Digging In: A Novel(42)

“I understand what you did,” I said.

“Maybe you do,” she said. “But you didn’t use circumstance as an excuse to self-destruct.”

“Don’t you think you’re being hard on yourself?”

She smiled wryly. “Do you know anyone worth her salt who isn’t hard on herself?”

“Good question.” I thought about the women in my life—Jackie, Glynnis, Rhiannon, Mykia. They could all give themselves a good pounding. The question was did it help or hurt? And how was it shaping my son’s perspective? “Your dad,” I said. “When did you reconnect with him?”

“This is going to sound like psychobabble, but I found my dad when I reconnected with myself. I put my mind into my schoolwork and found I had a love for science. Once my dad realized this, once he recognized I’d discovered a passion for something that wasn’t tearing me up inside, he came back to me.”

“You brought him back,” I said. “That was you, not him.”

She went quiet for a moment, and then said, “Maybe. And maybe Mr. Eckhardt had no one to bring him back.”

A certain sadness fell over me. Sadness for Mr. Eckhardt, but also sadness for myself. Who would bring me back? Trey? No, I couldn’t put that on him—he had to work on finding himself. On exploring what he had to offer. Maybe Colin had a point.

“That garden is doing it for you,” Mykia said as if reading my mind. “Even if Mr. Eckhardt is right and every one of those plants dies on the vine, you tried it. You had to find the energy to give it a go. And the passion.”

I thought about the garden and what it had come to mean to me. “They won’t all die,” I promised her. “I won’t let them.”

“Then maybe it’s already brought you back,” Mykia said. “Sometimes the brain takes a while to catch up with the heart.”





CHAPTER 17

“I didn’t do anything,” Trey said to the open door. My heart gave a thump when I realized it was Officer Leprechaun.

“He’s come to see me,” I said before realizing how that sounded. And that my voice had grown embarrassingly husky. What was wrong with me?

Willow Falls’ finest walked in, wearing tattered cargo shorts and an ancient Pink Floyd T-shirt. A few inches taller than me, he had a little middle-years paunch developing, but the surety of his steps told me he could move very quickly if need be.

“Oh, you’re gonna have to change,” he said when he took in my capris and sleeveless blouse. “Find your scuzziest clothes.”

Trey gave me a weird look and disappeared. I dashed upstairs to search for something else to wear. Before Jesse passed away, I would have had a difficult time finding something appropriate. But now, half of my wardrobe could be described as “skuzzy.” I shrugged on an old tank top and some shorts I’d been gardening in. I’d made them by hacking off the legs from a pair of khaki pants.

“Better,” he said when I entered the kitchen. He’d already begun setting up. I spotted a box full of mason jars on the kitchen table and three bags overflowing with tomatoes on the counter. A large steel pot sat tall on the stove, and he rinsed another at the sink.

“Do you wanna help or watch?” he said, laughing.

The simple components suddenly seemed overwhelming. “Where do I start?”

“Load up the dishwasher with mason jars. We need to sterilize them.”

“That makes it sound like we’re operating on something.”

He laughed again, and I realized how booming it was, how infectious. “We kind of are.” He hoisted the canner onto the stove. “This is the old-fashioned kind. I don’t have a pressure canner. This is yours now, though, old as it is.”

“Oh, I can’t take that.”

“Why?”

“What if you need to use it?”

He shrugged. “Then I’ll knock on your door and ask to borrow it.”

He was an easygoing man, Officer Leprechaun. It had been a while since anything felt easy. Still, having any man besides Jesse in the house felt vaguely like cheating, and I had to push away the urge to tell him to leave. I used the act of loading the dishwasher to distract me, but the good officer must have sensed my hesitancy because he said, “This isn’t a big deal. It’s actually not even a deal. I have no expectations.”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. It had been so long since I had allowed myself to expect anything. The garden was the first thing since Jesse passed that I’d allowed myself to invest a little hope in.

I stood a little straighter. “My only expectation for today is that I learn how to can properly. That’s a reasonable one, right?”

He moved to touch my arm, thought better of it, and picked up a tomato instead. “We need to start by skinning these babies. You up for that?”

“Bring it on.”



“It looks like a murder scene in here.” Officer Leprechaun stood in the middle of my previously white kitchen. Tomato juice covered every surface, dripped down to the floor in bloodred stripes, and was even splattered on the ceiling.

“Have you actually seen one of those?” I asked. “Willow Falls isn’t exactly a hotbed of crime.”

He glanced down at his stained T-shirt. “I used to work in the city, so yeah. It’s boring out here, but sometimes boring is good.”