The First Gardener

by Denise Hildreth Jones

  Tears surfaced in Grace’s eyes as the impact of the offer settled over her. “What can I say?”

  Mackenzie wrapped her arms around her. “Nothing. Your babies did something for me last night that no one has been able to do. Please just accept this as a gift in return for the gift you gave me.”

  Over the next hour, they piled Grace and the girls into Berlyn’s car and finally got all of them out of the house. Eugenia was the last to go, but that was because poor Dimples had gashed her head when she misjudged how far the front door was open. When the cut was bandaged and the circus finally left town, Mackenzie and Gray stood at the door and let out simultaneous sighs.

  Mackenzie turned and started up the stairs. “We need to talk” was all she said.

  Gray followed her to their family room. “What is it?” She heard the concern in his voice.

  She sat on the sofa and tucked her legs underneath her. “I don’t want you to drop out of the race.”

  The tension on his face eased. He sat beside her on the sofa. “Mack, I know you feel better, but there is still so much healing for us to do. We talked through all that last night. You are in no condition to rush anything here. We have to deal with everything that has happened to us. It’s been so much.”

  She nodded slowly. “I agree. We need all of that. But if there is anything inside you that wants to run, I want to do this with you.”

  He shook his head. “We’re too broken to be running a state.”

  “Look, if what’s real doesn’t have the opportunity to reside in this house, then how can it reside in any other house in our state? We’re not perfect, and we shouldn’t act like we are.”

  He dropped his jaw in mock astonishment. “What? You’re not perfect? I thought you were.”

  She slapped at him. “I’m serious. We’ve been through a lot. We’re not superhuman, and people need to see that. They need to know it’s okay to hurt and to get help.”

  “Well, we can’t work though this and be out on a campaign trail.”

  She shook her head. “You can’t win an election without campaigning.”

  “No, Mack. I’m not doing it. When we found out you were pregnant, we pushed all of that Maddie pain down and didn’t deal with it, and look where it got us. This is fresh and new, and we’re not doing that again.”

  “But—”

  He held up a finger. He bit his bottom lip and turned his head slightly. She could tell he was thinking.

  “What?”

  He shook his head as if it were a crazy thought. “How about this? I’ll only run under one condition—no campaign trail. At least not the way we’ve ever done it before.”

  “Then how do you propose to campaign?”

  “You want us to be transparent and honest?”

  She hesitated. “Yes.”

  “Do you really? Do you really want to offer this state something it’s never seen?”

  She really did. This time her voice was strong and sure. “Yes. I do. With you.”

  “Then we’ll do one interview that can be aired on all the stations in the state. And we’ll do one commercial that can do the same. And we will simply be honest about everything. About this last year. About our pain. About our continued battle for our family. About my decisions for balancing the budget and why I made them and about the tragedy that was a part of it. That’s it. No bus. No road trips. No twenty-four-hour days and endless pummeling to our bodies or our minds. And if we win, we win. If we lose, we lose.”

  She laid a hand on his knee. “Are you going to tell them what we’ve done for Grace and her kids?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “No, there’s no need. People will think we’ve done it for publicity. And they’ve been through enough.”

  “What if someone finds out?”

  “I don’t care,” he said. “For the first time in my life, I truly don’t care what anyone thinks. I have lost my daughter. I almost lost my wife. They can have this house, they can have this title, or they can have a man who isn’t perfect but is committed to fighting for them. We’re going to share our stuff. All of it.”

  She could tell by the look on his face that he was serious. “It’s not pretty stuff, is it?”

  He threw an arm around her and pulled her close. “No,” he said, “but it’s ours.”

  “Aren’t we lucky,” she said as she buried her head in the middle of his chest. He softly kissed the top of her head. And there was no place on earth she felt safer.

  They canceled Gray’s scheduled press conference and set up the interview for the following Friday. Gray wanted to start meeting with a counselor before they moved forward. The state could wait or move on. Either was fine with him.

