Chapter 9

Nora was making progress on her transformation, but she wasn't anywhere near where she wanted to be, and she was increasingly aware she was running out of time before the need to eat and pay bills would force her back to work. A few days ago, she'd gotten a call from a debt collector for a credit card bill she had failed to pay in the Before. She was mortified—she'd always kept her finances in good shape. She was afraid to look at how much she owed. Especially with medical bills starting to come in.

But Dad might force her back to work before bankruptcy did. His communication with her since the accident had been very limited. On the one hand, she felt miserably insignificant that he didn't seem to care how she was. On the other hand, she was relieved to be free from the weight of his criticism. How was it possible to want his attention and loathe it at the same time? She could never seem to stop wanting his approval. But he never had it to give.

Yesterday he'd finally reached out to her. Not to check on her, which one might assume, given the ordeal she'd been through. But to complain that he needed her in the office as soon as possible.

He was insistent and overbearing, and Nora knew she couldn't put him off much longer.

But today the skies had cleared and she was headed to Grandpa's garden. She expected the trip to be hard, mostly because the guilt she carried was so pervasive and heavy. She'd not only broken her promise to look after the plot when he was gone, but even before that, she couldn't seem to muster the energy to visit him. Her mother had told her she needed to snap out of her "funk." That was the euphemism for depression in the November family.

Nora stopped at a big-box hardware store and picked up a spade and a shovel. She would need more than that, but she didn't want to arrive empty-handed like she had no clue what she was doing. To be fair, she didn't have a clue what she was doing, but she was hoping some of Grandpa's garden tutoring would come back to her.

From there, the drive to the Goodfellow Community Garden was unpardonably short, hardly enough time to give herself a much-needed pep talk before she pulled into the parking lot.

High stone walls surrounded the garden. Entrance was gained through an ornate iron gate. The two acres of land had once belonged to an old Austin estate before it was broken up for development. Nora remembered Grandpa telling her that this part of the estate had housed the stables.

Through the gate, she could see bursts of color among the green plants that were beginning to unfurl. Her heart began a staccato beat in her chest. A shadow crossed over the sun, and she instinctively looked up. Grandpa was not there, of course. She had been seeing his shadow less and less. Still, she hoped for it every day.

A trickle of perspiration slid down her temple despite the cool temperatures. What the hell? Could she not walk into a community garden without having an episode? She thought she'd rid herself of that unpleasant occurrence of the Before—panic attacks. When they first started happening, she tended to get them in court. But in the last few months before the accident, they'd started happening at weird times and places, without any obvious reason. She'd be getting ready for work and feel her heart rate suddenly skyrocket. Or she'd be sitting second chair in a trial and imagine the first chair suddenly taken ill and her hands would get clammy, her heart would race, and she'd have to excuse herself.

The unmistakable signs of an attack were painting in at her edges now, slipping in under her nails and shooting white hot through her veins and into her chest. She had to move before it paralyzed her. She shoved against the gate, but it was rusted and didn't budge. She slammed her body against it, and it swung open with an alarmingly loud squeak, announcing to one and all that at long last, the ne'er-do-well granddaughter had arrived.

Fortunately, only a couple of people were present, and they didn't seem to notice her.

Nora took several deep breaths. She remembered what Grandpa used to say when she would get overwhelmed. "Listen to the birds," he said. "You ever hear a more optimistic sound in your life? That's God saying good morning to you. That sound is telling you everything is going to be all right."

Nora listened to the birds for several moments, the sound of their chatter reminding her of the utter joy she'd felt in Grandpa's celestial garden. It really was a very optimistic sound. You know what else is optimistic, Nora? Your reverse bucket list. She had to keep her eye on the prize. So when her heart had calmed, she picked up her shovel and spade and stepped inside and shut the gate behind her.

The community garden was as lovely as she remembered. She noticed the dark purple ranunculus and a lemon tree in full bloom, its boughs spreading prettily over two lucky plots. She could see the tender shoots of vegetable plants, the start of vines trained to poles and lattices. Bluebonnets were beginning to peek up in small patches. The air smelled sweet, and the constant noise of the city seemed to fade away as Nora moved along a crushed granite path. Some of the plots had plaques denoting awards won, like Best Floral or Best Use of Space. All awarded by the board of the Goodfellow Community Garden.

But the deeper she went, the more dread built. She could hear Grandpa whispering to grow her garden, to put some color in her salad.

