Chapter 10 - THE FIRST MORNING
The conservatory reopened on the first Saturday in June.
The north roof had been replaced with proper safety glass. The annex had new wiring and a lock that Owen kept the only key to. The evacuation signs were laminated and bolted to the posts, and Mara had made everyone — including Mateo — walk the route twice.
Ruby’s order table stood by the entrance, with a fresh sheet of paper and a cup of pencils.
The first customers were the veterans from the raised bed, who arrived early and pretended they had come to help. Then a school group. Then Nate, who had saved for three months and bought his grandmother the second-largest mint plant, which he carried to the bus stop himself with both arms wrapped around the pot.
By midmorning the place was loud.
Mateo carried boxes. He tied paper sleeves badly. Ruby corrected him twice and then, without being asked, showed him the trick with the thumb.
Later, when the crowd thinned, he walked the north walkway to the wooden label that read Elias.
The roses there had come in thick that spring. Someone had weeded the bed properly. Beside the label, half-hidden in the leaves, was a small stone that Ruby had painted yellow and set there months ago, when no one was watching.
Mateo crouched and read what she had written on it in her careful pencil, then traced the letters with one finger.
He did not say anything to his brother. He had spent three years with plenty to say and no way to say it, and he had learned, finally, that grief was not a problem that solved itself with sufficient force.
He just stayed there until his knees ached.
That afternoon he sat in the wicker chair.
The rain had stopped. Sunlight came through the new glass in flat, warm panels across the floor. Ruby was at the far end of the walkway with her watering can, telling Lady Thundercloud that she had been difficult all spring and that everyone had noticed.
“The blue pot is still here,” she said to the mint.
Mara passed behind the chair with a clipboard and did not say anything about him sitting in the wind.
Mateo closed his eyes.
He did not plan to sleep. He had stopped planning to sleep years ago, because planning it only made the failure sharper. He simply sat with his hands open on his knees and let the sound of a child talking to a flower move through the room the way water moves through soil.
When he woke, the light had crossed the floor and Ruby was sitting a few feet away, counting leaves under her breath.
“How long?” he asked.
She looked up. “About an hour.”
An hour.
Mateo looked at his hands. They were not trembling. His jaw was unclenched. Somewhere outside, a truck went past on the road, and he heard it, and it was only a truck.
“You should drink your tea,” Ruby said.
He looked down. There was a pink plastic cup on the arm of the wicker chair, empty, set upright exactly the way it was supposed to be.
“I don’t have any tea,” he said.
“I know,” Ruby said. “You have to imagine it. That’s how it works.”
Mateo picked up the cup and blew across its empty rim.
“Is that better?” he asked.
Ruby considered him with the grave suspicion of an eight-year-old who had been disappointed before.
“It’s a start,” she said.
Behind her, through the glass, Mara was walking the beds with Owen, checking the new irrigation line. The foundation’s sign had been repainted over the winter. Under the name, in letters small enough to miss, someone had added the line from Elias’s journal.
A garden should have room for people who need another beginning.
Mateo set the cup back down on the arm of the chair, upright, where it belonged.
May you like
Then he stood up and went to find a watering can.
THE END
