The Garden of Happy Endings

by Barbara O'Neal

  She found herself smiling. “Friday is fine.”

  A murmur rose from the crowd gathered around the tables, coming toward them on a wave. Elsa heard the worry in it and looked up to see the three gang boys striding up the center path between the newly planted gardens. The tall one who had touched her neck with his knife was at the center, clearly the leader, a smirk on his face. They didn’t do anything but walk through, snickering and jostling one another, looking down their noses at the people who turned their faces away, curled bodies around their small children.

  Elsa asked, “Where’s Joaquin?”

  “What?” Tamsin said. “I think he was—”

  Elsa was already on her feet, jogging diagonally across the path, dashing down another, narrower aisle between plots. Joaquin stood on the west side of the field, his back to them as he talked to someone smaller than he was.

  She grabbed his arm and he turned around, startled, and then spied the gangbangers veering around the church. The leader turned back and lifted his chin toward her, or Joaquin. Maybe both. A boy with a white cat in his arms came out of the courtyard, watching sadly. Elsa suddenly recognized him, by the rose tattoo on his face. He met her eyes.

  When Joaquin’s arm tensed, she simply stood there, holding on. “This is not a time for confrontation.”

  “They can’t be allowed to intimidate people.”

  “True, but let’s just let them go for now and come up with some ideas to address it in the next week or so, okay? There will probably be people here all the time and that will discourage them.”

  “Will it?”

  With a firmness she did not feel, she said, “Yes.”

  Deacon found himself a little nervous as he parked his truck in front of the sisters’ house on Friday night. It was a small place, like many of the houses in the area, a no-frills 1920’s bungalow with a deep porch and a giant elm tree arching over it. In front were a small patch of grass and a strip of flower bed. Lilacs lined the driveway. When the flowers bloomed, they would fill the nights with a narcotic scent.

  They had not drawn the curtains and as he approached, Deacon could see them through the picture window. Tamsin set the table, her long blond hair pulled away from her face into a braid that fell down her lean back. Once upon a time, she would have been his type. Lucinda, his ex-wife, was a tall, lean blonde like this. As his daughter, Jenny, would be, by now.

  Loss ached in him for a minute, making him pause. Every time you put yourself out there, you might take a hit. Was he ready to take a chance as a sober man? He’d had his share of women since leaving prison, though not as many as he might’ve had when he was still drinking. He hadn’t wanted to settle with any of them.

  Tonight, he only had eyes for Elsa, with her small, taut body and black curls and unaffected face. If she wore makeup, he couldn’t detect it. Not that he had anything against makeup, but she didn’t need it. Her skin was smooth and olive, her eyes bright, her mouth a hearty rose that bloomed with good health. That was what it was, he decided as he climbed the steps. Her good health showed on her face.

  He smoothed a hand over his own hair before he knocked. He’d brought a big bunch of sunflowers, sunny and enormous, and when Elsa opened the door and spied them, she gave a happy cry. “They look like sunshine!” She gestured him inside. “Come in, come in!”

  “That’s what I thought, too,” he said, and stepped over the threshold. The scent of supper enveloped him, onions and pork and something sweet. “Mmm. Smells great.”

  “It will taste even better,” she said with that saucy little smile.

  He wasn’t a man short on comebacks and flirtations. You could even say it had been one of his life pursuits. And yet all he could think when she gave him that grin was that he wished he was a better man. Not because she was a minister, which didn’t unnerve him as it might have some others, but because that smile deserved to be met with the same sweetness with which it was given. A man who’d spent damn near twenty years in a whiskey bottle didn’t have much sweetness left in him.

  “Deacon, it’s good to see you,” the sister said, coming forward, her hand outstretched. “You remember me, right?”

  And with her, it was easier. “How could any man forget you, sweetheart?”

  “Oh, brother!” Elsa said with a laugh, and headed toward the kitchen, flowers in hand.

  Tamsin tilted her head and accepted his homage as her due. She gestured toward the table. “Sit down. Can I get you something to drink? Wine? Beer, iced tea?”