His plot was near the back. She couldn't see it yet, and she hung on to a hope that it had somehow survived her neglect since Grandpa died almost a year ago. One time at the ranch, they'd had a prolonged hard freeze that looked to have killed the roses. But the bushes had come back more beautiful than before.

No such luck today. When she reached Grandpa's plot, she swallowed down a swell of nauseating dismay. What had once been a tidy, beautiful urban garden was now a tangle of weeds and dried-out stalks. Even his chair had rusted and toppled over. Grandpa would die all over again if he saw this garden.

Her raging disappointment with herself, she was sorry to note, felt as familiar as a pair of old house shoes. It was a wrecking ball to her psyche—the light seemed to change around her and her head began to pound at the temples, the buzz deafening. She pressed a damp hand against the churning of her belly.

She dropped her tools and made herself step onto Grandpa's plot. Her foot sank down into the detritus all the way up to her ankle. One particularly showy weed brushed her knee, and she bent over and yanked it out of the earth.

She reached for another weed, but this one would not come free. She wrapped both hands around the stalk and yanked—it broke at ground level, the roots sunk deep. That infuriated her. The weed was mocking her, reminding her that there was nothing she could do to fix this terrible mess, that she'd let her grandfather down, that she'd broken her promise to do the one thing for the one person who had ever loved her exactly as she was, and she abhorred herself for it.

The ghost of Nora wanted to give in to defeat, but this was one way the new Nora was different—she wasn't going down without a fight... her near panic-attacking notwithstanding. She whirled around to grab the spade to get that weed out of her garden but was distracted by the sight of an elderly woman barreling down the path toward her in a wheelchair with a wheel so wobbly, it looked as if it might fly off at any moment. The woman wasn't using her arms to propel her; she was using her feet. The wet crushed granite was making her progress difficult, so she suddenly surged out of the chair and marched forward.

Nora froze, uncertain what to do.

The woman's silver hair was wrapped in a tight ballet bun at her crown. She wore flannel palazzo pants and a worn motorcycle jacket. And her expression was murderous. "How dareyou," she growled when she reached the edge of Grandpa's plot.

Nora looked behind her to see if the woman was perhaps addressing someone else, but there was no one there. "I'm sorry?"

"You've got some gall showing up here now, you Lolly-come-lately."

Nora was stunned. "I'm sorry, ma'am, but I think you've mistaken—"

"I most certainly have not! I know who you are. He was my friend! Maybe even my best friend! Besides Walter, obviously." She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. In the next plot over, a slight man was casually raking. "He waited for you."

Confused, Nora asked, "Walter?"

"Jim! Every week he said, ‘Oh, my granddaughter is going to come. She promised she'd come,'" she said with a mocking tone. "But you didn't, did you?"

Oh gosh. Jim. James Brian Carpenter, her grandfather. Bile began to crawl up Nora's throat. That terrible sledgehammer of grief struck her in the gut, making her feel nauseous. "You knew Grandpa?"

"I just said that. Good Lord, he worried about you. Now why would you let an old man worry like that?"

"How... I mean, what makes you think that?"

The woman glared like she thought Nora was being intentionally stupid. "Because he toldme. He worried that you needed a break from your job because it was eating you up. He worried that you weren't taking care of yourself. All he wanted was to see you, and look what happened!"

Nora couldn't listen to this, because there was no room in her for more soul-crushing guilt and self-loathing.

"One day he was out here and announced to us all that his granddaughter was going to come visit, and oh, was that old man excited. But you didn't show up and he dropped dead of a heart attack. That's what happened."

It was worse than that. Nora hadn't come, hadn't been able to fight through another dark day. And two days later, when she finally did go to see him, she'd found him dead on the floor of his kitchen, his body cold and stiff, his skin mottled. She could recall every moment of that day like it had happened this morning. She had knocked several times on his door, pressing her ear to it to listen for movement—Grandpa was always home that time of day to listen to the news and weather. A resident passing by said they hadn't seen him for a couple of days.

Nora frantically dug a key out of her bag and opened the door to his apartment. She could feel death in the apartment before she ever saw him—the air was stiff and lifeless. "Grandpa?" She'd dropped her designer bag and walked in, checking his bedroom first, seeing the neatly made bed, and then the bathroom. His TV was off, his remote placed carefully beside the paper's crossword puzzle.

