“About yesterday, your friend . . . Well, are you sure you’re still okay with my coming over in the afternoons? I can always look on my own, if you’d be okay with that. If you really don’t want to be there.”
She leaned against him, tried to believe allowing him to be in the covert was some kind of atonement. “The covert is the covert. I just have to deal with it.”
Jude bent down and kissed the side of her neck. “Okay, now I seriously have to bring back coffee for Roadie or the guy is going to put me on manure duty again—last time, it took me over two days to stop smelling crap everywhere I went. Want to come over to say hi before you head home?”
“You want your boss to meet me?” she asked, sure she’d misheard. Everyone in town had already met her, more or less. She had a label, a box in which to stay, making her easy to figure out.
He smiled. “Yeah, I do want that. Roadie’s a good guy. And it feels wrong that you haven’t met him yet.”
So it bothered him, then—that she’d met Leo before Roadie. Marsden pictured the garden center from the last time she was there, its stretch of sun-washed display floor, the splashes of color and fragrance and everything that was somehow the opposite of Glory. She’d wondered if she’d see Roadie inside, if she’d get a glimpse of the man Jude thought of as a father. But instead, it’d been Leo who’d showed up, the last person she’d expected to see, his presence like an errant thorn.
“Did Roadie love your mom, you think?” she asked. What made a person love someone who wasn’t theirs? Brom and her once-married mother. Her wanting Jude, when she already had the world working against her.
“Maybe, yeah.” Jude didn’t seem bothered by it at all. “I could never ask, but . . . maybe. When I was kid, I once asked him to be my dad. I was seven, and I remember his face and how I could tell he’d wanted to say yes, but couldn’t. Seeing him so torn was almost harder than hearing the no.”
She thought of her father, who’d said to her face he’d never wanted her. She thought of Shine, who couldn’t seem to make up her mind between blaming and loving her.
Meanwhile, Roadie would have taken Jude for his own.
“Sure, I’ll come say hi,” Marsden said impulsively. “Should I prepare myself to hear really embarrassing kid stories about you?”
“He’s going to say me and Rig were a couple of shits, that’s for sure,” he said, laughing.
“Well, were you?”
“Absolutely. Me crawling around eating garbage off the display floor and giving him heart attacks, Rig drowning out the inventory with too much water. Really, thinking about it, he must have loved my mom to have that kind of patience with kids who weren’t his own.”
And it’d been Roadie who’d given Isabel that first ginger plant, the very same one that Rigby would later save by bringing to the covert. Which still grew there now, so thickly and deeply she could never imagine the place without it.
Just how much did Roadie know about her family? Raised in Glory and as old as he was, he’d be no stranger to the history of the covert, the stories and legends that went with it. Jude had said as much when he’d told her Roadie still recalled the place without ginger, before it’d gained its signature spice, the scent that anointed its bodies. He would have read all about Grant Eldridge’s tragic death, the reports about Nina buying the boardinghouse at the east end of the Indigo. And whether he chose to believe or not, he would have heard the rumors about Shine no longer working there as just a housekeeper.
What if he took one look at Marsden and assumed she was doing the same?
What if Jude read that in his eyes? Jude, who’d revealed everything to her in asking for her help?
Marsden was suddenly painfully aware of just how many secrets she was still keeping from him. Rigby’s note. Being a skimmer. Trying to hear the dead. Her mother’s plans for her.
“Jude.” Nerves pulsed in her throat. She felt sick. “You know about my grandmother being able to hear the dead, right?” She didn’t see how he couldn’t. It was like Theola being a psychic: basic Glory knowledge.
He nodded.
“What do you know about my mother hearing the dead?”
“I assumed she couldn’t, since I’ve never heard of anyone going to her for that.”
She took a deep breath. “What else do you know about my mother?”
A second’s pause. “She’s a cleaner at the boardinghouse.”
“You’ve heard nothing else about her work there?”
