Second Nature (8 page)

Roy turned to Robin; his face had gone so white he looked as if he didn’t have a drop of blood inside.

“Excuse me?” Robin said. She would have liked to give Jenny a good shake; instead she smiled and reknotted her pearls.

“The guy at the table,” Jenny went on. “He’s living at your house.”

They all turned to look. There was Stephen pouring ketchup on a hamburger bun. When he glanced up and saw them all staring, he immediately put the ketchup down. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to pour it straight from the bottle; maybe it was like mayonnaise, which Connor scooped out with a knife or a spoon.

“That’s what Connor told Lydia,” Jenny said. She took a step backward when Robin glared at her. “Is it supposed to be a secret?”

Robin quickly scanned the yard. Connor and Lydia were beside the forsythia. They hadn’t even noticed the bees swarming around them.

“Robin?” Michelle said.

“He’s a horticulture student,” Robin explained.

No one seemed convinced that this was an answer.

Roy nodded to a secluded corner of the yard. “I want to talk to you.”

“Well, I don’t want to talk to you,” Robin told him.

“Well, too fucking bad,” Roy said.

Michelle put her hands over Jenny’s ears. “Do you two mind?”

“Let me guess,” Robin said coldly to Roy. “You’re trying to charm me.”

“Don’t do this in public,” Michelle whispered to Robin.

“He’s living with you?” Roy said. “Am I hearing this correctly?”

“Are you speaking to me?” Robin said. “Or are you interrogating a witness?”

This was not at all the way she had planned it; everything she said sounded suspect and weak. Michelle seemed insulted, as if Robin had somehow intended to cloud their friendship by keeping Stephen from her. And Roy simply wouldn’t let it go. People were starting to stare at them. Stuart and Kay were being drawn over by their raised voices. George Tenney had stopped in midswing, and was holding up the ball game so he could see what was going on. Stephen had already begun to walk toward them, carrying the hamburgers; even from this distance Robin could see how cautious he was.

“What I do is none of your business,” Robin informed Roy.

“Go get ice cream,” Michelle told her daughter. “Now.”

“See, that’s where I think you’re wrong,” Roy told Robin.

Stuart came up behind Robin, and when he touched her arm she was startled, even after she’d turned to him. He seemed so rumpled and middle-aged it took Robin an instant to realize this was indeed her brother, the boy she used to protect in the schoolyard.

“You two sound like you’re married,” Stuart said cheerfully. “We could hear you over by the dessert table.”

“We are married,” Roy said darkly.

“Well, there you go,” Stuart said, less cheerful now. “There you have it.”

“You don’t need to be rude to Stuart,” Kay said to Roy. She had just come back from a vacation in Mexico, and Robin noticed that she looked ten years younger than she had when she and Stuart were still married.

Stuart beamed, genuinely happy to be defended by his ex-wife. “Oh, don’t pay any attention to Roy,” he told her. “Nobody else does.”

“Let’s get ice cream,” Paul whispered to Michelle.

“And here he is,” Roy said. He was truly smooth when he wanted to be. There was that smile, for one thing. “The man who’s living with my wife.”

For a brief moment, Robin had the sense that something horrible could happen. Stephen’s eyes were hooded and cold; along his neck a line of veins rose up. He was face to face with Roy, and although his mouth was curled, he didn’t appear to be smiling.

“Hamburger,” Robin said. She took one of the plates from Stephen and shoved it at Roy. “This is Stephen,” she told Stuart. “He’s studying landscape design.”

Robin had drawn Stephen over to her brother, but he was still looking at Roy.

“Will you be working with the Doctor?” Stuart asked. “Roy’s father plotted out the arboretum for our grandfather.”

“I’m working with Robin,” Stephen said.

“You should come see the moon garden Robin did for me,” Kay suggested. Hers was an all-white garden: white hybrid tea roses, masses of white lilies and bearded iris, Miss Lingard’s icy phlox, clematis that opened to look like a handful of snow.

“Thank you,” Stephen said. Robin nodded at him, so he knew he was doing well, but his heart was pounding. “I will,” he told Kay. He could still feel the bad thing between him and Roy; if they were honest about it, they’d be circling each other right now. But men weren’t honest; they sipped beer and smiled and didn’t show their teeth.

