The talk transitioned to tennis, whether Roddick was the real thing or just a flash in the pan, that Hewitt was an asshole, and who were these Russian girls coming into this country and using our trainers and playing in Florida but still competing under the Russian flag. I had no idea Philip knew anything about tennis. Sometimes, he just came out with these random facts about things-famous mountain ranges, American history, the Dalai Lama. I could see the corner of his eyelid twitching, which happened whenever he was nervous. In the year we’d been together, I’d told him plenty about my father, but this was the first time they’d met. I wanted to tell Philip he didn’t have to try so hard.
‘Summer, I wanted to show you this.’ Rosemary pulled a binder out of her enormous handbag. Inside were photographs, notes scrawled on lined paper, and more notes and drawings on Post-its. ‘It’s the general premise to my book.’ She pointed to the photographs. ‘I featured twelve gardens in Vermont, and interviewed each of the people who cultivated them. I tried to vary them as much as possible, to give people a lot of options. If it ever gets published, maybe we could sell it at my store. Anyway, I thought you might want to take a look.’
‘It’s nice,’ I said, leaning over, feigning looking. ‘Very pretty.’
‘You should see the things Rosemary’s doing for that store,’ my father butted in, just as the frizzy-haired ma?tre d’ announced that our table was ready and that we could sit down if we wanted, even though Steven and Angie, his girlfriend, hadn’t arrived yet. ‘They raise llamas on the neighboring property, right? Well, now they don’t only just sell plants at Carson’s. Rosemary is buying some of the llama yarn to sell there as well.’
‘And you should see him with those llamas.’ Rosemary jutted a finger at my father. ‘There’s this one mother who was completely ignoring her baby, and Richard was so worried. He thought maybe we should adopt it. Had all these plans of how we could build a little llama barn off the garage.’ She rolled her eyes good-naturedly. ‘Your dad and his worries about karma.’
I recoiled, horrified she had so nonchalantly referred to what I thought she had referred to-my father’s accident, his guilt over hitting the deer, his loss of Kay. My father had surely told Rosemary, and maybe Rosemary had assumed he’d discussed it with me. Only, he hadn’t. Not once. I wasn’t even sure if he knew I knew.
‘I think it’s nice he saves animals,’ I said, unable to suppress the snip in my voice.
Philip touched my arm.
‘Well, I know.’ Rosemary sucked in her bottom lip. ‘I mean, so do I.’
I clamped down on the insides of my cheek. I was trying. I was trying to try.
‘You really should come to Vermont, Summer,’ Rosemary said gently as we all sat down. ‘It’s so beautiful there right now, with the snow.’
I turned away, pushing my tongue to the roof of my mouth. All in all, it was a relief that Rosemary was who she was. Before I met her, I’d pictured her as this exuberant, carefree woman, the kind that wore short A-line skirts and was always the first to get up to dance at a wedding-like Kathy Lee Gifford on those Carnival Cruise commercials. Rosemary had come to Cobalt with my father to organize Stella’s things and make the funeral arrangements. She was a godsend-she cleaned Stella’s house top to bottom, sorted through a good deal of her things, braved places I didn’t want to go, like the basement or Stella’s closet or the kitchen pantry. Pete drove across the country to attend the funeral, too, and Rosemary cooked for everyone. She hung out in the living room doing a crossstitch while my father and Pete caught up in the kitchen and I walked up and down Stella’s gravelly street, talking to Philip on my cell phone.
‘She’s just so…ordinary,’ I had told him. At this point, Philip and I hadn’t actually seen each other yet, but we were talking to each other on the phone every night.
‘Does she seem nice?’ Philip asked.
‘I don’t really know,’ I said, passing the old speed limit sign. I could still make out Sand Niggers Go Home, although the paint had faded almost white. ‘She hasn’t really said anything.’ Not that I’d exactly said anything to Rosemary, either.
The third night in Cobalt, when my father and Pete were yet again drinking beer on the de-cluttered back porch, Rosemary started to brave a conversation with me. She did the talking. She told me she was working at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. And that she wanted to start a gardening business and write a gardening book. Rosemary had created a gorgeous garden on the Brooklyn apartment’s roof deck, and a few neighbors who had seen it from their roofs hired Rosemary to come over and make over their spaces, too. She told me she’d been working on the roof deck the day the terrorist attacks happened, and they’d put a big, jagged tear in her memory for life. She wanted to move my father out of the city-to Vermont, she was thinking-as fast as she could. She said this with a lift at the end of each sentence, like a question, although I doubted she was asking my permission.