Jude looked, she saw with a sinking heart, distinctly uncomfortable. “I’ve heard the stories, Marsden.”
“And if I said they were true?” Her words came out bitterly, pills being yanked back to the surface. A dread that bordered on fear danced on her tongue, pushed the dusty storefronts and dirty concrete pavement all around them further into the background. “How much would that bother you?”
“It doesn’t. I admit it did at first. But now I know you, really know you, and it’s like . . . You’re you, and whatever your mom wants to do is just . . . everything else. The rest doesn’t matter.”
But you don’t know me. Not really.
“Think of it this way.” He shifted the take-out tray to his other hand. Marsden had the vague thought the coffees would be nearly cold by now, and wondered if it meant Roadie would stop asking Jude to go on food runs. “Does it bother you to hear stories about my father, or when people keep trying to guess why Rig killed himself?”
“It bothers me for you.”
“So, okay, then.”
“But what you hear about me—that doesn’t bother you? How I’m not going to inherit a house or money, just the creepiest piece of land in all of Glory? That I’m destined to forever work at the boardinghouse in some way?” She thought about Nina’s threat and shuddered. “I know everyone at school talks about it—about me, who I am, who I’m meant to be. A lot of it won’t be wrong. A lot of it might eventually matter to you.”
Jude narrowed his eyes a fraction, and when he didn’t speak right away, Marsden’s heart sank further.
“Going to see you at the covert that first time, all I could hear were those stories,” he said quietly. “I didn’t know you, so what everyone else said, I listened to all of it. And no, not all of it’s wrong—your folks, the covert, those are a part of you, too. But you’re also way more than just those things. You are outside of them. You are beyond them.”
She blinked so the world didn’t blur, but it blurred anyway. He was saying everything she wanted to hear, but he didn’t know how she had no options left. How could she tell him the person he’d come to discover was going to change again? That the person he thought was better than all those terrible things was really nothing but those things?
Jude leaned close to kiss her, and Marsden let herself pretend again about that one kind of fate being wrong. “Now c’mon, before Roadie refuses to let me back into the shop.”
thirty-eight.
“Okay, what’s this one?” Marsden held out the flower, unable to keep from laughing at Jude’s blank expression as he struggled to come up with the name. “Seriously, shouldn’t you know?”
He grinned at her. “But you don’t know, either.”
“I also don’t work here.”
His grin wasn’t even a bit sheepish. “It’s a daisy?”
“Jude!”
The bellow came from across the display floor, and Jude winced, laughing, as a man strode up to them. “Damn, guess that was the wrong answer.”
She’d known what Roadie looked like, but only in the same way she knew what all the locals in town looked like when she’d never met them. Seen from across the street, while on her bike, through a store window.
Up close, he looked like he could run any business except a plant shop—personal bodyguard, home security, slick casino dealer.
Beard a broad smear of peppered stubble, head shaven clean as a whistle, build as solid as a truck. Tattoos peeked out from his T-shirt sleeves, dragons and hearts and women, all me
andering about his arms in shades of smoke and teal and ruby. His eyes were a warm brown, his scowl full of bluster, and he was balancing a honey cruller on top of the coffee Jude had left for him on his desk in the staff room.
Marsden liked him immediately.
“You work in a garden center!” Roadie yelled, inches away from Jude’s face. “With plants and flowers! You should at least know the items on the display floor!”
His voice was a sonic boom in volume, each word explosive, and she barely managed to keep from instinctively covering her ears.
“Sorry, I forgot to warn you about him going deaf,” Jude said to her in an exaggerated whisper, smiling even as he pointed to his ear, cupping it with a hand. “He insists he just likes being so obnoxiously loud, but really it’s because he’s getting old. He can’t hear so well anymore.”
Roadie smacked him on the back of his head. The gesture was affectionate, careful not to hurt.
Jude rubbed the back of his head, turning to his boss with his own mock scowl. “Is that for the daisy answer or the deaf remark?”
“Both, kid. Didn’t hear me coming, did you?”