  “Iced tea, please.” He appreciated the fact that Elsa had plainly not said, Deacon, who runs the AA group, is coming over tonight. Hide the liquor. Always excruciating.

  As she fetched it, he looked around, not settling yet. The music was something he couldn’t quite identify, a woman singer he thought he knew from the radio, not exactly what he would have expected from Elsa. Though now that he thought about it, he wasn’t at all sure what kind of music he’d imagined she would like. And maybe she hadn’t chosen the music anyway.

  Noticing his thoughts chasing around like squirrels, he shook his head slightly. Crossed his arms. “Sure I can’t help in there?”

  Elsa, standing in view beneath an archway to the tiny kitchen, laughed. “There’s not even room for two, much less three.”

  Tamsin reemerged with his tea. He nodded his thanks but still didn’t sit down, instead going to lean against the kitchen threshold to watch Elsa at the stove. “This your music?”

  She glanced up from stirring a thick gravy. “Yeah. You like it?”

  “I do, as it happens.”

  “You strike me as a Lynyrd Skynyrd kind of guy. Allman Brothers.”

  “Are you stereotyping me?”

  Her grin flashed, quick and elfin. “Maybe. Is it true?”

  “Guilty.” He sipped his tea. “But I like music in general. Just about all of it. No Death Metal, which I just can’t understand, and no Rap, but the rest is good.”

  “Some Rap is pretty powerful, but I’m with you on the Death Metal. If there was such a thing as demons, that’s what I think they’d sound like.” She poured gravy into a waiting serving dish, and the steam curled in the air, carrying the smell of meat and salt and browned flour. Tucking hair behind her ear, she said, “What about Celtic, New Age? A lot of manly men don’t like that kind of music.”

  She cut her eyes sideways at him, one eyebrow raised slightly, and Deacon’s chest expanded the smallest bit, puffing up like he was a bird. The image of himself as a blue jay, fluffing up, seemed ridiculous, but true enough. “Manly men, huh?”

  “You bet.” She swept the gravy boat around and into his hands, and for one minute, her face was tipped up toward his, smiling, her eyes glittering. It had been ten thousand years since he’d felt anything real and true move in him, but he did now. He let it show in his eyes, then took the weight of the boat fully into his hands.

  “Table?”

  The corners of her lips seemed to turn up even higher. “Yes.”

  She followed him with a serving dish of fried pork chops and a bowl of greens, piled in flaky beauty, with a hank of bacon clinging to the top. A glass dish of cornbread steamed next to an old-fashioned butter dish with a glass hood. He hadn’t seen anything like it since childhood. A thin bottle of peppers with a yellow lid sat next to the salt and pepper.

  Deacon sat down and rested his hands on the table for a moment, letting the scents fill him with a powerful nostalgia. It had been many years since he’d had a meal like this. Decades. For a long moment, he tried to think when it could have been. Before his tumble, before his daughter was born, even before his marriage. Long before that.

  “This,” he said a little roughly, exaggerating his accent to cover, “is right neighborly, Miss Elsa.”

  “My pleasure.” She picked up the dish of pork chops and offered them to him. “Dig in, sugar.”

  After dinner, Tamsin jumped up to clear the table. “I’ll take care of the dishes.”

  “Would y
ou like to take a walk?” Elsa asked Deacon. “It’s a very pleasant night, and I’m sure Charlie would appreciate the chance to stretch his legs.”

  “Considering I ate enough for three people, that would probably be a very good idea.”

  She found the leash and a sweater and they set out, walking south beneath a bank of elms. Elsa was suddenly aware of herself, her head and her feet, her arms on either side of her body, a sense of space bordered by the big presence of Deacon. For almost a block, neither of them said anything. The air was cool, and scented with hints of moist earth and blooming flowers. They passed a yard neatly fenced with old-fashioned wrought iron, and an explosion of perfume enfolded them.

  “Smell that?” Elsa asked, pausing. Charlie shuffled over to the gate to sniff the entire post. “Lilies of the valley.” She peered through the gloom and spied them lining the edge of the porch, tiny white bells. “My aunt Rosalie loved them.”

