“So what happened?” Vi asked. “Did he ever find anything? Dig anything up?”
Patty shook her head. “Nah. There was nothing there. We had to have him put to sleep. He had cancer. The vet said maybe that’s what made him so crazy.”
Vi shook her head. “I don’t get it,” she said. “What does that have to do with us? With this situation?”
Patty gave her a long look. “We’re Oscar,” she said.
“No!” Vi said, a little too loud. Miss Ev looked over, then went back to ordering Old Mac around. He now had the tractor positioned correctly and was about to dump the rocks. “We’re not digging at nothing,” Vi whispered. “And you know it.”
“Everything all right over there?” Miss Ev called to them.
“Just fine,” Patty called back. “Vi’s just being a perfectionist. She isn’t happy with the way I’ve got the back of the bed shaped.”
“It looks good from here,” Miss Ev said. “The whole garden is coming along fabulously!”
Vi nodded. The truth was, she was actually disappointed with how well things were going and how quickly the garden was coming together; she was running out of time. Once the garden was done, she wouldn’t be able to keep talking with Patty or walking into Miss Ev’s office or the Inn without question.
She stood up straight, leaned against her shovel, and looked around.
It was thirty feet from one side to the other, a perfect circle. They’d laid it out by putting a stake in the ground and tying a fifteen-foot string to it, then marking the circumference all the way around. Old Mac and the patients had torn up the sod, marked the areas for the beds and paths with sticks and string. There was a fountain in the center with three cement birds that sprayed water out of their open mouths （Miss Ev had picked it out herself from a catalog at the garden center）。 Gran thought the fountain was a little tacky, but what mattered, she said, was that Miss Ev and the patients all seemed to love it. When Old Mac first plugged it in and those birds started spitting, everyone cheered and hooted and hollered like they were watching fireworks on the Fourth of July.
Little by little, after putting in the fountain, they’d been adding in beds and lining them with stone.
Vi had enjoyed getting to know some of the patients. Other than the strays Gran brought home from time to time, she’d never interacted with any of them at the Inn before. The thing that surprised her the most was how normal they all seemed. Like Jess, for instance, who’d quickly become one of Vi’s favorites. Jess had two kids and a husband who came to visit her twice a week. She talked about her life back at home: her friends, how she was active with the PTA, how she coached her daughter’s softball team. She wore cheerful, bright-colored blouses that she’d sewn herself. Vi couldn’t understand what she was even doing at the Inn—she seemed so… normal. Vi had asked Gran about Jess, and Gran had shaken her head, said, “You know I can’t talk about our patients, Violet.”
“But she seems fine. Like there’s nothing wrong with her at all.”
Gran nodded. “Some people’s problems are better hidden than others,” she’d said. “In fact, sometimes, the better hidden, the deeper they go, the more difficult they are to fix.”
Vi thought about that a lot as she worked on the garden with Jess and the other patients for a few hours each afternoon during activity time at the Inn—the time when patients got to choose between working in the vegetable garden, pottery studio, or kitchen. Sometimes there were other special activities, like badminton. One time Miss Ev had even taught patients how to make macramé wall hangings. And now, there was the bird garden.
Each night at dinner, Vi gave a progress report on the garden. Iris kept asking to come help work on it, but Gran had said no again and again.
“You’ve come such a long way,” Gran said to Iris. “I don’t want you to push yourself.”