The words hang in the air, sharp as a thrown knife.
Nathan’s face goes pale. He stands, brushing dirt from his palms, but doesn’t move closer. “You’re right,” he says, his voice steady but brittle. “I’m sorry. I overstepped.”
Cassie blinks, surprised by his concession. She looks at me, pleading for an ally, but I am still caught between the urge to protect and the need to let her fight her own battles.
I kneel next to her in the dirt, putting a hand on her shoulder. She doesn’t pull away, but she doesn’t lean in, either.
“Cassie,” I say, “he’s not trying to take over. He’s just…trying to help.”
She stares at the broken pot, breathing hard. “I don’t need help.”
I want to tell her that needing help doesn’t make her weak, but I can see in her hunched shoulders that she’s heard it all before. Instead, I just sit with her, letting the silence do what words can’t.
Nathan kneels by the wreckage, gathering shards of clay with careful hands. He looks at Cassie, then at me, and I see fear on his face. Not for himself, but for us.
“She needs time,” he says quietly, more to himself than to me.
“So do I,” I say
He returns to planting, doesn’t force the conversation, doesn’t try to fix the unfixable. He just keeps working, hands steady in the earth.
The clouds finally open, a soft mist settling over the garden. It beads on Cassie’s eyelashes, turns the dirt to mud beneath our knees.
Cassie stands, wiping her hands on her jeans. She stares at the muddy smears, then at me, then at Nathan. “I’m going for a walk.”
“Do you want company?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “No. I’ll take Rolo with me.”
I watch Cassie’s retreating form, her hair wet and wild, arms swinging with a defiance that looks so much like my own.
I want to follow her, to drag her back and make her sit in the dirt and plant something that will last. But I know that isn’t how anything grows.
Instead, I kneel beside Nathan and help him tamp down the soft, damp earth. For a while, we don’t speak. The work is enough. When the beds are full, we sit on the edge of the porch and let the rain wash our hands clean.
The wind chimes rattle above us. Through the open window, I can hear Sara’s favorite song playing faintly from the stereo, the record crackling like distant thunder.
“She’ll come back,” Nathan says. “She always does.”
I want to believe him.
I close my eyes and listen to the rain. I can almost hear Sara laughing, mocking our crooked rows and uneven spacing, but proud anyway.
When I open them, the world is greener than it was before.
I touch Nathan’s hand, let it rest there a second longer than necessary, then stand and go after my daughter, following the line of footprints she left in the wet grass. Each one an imperfect echo of my own.
43
Diane
Night comes early in this house. The old cedar beams catch the dusk and bottle it, so even the brightest lamp only grazes the darkness in patches. It feels right, somehow, privacy in every corner, as if the shadows themselves are allies.
I flick on the lamp in Sara’s library, the one with the cracked base she swore she’d glue “someday, but not today.” The yellow pool of light spills onto the woven rug, the battered cushions we scavenged from the attic, the stack of board games with half the pieces missing. The air smells like cinnamon and wet leaves. I open the window just enough to let in the sound of wind, the salt from the ocean.
Cassie walks in with damp socks, face flushed and hair wild from her walk. She doesn’t look at me, but she doesn’t look away, either. Small victories. Nathan follows, arms full of mismatched mugs and a pot of cocoa, which he deposits on the coffee table with all the ceremony of a peace treaty.
“We’re out of marshmallows,” he announces, feigning tragedy. “You’ll have to accept my humble apologies and extra whipped cream instead.”