  And on Monday morning, Joseph brought a beautiful bouquet of white tulips up to Mackenzie, along with a scrawled note. It was clear it was from Jeremiah.

  Miz Mackenzie—ain’t gon’ make you go and search for what these here flowers mean. They be tulips, you good and well know. Be the flower of spring. And they mean “perfect love.” That be the only thing could do what been done ’round here. They mean “forgiveness” too, ’cause without it, can’t no healin’ ever really happen.

  She ran her fingers across a silky white petal, grateful for both the flower and the man who sent it.

  Chapter 55

  Eugenia straightened her clunky gold necklace as she got out of the car. She’d told Mackenzie she would pick her up and take her to the rescue mission tonight, but first she had something to do. She walked straight out to the back gardens and found Jeremiah sitting under a tree, drinking bottled water.

  She tossed a bag at him. “There. I had to go everywhere but Timbuktu to find those.”

  His long fingers reached inside the bag and pulled out a box of navy-blue handkerchiefs. A big white smile stretched across his freckled brown face. “Well, I’ll be. You gone and found me some handkerchiefs I can sweat on.”

  She huffed. “It’s ridiculous. I’ve never seen a man so adamant about what kind of handkerchiefs he needs. You’re worse than a woman.”

  He pushed himself to his feet, then wiped dirt from his backside, holding on to the bag with his other hand. “Know why these be so special to me?”

  She poked at a stiff blonde strand the breeze had rearranged. “I have no idea.”

  “My Shirley bought me some right after we got married. Ain’t cared nothin’ ’bout ’nother color since.”

  Eugenia had forgotten he had lost his spouse too. The loss was pretty fresh, like hers. She crinkled her brow. “You told me you used them because of the dirt.”

  “That sure ’nough true. But ain’t why I first gone and got ’em.” He put a new handkerchief under his nose and inhaled long and deep. “Ah. Love me the smell a new stuff.”

  She had no idea how often Jeremiah actually got new things. And seeing him with his nose against a fresh blue handkerchief, she suddenly felt a twinge of pain for how she had treated him. She looked at her gold watch and saw that she had to go.

  “Well, enjoy,” she said, turning on her heel. “But you’d better get back to work because your Lenten roses look like . . . Well, I’m Southern and a lady, so I won’t say it, but it starts with a c and ends with a p.”

  The snide comment seeped out of her as effortlessly as her hands could make a seven-layer chocolate cake. Sure, she felt a twinge of guilt over it—but only a twinge. And as she walked away, she heard him chuckle.

  She didn’t let him see that she chuckled too.

  Chapter 56

  Mackenzie’s friends were waiting in the foyer of the mission after she came through the metal detector. It was the first time she had been back since she lost the baby. She had asked Eugenia to bring her.

  “Mama, I’ve got to do the hard things or I’ll never do them again,” she’d said. Eugenia had agreed. So they were here—with some reinforcements. Eugenia had decided her friends needed to come too. She’d told them that they were getting old and narcissistic and needed to think of somebody else f
or a while. But she suspected they’d agreed to come because they were getting bored with Skip-Bo.

  “Welcome back!” Anna pulled Mackenzie into a hug. “We held the fort down.”

  Mackenzie leaned her head on her friend’s shoulder. “I had no doubt.”

  Eugenia pushed Mackenzie and Anna toward the elevator and up to the kitchen, where Harrison had already put Berlyn, Sandra, and Dimples to work. Berlyn was slicing tomatoes. Sandra was putting silverware out. And since Dimples wasn’t allowed to play with sharp objects, she was wiping off dinner trays.

  But Dimples was sneaky. When Sandra wasn’t looking, she grabbed a fork and snagged a carrot from one of the steam trays.

  “If you take another one, I’ll fork you.” Sandra held up her own utensil and turned it in her hand, making sure Dimples saw it no matter which eye she was looking with.

  Harrison looked at Mackenzie. “How’d you come out so normal?”

  She pulled a plastic cap over her hair. “Who knows?”

