Chapter Text
Dad knocked on my door before I was up. Three knocks, a pause, one more. Same as always.
"You decent?"
"It's my room, Dad."
"That's not a yes." He put his head in anyway. His hair was doing the thing it does when he sleeps on it wrong. "Did the soil come?"
"It's a bag of dirt. I didn't sit up all night waiting for it."
"Big weekend riding on that dirt." He was already gone.
By the time I got downstairs he'd been out to the tomatoes and back. I could tell because the watering can was wet.
"You watered them," I said.
"They looked dry."
"You watered them last night. You're going to drown them."
"They looked dry from the window."
"They always look dry from the window." I sat down with my toast. He stole a bite of it on his way to the coffee, the bite I'd already buttered. "Get your own."
"Tax." He's called it that since I was old enough to fight him for it and lose. I let him have it. I always do.
Claire came down while he was rinsing his mug. "Morning."
"Hey."
"I'm doing a grocery run after work. You need anything?"
"I'm good."
"Okay." She wiped a spot on the counter that was already clean.
Dad kissed the top of my head on his way out. I heard the truck start before I'd finished my toast. Claire watched him go from the window. She does that — watches this house a step back from the glass, the way you'd watch a place that wasn't quite yours. Five years in and half her boxes are still taped up in the garage. I filed it under cold, same as the rest of her. I didn't say anything and neither did she.
Ravi dropped Priya at the stop on his way to open the shop, like most mornings. He leaned over and said something that made her roll her eyes, then gave me a wave through the windshield and pulled off. Ravi's been my dad's friend since before Priya and I were born. That's the whole reason we're us — two kids handed to each other at somebody's cookout before we could talk. He's been on his own since Priya was little. The kind of good-looking that makes the moms at pickup find a reason to walk over.
Priya was already half out of her skin.
"Okay. Tyler. From my cousin's thing. He asked Danny for my number last night."
"Tyler who almost got thrown out of camp?"
"That's the one." She said it like it counted in his favor. "He hasn't texted. It's been sixteen hours. I've checked my phone maybe forty times."
"You could just text him."
"No. Absolutely not." She grabbed my arm. "What if he's boring, though. What if he texts and he's boring."
"Then he's boring and you're free."
"See, that's so easy for you to say." She meant it as a normal thing to say. It landed anyway. Priya's kissed four people. I've kissed one, in eighth grade, on a dare, and we both said sorry after. Somewhere around fourteen she came back from a summer grown into herself, easy in it like it had always been hers, and the boys who used to just ride past started slowing down. They slowed for her. I was the one holding the bag while she talked to them. She gets to worry a boy might be boring. I don't have that problem.
She didn't notice. She was already back on her phone, writing the text she wasn't going to send.
I had the closing shift at the nursery, which is the one Hannah gives me because she trusts me to lock up and doesn't trust the college kids to water without drowning something.
I like the place empty. Last customers gone, the misters off, the big greenhouse quiet and green and warm even when it's cold outside. I moved the trays of mums in under the lights, pinched back the leggy ones, pulled the yellow off the ferns before anyone else would've noticed they were going. For an hour I wasn't anybody's stepdaughter and wasn't anybody's problem. I was just the one who knew which plants were about to turn and got to them first.
Hannah's new girl — seventeen, sweet, still asks before she uses the bathroom — asked if my mom was coming to get me.
"Stepmom." I let her read the rest off my face.
She didn't ask again. Nobody does, after the first time. I've gotten good at making the first time enough.
Hannah found me in the back on my phone, on the trade board I've been on since spring — people two and three states over posting cuttings, whole plants sometimes, photographed on their kitchen counters like grandkids.
"You're on that thing again."
"There's a swap at the end of the month. Fairground out past Dell. A woman's bringing something I've wanted for a year and she won't ship it — which is how you know she actually knows what she has."
"You're not driving an hour for a plant."
"Watch me."
