Mason’s gloved hands lifted into the air in a gesture of surrender, and he fell quiet, making me instantly feel guilty. The truth was, he was waiting for me to fall apart just like Birdie was. He didn’t know that the waiting was over. I just hadn’t figured out how to tell him yet.
We worked in silence, keeping pace with each other as we moved down the row, and when I reached the end of the larkspur, I slipped the clippers into my belt and sank down, taking hold of the full buckets at my feet. When I rounded the corner of dahlias, Mason was crouched low, cutting away the yellowed stalks from where a section of drip line had busted and flooded the roots.
The rim of his hat was low over his eyes, his denim shirt already wet and darkened down the center of his back. When he finally looked up at me, his blue eyes held the question he wasn’t going to ask again. He wanted to know if I was okay. Really okay.
“Want me to take those?” He stood, wiping his brow with the back of his arm, but his gaze was on the buckets I was holding.
“No, I got it,” I said, shifting one of them into the crook of my elbow so I could take the one he’d filled with the ranunculus.
Before he could think better of biting his tongue, I ducked past him, heading for the peak of the barn’s rusted rooftop, visible in the distance.
“You look at that schedule tomorrow before you come out here hacking away,” he called out.
A smile broke on my face, and I waved a hand in the air, not looking back.
It was one of the slow days, and I was grateful for that. The barn doors were open to the sunlight, and inside, a few of the farmhands were tying up the blue hydrangeas we hadn’t used up in the shop last week. There they would hang until winter, when there was frost on the fields and the only things to sell were evergreen wreaths and dried flowers.
The old green Bronco that had once belonged to my mother was parked between the barn and a wall of sunflowers that were days from blooming. The engine still ran, and it was more farm truck than anything these days. I set down the buckets on the gravel drive and opened the back, not even flinching at the painful screech of rusted hinges. Withered blooms that had broken off in previous shop runs littered the bed, along with a burlap cloth and the old milk crate bolted into the metal that served as the only real storage space.
I loaded the buckets, taking care not to let the flower tops scrape along the roof, and then unzipped my coveralls, letting them fall to the ground. I stepped out of my boots, reaching for the sandals that were waiting in the milk crate.
“Morning, June.” A few of the field workers passed with sympathetic smiles, the greeting too sweet to pass for normal. It would be like that for a while, I guessed.
I gave them a nod, shaking out the coveralls before I dropped them into the crate. The farmhands were disappearing into the rows of bachelor’s buttons and soapwort up ahead when I shifted the truck into gear and backed up onto the road.
The road curved into the trees, the summer vines already creeping onto the cracked pavement. It was like that this time of year, as if the woods were nibbling at the edges of town, just waiting for a chance to swallow it whole.
There was a quiet in the mountains, even when the cicadas and the crickets were singing and the wind was howling. It was the sight of those rolling blue peaks in the distance that made me feel like maybe the earth wasn’t really spinning.
None of the farms that were still running grew tobacco anymore. The river had kept the land fertile, carving through the fields before it began its descent into the lowlands, and now, the families in Jasper mostly raised hogs or grew sweet potatoes. There were even a number of Christmas tree farms now.
The radio cut in and out with bits and pieces of Billie Holiday’s “I’ll Be Seeing You,” and I breathed through the tight feeling in my chest, eyeing the cracked display. I reached for the knob, turning it just to be sure. But it didn’t matter how many channels the dial scrolled past, the song was the same. The radio had been busted for years, but I could hear the static-muffled notes and butter-smooth voice buzzing in the speakers.
Sometimes, if I focused, I could push the episodes from my mind like tightening the tap on a faucet just a little bit more to stop the drip. But that was becoming less and less easy to do. The man I’d seen on the porch last night had been proof of that.
I steered the truck down the winding roads and let one hand fall out the window, splaying my fingers so that the wind could slip through them like warm water. The song faded from my mind as the cool morning burned out of the air and the sun rose higher.
When town appeared in the distance, I saw the doors of the flower shop were already propped open. The engine groaned as the gear shifted down, and I came to a stop at the only traffic light in Jasper, which hung from a tenuous wire over the main intersection in town. A right turn would take me over the bridge that crossed the river, now sparkling with sunlight. I could see the steeple of the church, and I resisted the urge to search the cemetery’s green hill for the freshly dug grave we’d stood by the night before.
To the left of the stoplight stood the county courthouse. The red brick was the same that had been used for all the buildings, but its white dome top and marble floors were too grand for Jasper, built at a time when the farms in these hills were producing the east’s best tobacco. No one had known this town wouldn’t ever become anything more than a few farmers and their local gossip, bypassed by an interstate that would run all the way from California to the coast of North Carolina.
The traffic light clicked off and then on again as the bulb lit green, and I let my foot off the brake, pulling into the parking spot in front of the shop. The old metal sign that hung above the door read ADELINE RIVER FLOWER FARM.
Birdie was at work behind the counter, a pen clenched between her teeth as she read the order taped to the wall. Ida’s daughter, Melody, spotted me from the front counter before I even had the gear in place. She’d been our summer hire for the last two years when she came home from college and we needed extra hands for wedding season. We might be in the middle of nowhere, but the brides that came in droves to be married with a mountain view in Asheville wanted Adeline River flowers in their bouquets and boutonnieres.
Melody came outside, her linen apron tied with a perfect bow at her waist. She was eleven years younger than me, and hers was a face that had always reminded me just how much I’d never really fit. Not in this town, my life, or even in my own skin. She was always smiling. Always polite in that way that southern people were taught to be. Like nothing dark had ever touched her.
She made her way around the truck, giving the back a few jerks until it opened. “Morning, June.” Her singsong voice was a pitch even higher than her mother’s.
“Morning.”
“The service was so beautiful last night. Me and Mom both thought so.”