“I was distracted.”
“And if I can’t hear, then how’d I know you messed up?” He took a bite of the cruller. “It’s a gerbera, kid! Gerbera. Be a good boy, write it on a piece of paper, and put it under your pillow for tonight!” He took a sip of what had to be ice-cold coffee and nearly spit it out. “Jesus, how far did you have to go to get this? You cross state lines or something?”
“Or something. And daisy, got it.” Jude grabbed Marsden by the hand and gently pulled her to stand right in front of him. Her face warmed as Roadie’s expression turned scrutinizing, as Jude tugged her even closer, her back resting right against his chest. “Roadie, this is Marsden. I wanted you to meet her and see why I was distracted.”
She watched Jude’s boss’s eyes flicker as he realized who she was—Marsden Eldridge, daughter of Shine, the boardinghouse’s delightfully exotic prostitute, and Grant, the man who drowned under mysterious circumstances eight years ago. Even if her name hadn’t given her away, her looks would have.
Roadie did a little bow that somehow wasn’t absurd, given his size and that he was still carefully balancing his doughnut on top of his coffee. Neither was it, she sensed, condescending or scornful, given what he must have known about her family.
The vise that had been closing tighter and tighter around her chest ever since Jude asked her to meet Roadie loosened a bit.
“It’s good to meet you, Marsden!” Roadie bellowed.
“Same here. Um, Jude talks about you a lot.”
He barked out a laugh. “Too much, I bet. The kid never shuts up at work, either. Too bad it’s usually him complaining about something.”
Jude snorted. “Roadie knows I barely say jack at work. Because, catch his attention, he sends you out on food runs—he likes to call it ‘volunteering.’”
Roadie smacked him on the back of the head again. Then he ruffled Jude’s hair as though he were three years old. Marsden watched him turn serious, how he was full of love for the boy who’d once asked him to be his father. “I tell you, he’s a pain in the ass, but it seems I’m stuck with him.” His voice was at nearly normal volume—rock-concert level instead of an airplane taking off.
“So, all it took was coffee—and cold coffee at that—to make you quit trying to smash apart everyone’s ear drums for a few moments?” Jude sighed. “Even shoveling manure wasn’t good enough for you.”
“No, it was the doughnuts that did it. And I had to order those in myself.” Roadie crammed a huge bite of cruller into his mouth and started talking around it. “Okay, I sent Kelly out on delivery, the others are wheeling in inventory, and I can cover the floor. Why don’t you take a few minutes and show Marsden the rest of the place?”
The “rest of the place” was the back entrance and the large, semi-secluded workroom off to the side. Jude told her it was where all the flowers and plants came through for inspection before hitting the display floor—domestic, imported, “whatever happened to catch Roadie’s eye that he wanted for the center.” Not the hard inventory, things like the giant potted trees and hedges and planters that came into the place on wheeled dollies, but the soft merchandise, what Roadie assumed a girl would like most. “Because deep down, the guy is a total romantic.” Everything was already neatly labeled from the supplier, saving Jude from messing up that task. She drank in rockets of color, the feel of velvet against her fingertips: hydrangeas, orchids, and tulips; snapdragons and tea roses; catkin and cherry tree and magnolia cuttings.
“It’s incredible in here.” Unable to keep her hands to herself, she stroked open boxes of blooms, caressed fat stands of bouquets, all of it the very opposite of Glory’s hidden prickliness, the town’s layered darkness. “I think if I worked for Roadie, I’d never want to leave this room.”
“You work with food, Marsden. Bacon. Cake. Cheeseburgers.”
Jude’s voice was surprisingly terse, and she looked over to see him shoving bunches of chrysanthemums across the long butcher’s block of a table, making room to toss down bundles of wildflowers to be cut. He seemed set on not meeting her gaze, at concentrating on his hands and his work and being too busy to notice her.
And she wondered if it was because it was the same for him—what she couldn’t ignore, had come to accept.