Hannah's been at this forty years and still calls them all "the merchandise," but she keeps me on the closing shift, lets me set the shade stock the way I want it, and doesn't argue when I'm right, which is most of the time. She handed me the coleus nobody was ever going to buy, gone brown at the edges, marked down twice. "Take that before I have to compost it." I took it because it was ugly and nobody else would, and she knew exactly why, and let me.
Claire had left something on my bed while I was at work.
I knew it was hers before I hit the top of the stairs, because Dad doesn't leave things and doesn't come in my room and couldn't tell a plant book from the phone book. It was a plant book. A real one — hardcover, glossy, the kind that costs money, rare houseplants — with a sticky note on the cover in her round, careful writing. Saw this and thought of you.
I stood in the doorway and looked at it a while.
The thing about Claire is she isn't stupid and she isn't lazy. She pays attention. She'd have had to notice what I'm into, and hold onto it, and go somewhere that sells a book like that, and choose it, and write the note, and carry it up here and set it square in the middle of my bed where I couldn't miss it. That's a lot of steps. She takes all of them, every time. That's almost the worst part.
I put it on the closet shelf, spine in, with the rest of the things she's given me that I don't use and won't throw out — because throwing them out would mean she'd gotten to me. Then I went down to help Dad kill his tomatoes.
When I passed her in the kitchen she looked up like she might ask whether I'd found it. She didn't. I didn't say anything either. It's not loud, the cold between us — nobody yells, nobody's cruel. It's a hundred small things she does and a hundred small ways I keep them from landing, and it's gone on so long now that I don't think either of us remembers how it started or how you'd stop it.
Dad built the raised bed himself back in April, out of leftover cedar from a job. It's a perfect box. Square to the inch, corner braces, the whole thing. He built a vegetable bed like it had to hold up a second floor.
Then he started killing everything in it.
He can't leave it alone. He waters when it's already wet. He digs down to check the roots and wrecks them checking. I came out after dinner and he was standing over it with the hose.
"Put it down," I said.
He put it down.
I showed him again. Thumb in the dirt first, past the knuckle. Only water if it comes up clean. He crouched next to me and did it, serious about it, because I actually know this and he doesn't. He's not weird about being bad at something in front of me. Claire would rather die.
"These two are too close," I said. "They'll choke each other out by July."
"Hannah sold me six."
"Hannah sold you six because six was what was left." He laughed, the real one. I moved two of them down the fence while he held the others.
He went quiet for a second, looking at the dirt on his hands. "Your mother killed more of these than I ever did. Swore up and down she had a black thumb." Then he handed me the next plant before I had to answer, which is how he does it. Says her once. Sets her down easy. Keeps going.
I told him about the swap out past Dell while we worked.
"An hour's nothing," he said. "I'll drive you. Long as I don't have to talk to the plant people."
Once everything was in, I made him promise not to water until the soil went dry, and he promised, and we both knew he was lying. He flicked dirt at me. I flicked it back. It got to the blue part of the evening where you can still see but the colors are gone, and we stayed out there past when there was anything left to do, because neither of us was in a hurry to go back inside.
Claire came to the back step. She didn't come down into the yard. She stood at the top with her arms folded.
"I ran into Sharon at the Shop-Rite," she said. "She and Paul want to get everybody together again. The old gang." She laughed a little. "Sounds like a heist movie when I say it out loud."
Dad's hands stopped on the plant. Just for a second.
"Together how?"
"I don't know yet. Sharon wants to actually do it this time. Not just say it at Christmas and forget." She looked at him a beat too long. "It's been years since everyone was in one place."
"Yeah," he said. He was looking at the dirt. "It has."
I put the last plant in and didn't think one thing about the old gang. Whoever they were. I figured cornhole and bad homemade wine.
Claire said the bed looked good and went inside. We stayed out until it got too dark to work.
Before bed I took Mom's gray sweatshirt down off the hook and held it to my face.
It doesn't smell like her anymore. It hasn't for a couple years. It smells like my closet now. Cedar, and whatever dryer sheet Claire buys.
I held it there a minute anyway. Then I put it back, arms in first, and got in bed and looked at the trade board until my eyes gave out. The plant was still there. The end of the month was still a long way off.