  Eugenia brought a large tray of lettuce to the serving line. “Girls, if you can’t act right, I won’t take you out anymore.”

  Berlyn put her knife down. “Well, I vote that the next time we go out, we at least go to a place where there are men—preferably men with jobs.”

  “Yeah,” Dimples said. “Social Security is tight.”

  “Y’all don’t need men. You need to be put in a home,” Sandra quipped as she patted the bobble necklace that hung in the deep V of her blouse.

  Berlyn giggled. “As long as it’s a home with men.”

  Harrison stuck his fingers in his ears and started singing.

  Mackenzie laughed. “You’re scaring him.”

  “Scaring him?” Eugenia flailed her hand in Harrison’s direction. “They’re scaring me.”

  “Hey, you brought them,” Mackenzie reminded.

  Berlyn turned to Sandra. “Why are you acting so self-righteous, anyway? We finally got you set free from high-collared shirts. Now it’s time to find you a man.”

  Eugenia nearly gasped when she saw Dimples’s good eye wander toward Harrison. “Dimples, don’t even think about it,” she whispered sharply.

  Dimples lowered her head quickly and scrubbed hard at the tray in her hands.

  “I just started going through the change,” Sandra said. “That’s why I had to wear cooler tops.”

  “Change-schmange, Sandra. You’re practically the same age as me,” Berlyn shot back. “You haven’t had the use of your girl parts for as long as I’ve gone without sex.”

  Eugenia could see Dimples trying to do the calculations in her head. If she didn’t stop her, she might hurt herself. Berlyn must have seen it too. “It’s been fifteen years, Dimples. Herbert died fifteen years ago.”

  Berlyn raised her eyebrows at Eugenia. Eugenia shook her head. She could only hope it had been fifteen years.

  “I have all of my parts, for your information,” Sandra said.

  Harrison glanced at the clock. “Oh, looky there—we’ve got to go to work.”

  The doors opened, and women and children began filing in. A little girl with black curls was at the front of the line, balanced on her mother’s hip. Eugenia looked up just in time to see Mackenzie disappear around the corner.

  And her heart stopped.

  Mackenzie knew what she had to do. It was one of the reasons she’d wanted to come to the mission tonight—to get it over with. One more first time among all the first times that remained ahead of her.

  The first visit to an elementary school for a curriculum meeting.

  The first movie with Gray and without Maddie.

  The first warm spring day without a child to go to the park with.

  One at a time, she was determined to tackle them all. It was all about going through. In fact, she was beginning to realize that it was in the going through—not the avoiding—that God had promised to be with her.

  Letting the kitchen door close behind her, she approached a young woman in the front of the line, the one with the beautiful black-haired baby. “Can I hold your little girl while you fix your tray?”

  The woman studied Mackenzie and finally nodded. Mackenzie took the little one in her arms and pulled her close to her chest. Her friends serving in the line all seemed to be holding their breath, waiting for her to collapse, scream, do something that they thought looked like the face of grief.

  But this was grief too. She was doing grief, doing it the way she had to do it in this particular season. She was holding the very thing she didn’t have and realizing that babies were still going to be born in this world. Every day, someone was going to have one. She was going to encounter them in grocery stores and gas stations and here at the mission. And those babies would never be hers. She had no choice about that. She could only choose to run from them or run to them.

  “Hey, pumpkin,” she said, bouncing the baby on her hip.

  The girl reached up and pulled at Mackenzie’s long hair. “Yeah, that’s my hair. I wish I had your curls, though,” she said, fingering black ringlets.

  The baby jumped in her arms as she spotted her mother coming with a tray, her little face lit up with excitement. Mackenzie followed the mother to a table and settled the little one in a high chair. For the rest of the evening, she did this with baby after baby after baby.

  There were a couple of moments when all the what-ifs wanted to rage to the surface. But she mentally set them aside, knowing the what-if game would rob her of the ability to live in the what-could-bes.

  This was her life.

  And she had chosen to live it.

