable and cold. “You want to do the version where I’m the villain. Fine. Let’s just, for accuracy, say ‘stealing from you.’” He shook his head as if dismayed. “Like I’m some guy in a ski mask. Sam. We were getting married. There was no ‘your money’ and ‘my money,’ there was our life, which I was out there building, every day, while you alphabetized the registry and made checklists. You’d have signed anything I put in front of you and we both know it. So yes, I saved us some conversations and saved myself some long and complex explanations. I used the information I had to jump on opportunities. Your information, our information, whatever makes you feel better.” He shrugged, palms open, entirely at peace with himself. “Call it whatever helps you sleep at night. It takes some risk to win big in business. I’d do it again. That’s what building wealth looks like.“

The garden was very quiet. Even the grasshoppers seemed to be silenced by his audacity.

“You should go,” Samantha said.

“Think about what I said.” He was already recalibrating back toward warmth, putting his sunglasses back on, the whole exchange being filed somewhere it could be denied later. He turned toward the car, then paused, because he had never in his life left a room without the last word. “Your parents agree with me, by the way. About all of it.” A small smile. “Take care of yourself, Sammy.”

The sedan crunched back down the drive. George watched it the whole way to the road, tail lashing, and then, when it turned onto the road and vanished, he looked up at Samantha and gave a single low sound she had never heard him make before, something between a growl and a hiss.

“Yeah,” Samantha said. Her hands, she noticed, were trembling. “Agreed.”

Murphy came around the corner of the house ninety seconds later with an empty wheelbarrow and stopped dead.

“Whose car was — “ He looked at her face. The wheelbarrow went down on its legs. “That was him.”

She nodded.

What happened in Murphy’s face then was something she’d never seen there: everything went very still and very flat, like a lake before lightning. He crossed the lawn. His hands came up — hovered — landed carefully on her shoulders, and she realized he was checking her the way but also trying to make sure it was okay to touch her.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re shaking.”

“I’m fine. He just — talked at me. It’s what he does. He talks.” She laughed, and it came out wrong, high and thin. Because it was an oversimplification of what Bradley could do with his words. “I told him no. I did tell him no.”

“Okay.” He said it low, steady, but the stillness hadn’t left him, and when he glanced down the empty driveway, she could feel a crackling energy from him that she hadn’t seen before. “Sam. He showed up here without your permission. You have his texts. You have the account statements from the withdrawals he’s made. Report him. Please. I will drive you there myself, right now.”

“You don’t understand what that would do.”

“I understand he stood on your property and made you — “ He stopped himself. Closed his mouth. She watched him take the anger and set it aside deliberately, and when he spoke again his voice had the careful evenness of a man choosing every word carefully. Careful not to direct his frustration at her. It was something she’d never seen. “I came around that corner, and when you turned, the girl I’ve known all summer disappeared. He diminished you, Samantha. I saw it happen in real time, like — like watching a flower wilt.” His thumb moved once, gently, against her shoulder. “It makes me angry. How can I fix this? How can I bring back the bold, confident, organized, funny, but still classy girl that I’ve gotten to know?”

And that stung worse than anything Bradley had said, because Bradley had only ever described a woman who didn’t exist, and Murphy had just described one who did. A more authentic version of herself that she had started to like, too.

“Can we not,” she said, “do this right now.”

“Yeah.” He let it go. She knew it cost him something, and she watched him pay it anyway. “Yeah. Okay. Come sit down. I’m getting you water, and we’re going to sit on the steps, and we’re going to hang out with George for a minute and ask him which flowers belong where.

They sat on the porch steps, which had a blissful sliver of shade. George told them his opinions, and insisted on rubbing against her sticky, sweaty legs, which he seemed to know grossed her out. The water glass also sweated in her hands, and the kitchen behind them breathed its impossible coolness out through the screen door like the house itself was holding a cool cloth to the back of her neck. Slowly, degree by degree, Samantha came back.

The zinnias didn’t get planted until four o’clock. She got up without a word and just began putting them where she thought they belonged, dispersing the various colors. They worked side by side without much talking, and the garden work did what the garden work had done for her all summer. It made the noise quieter, gave her little dopamine hits of accomplishment with each successful planting. If she was still hearing your parents agree with me on a loop somewhere under the katydids, she didn’t admit it. The light went long and gold. The border filled up with color.

At some point, Murphy grabbed some cold pizza and switched the new string lights on. They washed their hands with the hose and ate on the grass under the glow of the lights.

It was nearly seven when he finally remembered and went to break down the tripod.

She was coiling the hose back up and heard him stop. When she looked over, he was standing very still in front of the camera, not touching it, his head bent to the little screen.

“Sam.”

“What?”

He didn’t answer. She crossed the lawn. The camera sat exactly where it had sat since morning, aimed down the long east border, at the beds, at the lawn, at the driveway. The red light was still blinking. Patient. All day.

Murphy flipped the screen out, scrubbed backward with one finger, and pressed play.

The audio came out of the tiny speaker thin and tinny and unmistakably, like someone who had been standing close enough to a microphone for it to capture everything: “You’d have signed anything I put in front of you and we both know it. So yes, I saved us some conversations and saved myself some long and complex explanations...“

Murphy let out a very uncharacteristic and creative expletive.

The recording ran on and forced Samantha to relive the entire scene. The tiny Bradley on the tiny screen ran his fingers through his tiny, perfect hair. Funny, she hadn’t noticed him do that in real life.

Murphy looked up at her. She looked at the camera, the thing she had resented all summer, the eye she had spent two months learning to live in front of. The one that captured everything.

“Play it again,” Samantha said.

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