The rattle of a bucket landing on the ground sounded on the other side of the dahlias, and I looked up to see the top of Mason’s hat. The wide-brimmed canvas was stained across the brow with a few growing seasons’ worth of sweat.
“Wasn’t sure you’d come in today,” he said, not finding my eyes over the row.
I cut another bunch of the larkspur, and when my grip was full, I tucked them under one arm, pinning them there so I could reach for the next. “Are you checking up on me, Mason Caldwell?”
He pulled the snips from his belt and got to work, cutting into the rainbow of bloomed ranunculus on the other side. “Do you need checking up on?”
Mason still had a bit of that wry, boyish demeanor he’d had when we were kids fishing on the bank of the river and sneaking out to watch the sunrise up at Longview Falls.
I half laughed. “No. I don’t.”
“Did you look at the schedule?” he asked.
I sighed. “You know I didn’t.”
“The larkspur is tomorrow.”
“Well, it’s getting cut today,” I said, a monotone note creeping into my voice.
I wouldn’t tell him that the tinge of pink at the tip of the petals had told me they were ready, and that tomorrow just a little of their color would be gone. I wouldn’t tell him that the amount of dew on the stalks this morning had me worried about the leaves, either. Mason didn’t believe in the wives’ tales Gran had taught me. He put his faith in plans and data and forecasts, and I’d resolved myself not to argue with him, because he was running things now, and that was best. There was no telling how long I had before I ended up like Gran or my mother.
“We have schedules for a reason, Farrow.”
I rolled my eyes before I found the joint of the next stem, not bothering to look back at him. Again, I wouldn’t argue, because there was no point. That was one of the benefits of working with your oldest, and in my case—only—friend. You got good at not wasting energy where it would be badly spent.
“Well?”
“Well, what?” I echoed.
“You okay?” His voice softened a little, but I could still hear him cutting.
I took the bundle underneath my arm and followed the row to its end, where a bucket was waiting. The memory of last night, when those eyes on the porch and the man standing in the church window found me again, making me clench my teeth. Even now there was a part of me that thought I could still smell that cigarette smoke in the air.
“I’m good.” I dropped the larkspur into the bucket, returning to the place I’d left off.
Every woman in the Farrow family was different, but the end was always the same. Gran hadn’t started showing signs until she was in her sixties, and it had progressed very slowly. Her mind had crumbled in those last years, the light in her eyes all but flickering out. In the end, I lost her to wherever that other place was. She faded. Disappeared.
But the town had already begun to see it in my mother before she went missing, and by all accounts it had been a fast-growing, hungry thing. That was probably the reason they’d stopped looking for her.
The statements collected during the investigation were filled with accounts of inexplicable behavior. Speaking to someone who wasn’t there. Confusion about things that had or hadn’t happened. There was a particularly concerning story about her walking barefoot in the middle of the night during a snowstorm. And it wasn’t the first time she’d disappeared with no explanation. But the day she left me in Jasper was the last of her. After that, there was nothing left.
This time, the ease of Mason’s voice gave way to hesitation. “What are you doing later? I’m going into Asheville if you want to come.”
I glanced over my shoulder. He was still hidden behind the towering thicket of dahlias. “You’re never going to find someone if you spend your weekends babysitting me.”
He was quiet for a moment, and I wished I could see his face. We were both thirty-four, and for most of those years, the town had speculated that we were more than friends. We were, I supposed. We were family. In the few times I thought there might be something beyond that, it was smothered by the reality of what we both knew was coming. I’d made promises to myself a long time ago that kept me from ever crossing that line. Mason hadn’t crossed it, either.
“I’m all right, Mason,” I said again, hoping I sounded more convincing this time.
“I’m just saying . . .”
I made the next cut, irritated now. “I said I’m all right.”
Mason’s gloved hands lifted into the air in a gesture of surrender, and he fell quiet, making me instantly feel guilty. The truth was, he was waiting for me to fall apart just like Birdie was. He didn’t know that the waiting was over. I just hadn’t figured out how to tell him yet.
We worked in silence, keeping pace with each other as we moved down the row, and when I reached the end of the larkspur, I slipped the clippers into my belt and sank down, taking hold of the full buckets at my feet. When I rounded the corner of dahlias, Mason was crouched low, cutting away the yellowed stalks from where a section of drip line had busted and flooded the roots.
The rim of his hat was low over his eyes, his denim shirt already wet and darkened down the center of his back. When he finally looked up at me, his blue eyes held the question he wasn’t going to ask again. He wanted to know if I was okay. Really okay.
“Want me to take those?” He stood, wiping his brow with the back of his arm, but his gaze was on the buckets I was holding.
“No, I got it,” I said, shifting one of them into the crook of my elbow so I could take the one he’d filled with the ranunculus.
Before he could think better of biting his tongue, I ducked past him, heading for the peak of the barn’s rusted rooftop, visible in the distance.
“You look at that schedule tomorrow before you come out here hacking away,” he called out.
A smile broke on my face, and I waved a hand in the air, not looking back.
It was one of the slow days, and I was grateful for that. The barn doors were open to the sunlight, and inside, a few of the farmhands were tying up the blue hydrangeas we hadn’t used up in the shop last week. There they would hang until winter, when there was frost on the fields and the only things to sell were evergreen wreaths and dried flowers.
The old green Bronco that had once belonged to my mother was parked between the barn and a wall of sunflowers that were days from blooming. The engine still ran, and it was more farm truck than anything these days. I set down the buckets on the gravel drive and opened the back, not even flinching at the painful screech of rusted hinges. Withered blooms that had broken off in previous shop runs littered the bed, along with a burlap cloth and the old milk crate bolted into the metal that served as the only real storage space.
I loaded the buckets, taking care not to let the flower tops scrape along the roof, and then unzipped my coveralls, letting them fall to the ground. I stepped out of my boots, reaching for the sandals that were waiting in the milk crate.
“Morning, June.” A few of the field workers passed with sympathetic smiles, the greeting too sweet to pass for normal. It would be like that for a while, I guessed.
I gave them a nod, shaking out the coveralls before I dropped them into the crate. The farmhands were disappearing into the rows of bachelor’s buttons and soapwort up ahead when I shifted the truck into gear and backed up onto the road.