“Why you?” she whispered. “Why did she give it to you? Why didn’t she tell me?”
Marcus stood very still. Something in his shoulders let go, the way a rope goes slack when the weight at the end of it is finally set down.
“Mrs. Hargrove,” he said, and for the first time all morning his voice was entirely gentle, “that’s the right question.”
6. What the Fence Remembers
Marcus did not answer at once. He walked to his garage, and Teller, who had been a police officer long enough to recognize the difference between a man going for a weapon and a man going for a memory, let him go. Officer Kessler, still stranded at the curb, took half a step forward. Teller lifted two fingers without turning around, and the young man stopped.
When Marcus came back he carried an old steel toolbox. He set it on the grass, but he did not open it yet.
“Daniel Whitcomb was her son,” he said. “You knew that. What you might not know is that I was with him when he died. I’ve never told anyone the whole of it, and I won’t tell you now. But I went to the funeral, and I stood at the back, because I thought I had no right to be in the room. And that little woman walked the whole length of the church and took my hands.”
Vivian’s lips parted.
“I came every Thanksgiving after that. Twelve years. She fed me, and she talked about her roses, and she talked about you.”
“About me.”
“Every visit. Frank’s girl, she called you. The daughter I borrowed.” Marcus’s mouth moved in something that was nearly a smile. “She said you were the best pruner she ever taught, and the worst at being taught anything else.”
A sound escaped Vivian, half laugh and half something much more dangerous. She pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth. Mascara had begun to run in two thin gray lines down her cheeks, and for once she did not seem to care who saw.
“Why didn’t she tell me?” she said again, quieter. “She was sick, and I didn’t know. I could have—I would have—”
“She knew you would,” said Marcus. “That was the problem.”
He knelt, unlatched the toolbox, and lifted out a cream-colored envelope soft at the corners from three months of riding among wrenches and screwdrivers. Blue ink. Her name in a hand Vivian would have known anywhere, in any light, at the bottom of any ocean.
“She gave me one instruction,” he said. “She said you would come about the roses, and that I wasn’t to fight you. I was to wait until you asked me the right question.” He held the envelope out across the low white fence. “I’ve been waiting twenty-two days. I almost gave up on Thursday.”
Behind them, Teller cleared his throat softly and took three steps back, pulling Kessler with him by the elbow. “Come on, Dale,” he murmured. “This next part isn’t ours.”
“But the call—”
“The call just got answered.”
Vivian took the envelope as if it might be hot. She turned it over. There was no flap to unseal, only a single line of tape that Eleanor had pressed down with her thumb, and the thumbprint was still there in the old glue. She stood for a moment with her forehead nearly touching the paper. The sun climbed another inch over Larkspur Street. Down the block, a curtain gave up the pretense and simply fell open.
Then she tore the tape.
7. The Key
A key fell out first. It was small and brass and slightly warm from the sun, and it landed in her palm with a weight far out of proportion to its size. Behind it came two sheets of stationery with violets in the corner.
Vivian read the letter once in silence, and then, because her voice would not hold, she handed it to Marcus. “Please,” she said. “I can’t.”
He took it. He read aloud, slowly, in the low steady voice he had once used to read names at memorials.
My dear Vivian,
If Marcus is handing you this, then you have finally asked me a question instead of citing an ordinance, and I am so proud I could burst.
Forgive an old woman her cowardice. I did not tell you I was dying because I could not bear to watch your face do what it did the winter your father went. I told myself I was sparing you. I see now I was sparing myself. That is the trouble with love: it is so often selfish in its tenderness.
I sold the house to Marcus because he is the kindest man I have ever known who is also not afraid of hard work, and because he needs a place to belong as badly as you do. You two will be at each other’s throats by Saturday week. Please try to remember that the roses do not care who is right.
Enclosed is a key. Your father gave it to me the week before he died. He said, “Give it to her when she stops wearing the lock to keep people out and starts wondering what it might let in.” I have held it thirty-one years, waiting for you to wonder.
Water the roses on Tuesdays and Fridays if you must. But also, my darling, water them on Saturdays, with company.
All my love, always, Eleanor
Nobody spoke. A mockingbird started up again in the Hendersons’ maple, as if nothing in the world had happened.
Vivian’s hands shook so badly that it took her three tries to unclasp the chain. She held the little gold padlock in her left palm, the lock she had worn against her breastbone through a wedding that had not lasted, through eleven years of presiding over other people’s lawns, through every night she had spent listening for footsteps that never came. With her right hand she raised the brass key.
It slid in as if it had been cut that morning.
The click was very small. It should not have been loud enough to rearrange a life. But the shackle sprang open, and Vivian made a sound that came all the way up from the thirteen-year-old girl on the back steps with her chewed fingernails, and she sank down onto the grass in her ruined pink blazer and cried.