  “They do smell great.”

  They walked on, arms swinging side by side. Deacon reached out and took her hand, giving her a little smile as he did it, as if he wasn’t sure. She rounded her fingers around his big palm.

  “Tell me a story, Elsa,” he said. “About you. About your life.”

  Charlie planted his feet and intently smelled a shrub. When she tugged, he resisted. “A story, huh? What kind of story?”

  “Tell me about your first kiss.”

  “You first.”

  “Fair enough.” Charlie gave up with a sneeze and they walked on, slowly. Lights were on in the living rooms and kitchens along the way. Television flickered blue into the evening. Music and laugh tracks and an argument gave texture to the world. “I was ten. I mowed lawns around the neighborhood for extra money, and there was a pretty little eight-year-old who flirted with me all the time. I finally just got up my nerve and took her under a pecan tree in the backyard and kissed her.” He held up a finger. “But I did it the right way, like I saw on TV, leaning her backward over my arm.”

  “You didn’t!” Elsa gave a hoot of laughter.

  He held up a hand in oath. “True story. Sealed my reputation as a ladies’ man right then and there.”

  “I guess it would.”

  “Now you.”

  “My story is not that good. I was fourteen, and I’d had a very bad day, and my best friend followed me down to the park. I was crying my eyes out and he was hugging me and then …” She shook her head, remembering the way they had tumbled into the grass, pressing bodies together, only lips touching at first, then tongues. He slid over her, and they pressed their bodies together, and kissed for ages. “… we were kissing, like it was the most natural thing in the world.”

  “Gathering that must have been your old friend Joaquin. Is that right?”

  “Yes,” she said, and paused to look up at him. “But don’t read anything into that. We returned to being best friends when he became a priest, and that was almost two decades ago.”

  He took a step closer, raising a hand and curling it around her neck. “This is our first kiss,” he said, and leaned down to press his lips into hers, sweetly. Just lips, his rough palm against her skin, her breasts barely grazing his chest.

  When he raised his head, she didn’t move away, but instead rested a hand on his waist. Lightly. Gauging the ratio of flesh to muscle to bone beneath her palm, beneath his shirt. She thought again of her desire to see his naked back and now added his naked chest to the list.

  His thumb traced her jaw and then he bent again, pulling her a little closer so that she could feel his whole body against the front of her whole body, and her mouth opened of its own accord, inviting him in, and as if she had never experienced such a thing before, she felt nearly faint when their tongues met. His arm slid around her waist, pulled them more tightly together, and his other hand was in her hair, and their mouths fit perfectly, perfectly. He knew how to kiss her, too, both delicately and hungrily, as if he had not tasted anything like this before and needed to take his time.

  Kissing and kissing. He turned and pressed her against the tree, his hands sliding up her arms, down her sides. She explored the length of his back with her fingers, following the indentation of his spine, the muscles on either side of it.

  Kissing and kissing, as if they were fifteen and he was dropping her off in front of her parents’ house. Kissing and kissing, turning their heads this way and that way, taking time, hands moving but only in chaste ways.

  He lifted his head at last. Brushed hair off her face. “I might be a little out of practice here.”

  She laughed softly. “That did not seem like out of practice to me.”

  “No?” He bent, kissed her again, sucking at her lips as if he couldn’t help himself. “I guess I’d better stop now. Jesus, you have the sweetest mouth.”

  “Tamsin will wonder where we are.” She suddenly realized that she still held Charlie’s leash, and her poor dog had just sunk down on the grass, politely waiting. “And poor Charlie!” He swept his tail over the grass.

  The walk back was only five minutes—they really hadn’t been gone long, it had only seemed like it. Charlie spied someone going up the walk to the house and he leapt forward, ready to greet whoever it was with a big kiss. Elsa let the leash go, and he dashed ahead. When the visitor bent to speak to the dog, Elsa recognized Joaquin’s voice.

  He waited on the porch, a dish in his hand. “Hey,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, looking from Deacon to Elsa. “Am I interrupting? I brought over a tarta de Santiago.”

