She stomped out into the back garden leaving Patience staring at the black-and-white checked floor. A hot tear dropped at her feet. It smelled of chamomile, as did her skin and clothes, but there was nothing soothing in it for Patience. Sorrel lost her temper with her sisters so infrequently that Patience wasn’t sure if she was (damn it) crying because of Sorrel’s angry words or over the very odd reaction she’d had to Henry Carlyle. Simmering under her anger with Dr. Carlyle was a wholly unexpected tug. If Henry had been captured in that moment, Patience had been caught, too. She would never tell her sisters but Patience had already noticed Henry, twice. One evening as she walked home from Baker’s Way Bakers Patience looked up to see him standing at his window. He hadn’t seen her in the darkness, but she was able to pick out the slump of his shoulders, his fingertips pressed against the glass. She’d wondered what his story was. Patience had sidled closer to the building across the street so she could look at him for another minute. When she saw him coming out of the post office a week later, she ducked her head and fiddled with her phone.
Patience swiped at her cheeks and pulled her heavy hair back up into a ponytail. “Really,” she muttered, “get a grip,” and walked down the hall to the kitchen.
The air around her had taken on a sharp, astringent smell, the soft chamomile burned away in a matter of moments. Sorrel smelled it as she gathered laundry from the line; it was so strong even the sheets were imbued. She knew that sometimes Patience’s rich interior life, a thing of bright colors, strong scents, and a good deal of swearing, burst forth. The smells that followed her were the most noticeable, and even the town had learned to interpret at least some of the scents that wrapped around the youngest sister. Her graceful surface was often at odds with the force of her emotions. When that happened, everything and everyone around her knew it. Her sisters had gotten used to it: her internal struggles externalized. In fact, they could read Patience as easily as Patience read the people she helped. The three sisters were as tightly entwined as the bittersweet they battled each fall, and as stubborn. If the town ever wondered why they didn’t break away—and it did—no one dared to ask them.
All the Sparrow sisters were naturally beautiful, each in very different ways—except for the twins, of course, who were eerily identical. So even the three who were left in the house had the certain confidence that came with knowing you needn’t worry about your looks. They were never self-conscious around the men in town, which made Patience’s reaction to Dr. Carlyle all the odder. In fact, as the years passed and neither Sorrel nor Nettie married, everyone stopped bothering about them. A natural New England reserve meant people didn’t give in to curiosity often, and really, it was easier to assign them the status of the slightly sad single Sisters than to keep wondering. The girls seemed unconcerned and went about their days, each as lovely in their own way as the flowers they tended. Sorrel’s black hair became streaked with premature white, which gave her an exotic air, although the elegance was somewhat ruined by the muddy jeans and shorts she practically lived in. Nettie, on the other hand, had a head of baby-fine blond hair that she wore short, thinking, wrongly, that it would look less childlike. Nettie wouldn’t dream of being caught in dirty jeans and was always crisply turned out in khaki capris or a skirt and a white shirt. She considered her legs to be her finest feature. She was not wrong.
Patience was the sole Sparrow redhead, although her hair had deepened from its childhood ginger and was now closer to the color of a chestnut. It was as heavy and glossy as a horse’s mane, and she paid absolutely no attention to it or to much else about her appearance, nor did she have to. In the summer her wide-legged linen trousers and cut-off shorts were speckled with dirt and greenery, her camisoles tatty and damp. The broad-brimmed hat she wore to pick was most often dangling from a cord down her back. As a result, the freckles that feathered across her shoulders and chest were the color of caramel and resistant to her own buttermilk lotion (Nettie smoothed it on Patience whenever she could make her stand still). When it was terribly hot Patience wore the sundresses she’d found packed away in the attic. She knew they were her mother’s, and she liked to imagine how happy Honor had been in them.
On the surprisingly warm June day on which Dr. Carlyle threw the Sparrow Sisters into a swivet, Patience was wearing a pair of Sorrel’s too-loose shorts rolled down at the waist until her hip bones showed below her tee shirt. She hadn’t expected a visitor, and certainly not a stranger, so it wasn’t until she went back into the kitchen and caught sight of herself in the French doors to the dining room that Patience realized how undressed she really was. She stared for a minute and then she laughed. Ha! she thought, No wonder he was so unbalanced.
Patience wasn’t vain, but she knew what the sight of her bare midriff could do to a man. It made her laugh again as she pulled the chamomile flowers from their stems. But when she thought about how silly her sisters were, how completely “girly” their behavior had been in front of the doctor, her smile faded. And when she recalled how Henry Carlyle’s jaw had hardened as he looked at her, Patience dropped the chamomile into the sink and slapped the cold porcelain, her tears completely dried, as teed off at him as Sorrel had been at her.
OUTSIDE IVY HOUSE, the doctor stood for a full minute before he turned to walk back to his practice. The scent of herbs and grass and damp soil trailed in the air behind him. He turned in a circle trying to focus on the scent, and for the second time that day he sniffed like a rabbit and tried to pinpoint what it was.
When Henry got back to his shingled house on Baker’s Way, he wavered in front of the door to the apartment he lived in over the “shop.” It was after six, and there was no real reason to go back into the office, but he did so anyway. It was too quiet in his apartment, which struck him as funny, really. The one thing he’d craved in the hospital was quiet. The one thing he didn’t have when he was deployed was solitude. Now that he had both, it made him restless. So he unlocked the door and turned on the lights in the office. There were always notes to dictate, charts to catch up on; paperwork was not Henry’s strong suit, and he usually left anything to do with organization to the last minute, or to Sally, who he’d inherited from Dr. Higgins. He found a pile of patient files with a yellow sticky on his desk and growled as he toed his chair out.
“Dr. Carlyle, please try to keep up,” Sally had written in purple ink. He huffed and deliberately moved them aside so he could put his bag on the desk. Henry opened the old satchel, meaning to restock it with saline, Tylenol, a suture kit. The scent of chamomile slipped out, or at least that’s what Henry thought. He snapped the bag shut and crossed to lie down on the exam table. The paper rattled under him as it did under his patients. Not for the first time he wondered what he thought he was doing in this town of fishermen and spinsters, shopkeepers and faith healers.