“When did you plan to tell me about him?” Michelle whispered as Paul tried to guide her toward the dessert table.

“There’s nothing to tell,” Robin insisted. “Really,” she swore, but by that time no one was listening to her.

“Is the cat driving you crazy?” Stuart asked Stephen. “When I stayed at Robin’s the damned thing used to jump on me in the middle of the night. I’m convinced the sole purpose of its existence is to shed.”

“The cat doesn’t bother me,” Stephen said carefully. This was it, this small encounter was what they had practiced for. The true test, Robin had said, the real McCoy.

“You’re a tolerant man,” Stuart said. “Lemonade?”

And that was when Stephen knew they had actually accomplished it. Stuart had no idea that he’d talked to Stephen dozens of times in that room with bars on the windows. Just
blink your eyes if you want to answer yes. Shake your head for no.
All Stuart saw now was the sports jacket from Macy’s and the Nike sneakers and the sunlight, and what he saw he believed.
Tell me anything
at
all, say one word,
Stuart had pleaded, while Stephen sat across from him, in a hard-backed chair, considering how easy it would be to break his neck, then steal the ring of keys from his belt.

Bees buzzed around the pitchers on the table, and out in the rear of the yard a bat cracked against a ball and sent it flying. Robin glanced over at Stephen, pleased, as if their accomplishment had turned him, all at once, into the person he appeared to be on this one fine day in May. People all around them were talking, they sounded like birds, or water in a stream, unintelligible and constant. There were women in cotton dresses, and boys running through the new grass, and here he was, dressed like a man, accepting a tall glass of lemonade beneath a clear blue sky, more than a thousand miles from home.

 
 
In that first week of June, when the tide was so low that children went far out across the mud flats, collecting baskets of mussels, the roses bloomed all at once. People stopped at their own gates, openmouthed, surprised by the profusion in their own gardens. Everywhere on the island, roses spilled over lawns and climbed over rooftops, a glorious infestation. Thorns and brambles choked lawn mowers, allergy sufferers went crazy with sneezing, little girls complained they couldn’t sleep because the bees began buzzing long before dawn.

“It was the rainy winter,” the Doctor told Robin when he stopped by for a cup of coffee. The bed of his parked truck was filled with branches and canes; wasps hovered above the pickup. “The ground never froze,” he went on. But still he seemed puzzled; there was no real explanation. Usually, roses demanded more care than other plants; they were tricky and cantankerous and had to be coaxed into growing with bonemeal and lime. “So how’s business?” he asked.

“I’m sort of behind,” Robin said.

In fact, she’d hardly worked all spring, and if she wasn’t careful she’d have to borrow money from Stuart or, far worse, ask Roy for help again. Stephen was out in the yard now, practicing what she’d taught him about pruning back roses. She was afraid to do the job she knew so well; gardening was a gift, after all, and what was given might be taken away. She didn’t believe in bad luck or curses, but just in case, each time she found a toad in someone’s garden she made certain to set it free.

“It seems that I have a black thumb these days. I don’t know what to do about it.”

“It’s the divorce,” the Doctor said as he spooned sugar into his coffee. “Planning a divorce can kill a garden.”

“That’s a dreadful thing to say,” Robin chided him, although she secretly believed he might be right.

She made a face at him, the way she used to when he was working for her grandfather and she would annoy him until he shooed her away. It was, indeed, a dreadful thing to say, but the Doctor didn’t give a damn. He had recently celebrated his sixty-third birthday, and although he could still lift a magnolia out of the bed of his truck with no help at all, he figured he was now old enough to say whatever he pleased, whether or not it was true. As far as he was concerned, Roy had made a lot of mistakes in his life, and now he had screwed up the one thing he’d done right. “Have pity on him,” the Doctor suggested.

“I don’t think that’s what you’re supposed to feel for your husband,” Robin said.

The Doctor laughed and went to the sink to wash out his coffee cup. He would never have let a girl like Robin get away from him. The problem with Roy was that he was too good-looking. His mother, the Doctor’s wife, had been that way, too, and in the years before she died, she grew colder and more distant, shocked that the world hadn’t offered her everything she’d wanted just because she was beautiful.