Nora moved on to the kitchen and saw his bare feet sticking out from behind the bar. Her scream stuck in her throat and came out as a roar as she ran around to him. He was wearing his pajamas. A coffee cup lay shattered, and brown liquid had spilled and stained the floor. He looked like death, but the possibility that he was dead was too far out of reach for her. She grabbed his shirt by the collar and tried to shake him awake, shrieking his name between sobs. She'd wept as she'd scrambled for a phone, then screamed at 911 to send someone now. She kept trying to rouse him, begging him, as the unthinkable snaked its way like a serpent into her heart, biting off pieces bit by bit.

When the first responders arrived, they did what they could but eventually put a sheet over him. A police officer asked her to wait in the living room. She stood stiff and disbelieving, her fingers clenching and unclenching, her breath shallow and raw, her heart aching.

They said he'd been there about a day or so. Which meant she could have saved him if she'd found a way to come when she'd promised she would. Which meant, in that twisted way grief has of destroying us, that she'd killed him.

Without warning, she whirled around and vomited the contents of her breakfast into the weeds.

"Holy crap!" the old woman yelped.

Nora braced her hands against her knees, dragging deep breaths into her lungs to keep from having a heart attack or vomiting again. She despised herself for her failure, and now her worst fears were confirmed: She hadn't hidden anything from Grandpa. He knew how hard her life had become, how the law firm was making mincemeat of her. He died knowing that she was drowning in despair and that she wasn't coming. That no one was coming.

"Are you sick?"

"Not like you think," Nora managed on a gasp of air.

The woman bent over so she could peer into her face. "Are you having a panicattack?"

Nora didn't answer because a big glob of tears erupted from her, spilling down her face.

"Good grief." The woman reached into a pocket and handed Nora an embroidered linen handkerchief, the sort Nora's grandmother used to wash and iron and fold into triangles for Grandpa's suits. "Why is your generation so weepy about every little thing? How bad is it?"

"Oh," Nora said and sucked in another breath, fighting another swell of nausea. "On a scale of one to ten, I'm at want-to-die."

"That's ridiculous," the woman insisted. "When anyone says they want to die, what they really mean is, they want to live, but they don't know how."

Nora choked on another sob.

"Stop that." The woman straightened up. "I wasn't asserting cause and effect. But I can't help but be mad that you didn't show up for your grandfather. Do you have any idea how much he loved you girls? Oh my God, stop crying."

A bony hand landed on her shoulder and squeezed. It felt almost comforting. Still, it took everything Nora had in her to make herself straighten up and not collapse to the ground. "You're right, ma'am—I was horrible. I didn't do half the things I said I would. I—" The tears exploded again, sliding down her cheeks, coming out of her eyes, her nose, her mouth. She had let Grandpa down, over and over, in the worst ways. He had loved her so much, and all she could do was screw up.

"Stop crying,girlie. There's no crying in theater."

"I think you mean baseball."

"I mean theater."

"Gracious, what'd you do?" A man in a wide-brimmed hat—Walter—had appeared. "Leave the girl alone."

"I didn't do anything, Walter," the woman said. "Go check your precious Venus flytraps." She sighed. "The man wins an award for Best Exotic and suddenly he's a master gardener." She woodenly patted Nora's arm. "Look, I'm sorry I upset you. Walter says I talk too much, and I'm not one to sugarcoat anything. But Jim was my friend, and I miss him, and I guess I needed someone to blame."

"Well, I blame me too, so get in line," Nora said weakly.

The woman looked her over. "Jim was right about one thing—you're a mess. Much worse shape than I pictured."

Nora put her hands on her waist and drew another shaky breath. "I'm not sure how to take that." She couldn't banish the image of Grandpa's lifeless body or how she'd clung to it.

"Come here," the woman said and gripped Nora by the elbow and guided her over to the rusted metal chair. She bent down and righted it, made Nora sit in it, then told her to stay put. She went and got her wheelchair and rolled it up next to Nora and took a seat.

Nora wiped her face with the handkerchief, then looked at the woman. "May I ask who you are?"

"I should have said. I'm Catherine Henry."

Nora nodded.

"You've heard the name?"

"I'm sorry, but Grandpa never—"

"I mean, you've heard the name, generally speaking?"

Generally speaking, she had not. She shook her head.

Catherine Henry muttered under her breath, "What is wrong with this country? Don't they teach art anymore? I was a Broadway star back in the day. A big Broadway star. Jim knew who I was, but of course he did—he loved Broadway. What about closer to home? I headlined at Esther's Follies for a few years. That must ring some bells."

Esther's Follies was a long-standing vaudeville comedy theater in town. Nora had never been, but it was true that Grandpa loved a good rowdy show with lots of dancing and music.