  In the yellow glow of the porch light, he looked very much as he had when they were young and he would come to pick her up for something—a movie or an event at church or any number of other things—and for a single moment, she, too, was young. Seventeen and painfully in love with a good, honest man. She came up the steps. “Did you make it yourself?”

  He gave an abashed nod and held it out. He’d even put the shape of the Santiago cross on the top with powdered sugar. “Don’t tell the Gloriosa sisters. They’ll be scandalized.”

  Elsa laughed, feeling buoyant, and kissed his cheek.

  Deacon stayed on the lower step. “I’ll leave you folks to dessert. I’ve got an early call.”

  Elsa turned. “You don’t have to go! Come in and have cake.”

  “Thanks, but I really do need to run.”

  Elsa stood between the two men, a cake in her hands, the porch light exaggerating shadows and noses, painting more intent into each of their faces than could possibly be there. She took in a breath, smelling heat and salt and desire, twining red and purple in the air. Hers. His. Theirs.

  “Good night, then,” she said, and turned crisply away.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Tamsin sat cross-legged on the floor Monday evening, several lengths of fabric spread out around her. She’d worked her first shift at Walmart yesterday, six hours on her feet, with a single break of fifteen minutes. For seven dollars an hour. She’d been so tired when she returned home that she fell asleep waiting for water to boil for tea.

  Today had been better, but she was embarrassed by everything she didn’t know, things people took for granted, like how to punch a time clock, how to help someone figure out the notions for a dress pattern, and what shoes were best for a long day of standing. Her arches ached like the dickens; tomorrow, she would wear the tennis shoes in her gym bag. She hated the tedious aspects of the job, standing around under those ugly lights when there were no customers to wait on, tidying up over and over and over, and she lived in mortal terror of someone she knew showing up.

  The saving grace of it was the fabric. Working with it, setting it out to be admired, cutting it for someone, guiding people to the right choices for whatever project they had in mind. And when she had a quilter, she was in heaven, talking batting and machines and stitching.

  After such a long day, however, she wanted something creative to do. Elsa was off at San Roque, volunteering to help young mothers plant thei
r gardens appropriately. It was the first time in a long while that Tamsin had been alone.

  The newspeople had finally moved on to whatever breaking story was worth chasing now, leaving behind a pocket of quiet. She’d made a pot of coffee and now she sat in the middle of the living room amid spreads of fabric. Loreena McKennitt played in her ears. She’d found the iPod stuck in the side of her gym bag, and had accessed her iTunes account through Elsa’s computer. Done! The wonders of modern technology.

  The earliest part of a quilt was one of the best stages, when she simply let the fabric begin to speak, let it begin to arrange itself into a tale of many parts. A small scrap of blue and green paisley cotton sidled up to her knee, and pulled along a length of sea foam silk, which drew forth the gossamer aquamarine tulle. She ran her hand beneath it, admiring the airy thinness, then tugged it over the paisley and saw a clear ocean with fish swimming in it. She inclined her head, narrowed her eyes, scanned the fabrics for something that wasn’t there. Sand? Sea? A hint of a wrecked ship?

  On the floor next to her, her cellphone began to spin around in a circle, and she picked it up. Soon, this would have to be addressed, too, the fact that this was an expensive phone service and she was going to have to downgrade. It wouldn’t be long before they turned it off, which was a problem, because it would kill Alexa’s service, too.

  Speak of the devil. It was Alexa calling. “Hi, honey! What’s up?”

  “Mom?” Her daughter’s voice was shaking and Tamsin immediately sat straighter. “Some police just left here. American federal agents, looking for Dad. What’s going on?”

  “What?” Tamsin scrambled to her feet. “What did they say?”

  “They wanted to know where he is. They grilled me for an hour and asked me about everything we talked about when he was in Madrid.”

  No matter how she approached the problem, Tamsin couldn’t think of anything good to say. She thought of her daughter, alone in Madrid, on this side of a life-changing revelation. She stayed silent, letting her have one more minute before the world fell in on her head.