  “Thank you, Lord,” Eugenia whispered under her breath when she saw Mackenzie walk into the cafeteria. She had feared for a brief moment that they might be carrying her daughter out on a stretcher, and without thinking, she had started after her. But then she stopped, feeling strongly that she wasn’t to follow her. That this was now about Mackenzie’s journey to her own healing.

  Besides, once they started serving, she was too busy to worry about Mackenzie. It was her job to fix the salads. Berlyn dipped the whipped potatoes and gravy. Sandra served the veggies. Harrison served the meat, and Dimples passed out rolls, most of which actually made it to the plates, while Anna and the other volunteers kept them all well-stocked with food.

  From her vantage point, Eugenia could see bittersweet delight on her baby girl’s face and tears that she swiped throughout dinner. She felt a lump rise in her throat at the thought of all that the last year had brought her and her family. Then she looked at the faithful friends beside her and felt how truly blessed she was. She also thought about Jeremiah, the steady and faithful man who was as kind as she was ornery. How he had been so steady in loving her family. She might even find it in her heart to cut him some slack about that garden.

  A loud clang came from the end of the line and stirred her thoughts back to the present. She looked down the aisle to see Dimples pop up from underneath the counter. She rose with two rolls in her hand. “It’s all good!” she announced.

  And it was. Their hearts would never be the same. Broken like that never heals completely, and Eugenia wouldn’t want it to. She didn’t want to be the same.

  She wanted to be better.

  She was standing here with her good friends, serving food to people who needed it. And looking out into the dining room, watching joy and sorrow and determination do their dance on her daughter’s face as she ran headlong into her healing. And she had just given Jeremiah Williams a box of handkerchiefs. Blue handkerchiefs.

  If that wasn’t a sign of better, she didn’t know what was.

  Chapter 57

  Lights had taken over the living room, along with three cameras that had been set up to deliver Mack and Gray’s story to Tennesseans. Dan Miner, an anchor for the NBC affiliate, adjusted his lapel mic and checked his notes, preparing for the interview.

  It had been a long week. Kurt, Fletcher, and the rest of the staff had been working on the launch of Gray’s unu
sual campaign—making plans, talking to donors and supporters, as well as trying to keep the business of state rolling along. More importantly, Gray and Mackenzie had been to see Ken Jantzen three times this week. The sessions were exhaustingly painful, yet hopeful too. Getting out pain that severe could wear you out, but it also freed you.

  Every night that week, he and Mack had crawled into bed at nine. The first couple of nights, he’d been afraid to close his eyes. Afraid that in the morning she would decide it wasn’t worth getting up anymore. But every morning, there she was.

  There were tears, of course, and anger, but she was getting up and facing each day. And he was too. They were doing it together.

  Mack walked into the living room, her spring-green dress moving softly against her hips. She was still too thin, but her beauty was undeniable, and he loved seeing a hint of color in her cheeks. She extended her hand to the news anchor, and a wide gold bracelet dangled from her delicate wrist.

  The reporter turned to him. “Well, Governor, we’re ready if you are.”

  Gray looked at Mackenzie. “You ready, babe?”

  She nodded, apprehension evident on her face. He leaned toward her, his voice low. “We don’t have to do this. It is not too late for us to change our minds.”

  She shook her head firmly. “No. We can do it. Like Ken said, this can be part of our healing.” She straightened his baby-blue tie. “Did you wear this for me?” She smiled. “Because it makes your eyes look electric.”

  He nodded. He had. He loved to wear blue for her, and he loved it even more that she was finally noticing him again.

  “Okay, then.” He took her hand and led her to two chairs that sat in front of a large window overlooking the gardens. Gray unbuttoned his khaki sports coat and pulled at the bottom of his tie as he sat. Cameras started rolling, and Dan began.

  “Governor, the people of Tennessee know that this has been a difficult year for you and your wife. And we are here today because you requested this. What is it that you and Mrs. London want to share with the state of Tennessee?”