That despite the hundreds if not thousands of flowers in the room, all he could really smell was her.
She went to stand next to him and waited. Her skin felt too alive, overly sensitive, run through with an electric current, needing to be touched. It made her brave; it made her stupid. “Hey.”
“Yeah?” He finally looked up, and Marsden thought of how much of himself he’d already entrusted to her, and she nearly pulled back.
Nearly.
“I . . . Thanks for bringing me here,” she started. “For showing me this amazing room. And . . . for not freaking out about my mother, and all the things I haven’t really been able to tell you yet.” She knew it sounded more like a confession than anything to do with gratitude, and she knew that was right, too.
“Don’t thank me.” His voice bordered on ragged. “You don’t need to. It’s just baggage, what you’re talking about, and I have that, too.”
She nodded. Baggage. Together they both had ghosts, a paralyzing need for closure, guilt—what would he say when he saw she had lies on top of all that?
“Do two wrongs ever make a right?” She grasped for words to best shape the ache in her chest, to paint how she wanted him even as she knew she shouldn’t. “When it comes to people?”
“Depends.” His eyes were midnight, full of raw nerves, as he slowly set the flowers aside. “On whether or not they’re making it worse by being together.”
“Worse for others, or for themselves?”
“Either.”
“And if it’s neither?” Marsden slid her hand along the side of his face. Her heart drummed; she saw the echo of its beat in his pulse along his neck.
“Then it’s right.”
Jude drew her to him, and she pressed her mouth to his, letting herself slowly fracture into pieces
thirty-nine.
Brom’s place was about ten blocks from Evergreen.
She’d left Jude behind at the garden center, in that fragrant, semi-secret workroom, petals crushed onto his skin and fire still lit in his eyes as she made herself step away and out the door. The floor had been covered with a wild sprawl of flowers and stems, the layers of blossoms and leaves that they’d sent scattering across the room as they’d lost themselves in each other. Her lips still thrummed; she could still taste him there.
Later. She would let herself think about him again later.
Marsden jogged back to her bike, still in the alley behind Seconds. She wheeled it out to the sidewalk and turned it in the direction of the address she’d written on Brom’s face. She rode past buildings bleached pale with sun and dust, and
the heat burned its way into her brain until she was nearly light-headed.
Four grand.
The amount kept flashing behind her eyes, was nearly a visceral flavor in her mouth for how real it was beginning to seem. Four grand, when she’d always thought two would be enough to get her and Wynn away from Glory for good.
Was it also the price her father paid to end up in the cold, muddy waters of the Indigo?
When she reached the house, Marsden got off her bike and leaned it against the tree in the front yard. The place was a duplex, what might have been a cookie-cutter copy of her family’s old place, except that it wasn’t run-down at all and neither was it very old. The neighborhood was also one of Glory’s better ones. Brom was doing well enough.
The outside of the building had been painted a putty shade, tasteful and discreet. A trail of small paved stones split the dandelion-dotted rectangular lawn in two. Brom’s half needed a cut, but the whole thing was dried out and crispy from the sun. A pair of large picture windows faced the street—Brom’s was covered with a plain blind from the inside, while the other had long patterned curtains.
Marsden walked up his front steps, her hands skimming the black painted banisters that lined them. She had the vague memory of her own house once having the same kind, but that they’d been splotched with rust. She looked at her hands and was almost surprised there was no powdery orange residue on them. Just as she was almost surprised they didn’t smell of metal.
She knocked at the door, questions already on her tongue:
Did you follow my father that night?
What did you see?
What did you do?
But no one answered, and Marsden hesitated, uncertain what came next. If she waited even just a couple of hours, she would find Brom at the boardinghouse. His reservation always lasted at least a couple of weeks, and she was sure he’d only checked in days ago.
But then Shine would be there, shielding him, picking him over her daughters again. Marsden would find out nothing—even worse, if Brom were involved, he would then know she knew. And then what?
Along the Indigo Page 23