“The boy’s doing a good job,” the Doctor said as he watched Stephen through the window.

Robin came over and lifted the edge of the curtain, then made herself look away.

“He’s not a boy.” She laughed.

The Doctor put his cup on the drainboard. His point exactly.

“How’s my grandson?” he asked on his way to the door.

“Sixteen,” Robin said. A word synonymous with moody, and getting moodier all the time. Connor had taken to going out by himself at night. He needed to think, he said. He needed to be alone, and there was no point in her waiting up for him. There was no need to worry about him drinking, he’d stopped completely, she could trust him on that. Occasionally Robin would catch him grinning, and when she’d ask what was so funny, he’d clam up. Whatever it was, it was a serious business, but one that delighted him all the same.

“Your punishment for having once been a teenager yourself,” the Doctor told her. “Everything we do comes back to haunt us.”

Later that day, when the Doctor was working over at the Morrisons’, he saw Robin’s truck go by. He felt bad about throwing the breakup with Roy at her. He should have told her there was no such thing as a black thumb; if you believed something would grow it would, plain and simple. Anyone who knew gardens knew that. The Doctor let Angelo and Jim finish up the yard work so he could go to the curb and watch where his daughter-in-law was headed. The Feldmans’ place, one of the first of the old shingled houses. This was a job the Doctor had turned down, since Cheryl Feldman took no one’s advice but her own, and that was hardly worth heeding. Robin somehow managed to tolerate even the most obnoxious clients, but then, she’d had plenty of practice with her grandfather. If a client insisted on pansies or gladioli, Robin would nod, then go ahead and plant one or two in among the masses of lilies and cornflowers she’d suggested in the first place. The Doctor had taught Robin well, and he was proud of her. As his helpers raked up the cut grass, he decided that he’d better have a long talk with his son. He’d better do it soon, maybe as soon as tonight, because even from this distance, the Doctor could see that fellow who was staying with her didn’t mind the thorns on the Feldmans’ roses. He wouldn’t notice the blood on his hands.

“Floribunda,” Robin said, pleased to discover the rose Stephen handed her didn’t wilt as soon as she touched it. She’d been foolish to think she’d been cursed. Some plants died and others lived, and human touch had nothing to do with it. “The old name for it,” she explained to Stephen. “From the Latin.” She pulled her hair back into an elastic band. “We have to cut this all back. Pronto.”

It was good to work with Stephen; he worked hard and he didn’t say much, and at noon he walked down to the bakery to get them both lunch. They had agreed he needed as much practice as possible going to stores, making small talk, waiting for the light to turn red before he crossed the street. But sitting on the Feldmans’ lawn, waiting for him to return, Robin realized that she was almost sorry he was such a good student. He had learned to read more quickly than she’d ever imagined possible; he was already on chapter books. A few days ago he had asked for an atlas, and it wasn’t until she had brought one home from the library that she understood why he’d wanted it. She’d had the urge to take the atlas right back, but then he’d been so grateful when she gave it to him she’d felt silly and selfish. She opened the book and showed him the blue curves of Michigan and watched as he ran a finger over the lines that signified rivers and roads.

He brought back two tuna salad sandwiches and two bottles of spring water, and handed her the change, which he had tried his best to count. They unwrapped their lunches and didn’t speak as they ate. They moved only to wave away the bees. Robin tilted her face toward the sun and closed her eyes. Of course he wanted to go back; at night he was memorizing all the routes leading west, he was sounding out the numbers and the names. The mission had always been to let him decide his own fate, but that didn’t mean Robin had to think about it. She didn’t have to think about the atlas, left open on the oak dresser in his room. She would not think about how close they were sitting, or even allow herself to wonder if, by this time in her life, she shouldn’t have a little more sense.

 
 
Michelle Altero rarely got angry, and when she did, those who knew her could tell something was wrong after one look. Her face puckered and grew flushed; her mouth formed a hard, straight line. The students she counseled at the high school thought she was a pushover; they liked her generous spirit and knew she wasn’t in the least bit dangerous, unless someone was bullied or mistreated and that angry look of hers took over, which meant there’d be a price to pay.