"He saw some of my performances. At least he pretended he did. And he didn't mind me talking about my glory days. Not like Walter." She cast a dark side-eye in the direction of the man who'd gone back to his rake.

"Is Walter your husband?"

"Oh my God, no. My husband died twenty years ago. Liver disease. Didn't even know he had it until he got a strange pain in his side. The next thing I know, they're telling us he's only got a few weeks. No, Walter and I've been friends for fifty years, since we were wide-eyed theater students in New York."

Nora blew her nose. "You met my grandfather here?"

"Yep. I like to come down to the gardens while Walter works in our plot. Gives me something to do to keep my mind off my troubles. Jim missed you and the other one something fierce."

"Lacey," Nora said. "I'm Nora."

"I could tell by looking at you that you were the lawyer. You have that skinny, hard look about you."

Nora wasn't quite sure how to take that either. "Well, the skinny is a recent development. But I feel like the hard look has been around awhile."

The lady almost smiled. "He sure had high hopes for you. Always talking about what a great lawyer you were and how you could do some good in the world if your boss would let you."

More tears leaked from her—Grandpa would say she was excellent at anything she did. He once called her high school failing grade in physics a "launching pad to greatness."

"How?"she'd demanded, dismayed by the grade and fearing the criticism she'd get from her father.

"There's nowhere but up, and if I know anything about you, I know that you're only going up."

"Now, don't get me wrong, he loved the other one too," the lady said. "But he said she was self-sufficient."

"Yeah... but me, not so much, right?"

"Well, he worried more about you. You know, now that I'm looking at you, I don't see the lawyer so much. I see skinny and a little lost." She leaned forward to peer at her. "I'll be completely honest, Nora. I'm disappointed after the big buildup Jim gave you."

Not as disappointed as Nora was. She couldn't help a tremulous smile. "Well, thanks for your honesty, I guess."

"You owe it to your grandfather to bring this garden back to life, you know."

Why did this old woman think she was here? Tears erupted again, and she leaned over, folded her arms across her knees, and tried to stop them.

"Good Lord, there you go again. I'm just saying, after you let him down, you should make it up to him. I can help you. For starters, you need to clean out this plot." She leaned forward and put her hand on Nora's knee. "Don't cry, honey. There's nothing here that can't be fixed. You have to wantto fix it, though. Jim always said that happiness was born of usefulness. He had a lot of sayings like that. Anyway, you could be very useful here and get yourself happy. Get the weeds out before doing anything else. You can't grow the good stuff when the life is choked out by weeds."

What was it with old people and their garden metaphors? Was this woman channeling Grandpa? Was she Grandpa? Had Nora completely lost her mind? Entirely possible. She sniffed. "Thank you, MissHenry. I appreciate your... insight."

"Call me Catherine. Now, go home, and when you come back, you're going to need a hat."

Yes. A hat. Grandpa was never without his battered sun hat.

"Catherine, leave her alone," Walter called down the path.

Catherine muttered under her breath again. She began to back down the path, pushing with her feet, her gaze on Nora.

Nora sat still for a long time before she put her things away in Grandpa's footlocker with the spare key he'd given her ages ago. She looked around at the wild plot and pictured him puttering around. She missed him so very much.

She sank down to the ground and then slowly leaned back until she was lying on her back among the dead plants and weeds, staring at a fat white cloud floating across an azure sky. Oh, Grandpa, I'm so sorry. I'm trying. I really am.

She was trying so hard to make the After work because she needed it to work. It was harder than she'd thought it would be—she hadn't been able to completely rid herself of that weird sensation of her skin not fitting properly. And her emotions were all over the map. She longed for that slice of heaven that was Grandpa's celestial garden. She longed to feel that warmth of love wash over her again, to feel his arms around her, holding her safe.

A memory floated back of Gus, Lacey, and her, lying beside Grandpa on a blanket in the middle of a field. They were looking at cloud shapes, calling out what they saw. Gus only saw chickens.

Nora later told Grandpa that day was one of the best days of her entire summer.

"Well, that's the thing, sweetheart. Joy is found in the simplest things,"he'd said. "You never have to look too far for a little shot of it."

Maybe that was what was wrong with her, Nora mused. Maybe she'd been looking too far for a little shot of it. Maybe she needed to try harder to figure out why joy was so hard for her to see in life. And maybe Grandpa's garden was the simple thing that could bring her joy and really make her new life different from the Before.

The new Nora found the strength to get up. She left her ghost lying in the overgrown plot to rot with the weeds. The new Nora had work to do.