Lapeer County, December
“Thanks for doing this,” Tyrese said. “I know it’s not the way most people want to spend New Year’s Eve.”
“We’re glad to help,” Nora said, patting his hand. “Stop acting like you pulled us away from some glittering party somewhere. This is Lapeer, not New York.”
“I know, I know. But most people wouldn’t want to work on spreadsheets and order forms any old day, let alone a holiday.” Tyrese turned to where I sat drowning in plant and seed catalogs. “And this isn’t the most romantic place to ring in the New Year.”
Nora gave me a knowing look and then went back to following lines of minuscule text with a magnifying glass. Tyrese turned back to his computer screen. I went back into the shell of private misery I’d been living in for the past ten days. Tomorrow I was supposed to call Marshall Boon to tell him whether or not I would accept his generous job offer.
The big clock on the nursery’s office wall kept cruelly ticking off the minutes I had left before I’d have to tell Nora and Tyrese of my decision. I was powerless to stop it. I’d spent much of my life in high gear, wishing clocks and people would hurry up. Now there was almost nothing I wouldn’t do to slow time down.
When I’d gotten Tyrese’s call a few hours before, I’d actually jumped at the chance to get out of the house and help him play catch-up. His father had been down with acute tonsillitis for a week, leaving Tyrese to cover all of their plowing customers on his own. He hadn’t had time to finish their orders for the coming season, and the end-of-year deadline was bearing down on him.
“Would you mind if I brought Nora?” I’d said.
He’d hesitated just a moment before saying, “Of course not. With three people we just might finish before midnight.”
“Oh, it will take that long? She usually goes to bed pretty early.”
“No problem. If she wants to get some shut-eye, we can just set up the couch in the break room for her. A couple years ago we had an employee sleeping on it for a week after her parents kicked her out of the house. It’s really comfortable.”
Nora and I arrived at Perkins Nursery at 6:30 p.m. with a pizza and got to work, matching Tyrese’s scribbled notes to products, reading item numbers out loud, and checking species off lists while he maneuvered through order forms from a dozen different vendors.
As 8:30 p.m. rolled around and Nora began making mistakes, she decided to call it a night. Tyrese retrieved some bedding from a cupboard and lost himself once more in catalogs as I spread blankets and fluffed pillows.
“This is better anyway,” Nora said as she took off her reading glasses and settled in under the covers. “No one wants a third wheel on a night like this.”
“A night like what?” I snickered. “We’re ordering fertilizer and seed packets, not slow dancing in front of a roaring fire.”
Nora shook her tired head slightly. “Real romance happens when you least expect it. That’s what makes it romantic. I fell in love with William on a couch very much like this one after I’d embarrassed myself at an awkward lunch, made thoughtless comments about his neighborhood, and tripped on the sidewalk and bloodied my knee. I did everything wrong.”
I smiled. “My mother would say everything happens in God’s time, I guess.”
“Maybe.” She shut her eyes. “But if God had asked me anything about it, I would have told him he was mistaken.”
I frowned. “Why?”
“William was the right man, all right. But it was the wrong time, that’s all. Good night, Elizabeth.”
“Good night.”
I shut off the light, closed the door, and leaned heavily on the other side of it. Was she right? Did God get things wrong? Did his clock and our clocks just not match up, like how the clock in my car was four minutes faster than the one in the kitchen? Whose clock was Marshall Boon’s job offer running on?
Tyrese and I pounded out the remaining orders over the next few hours until there was only one left. I looked at the clock. 11:29 p.m.
“We’re going to make it,” I said.
“Yep. I just gotta run through to the back greenhouse a minute and double-check how many seed geraniums I already have planned.”
“I’ll come with you. I need to get out of this chair.”
“Grab your coat.”
We walked through the front showroom, the gardening equipment room, and the front greenhouse, flicking on each light as we went. The back greenhouse was where seasonal workers prepped seed trays and planters, where thousands of tiny brown seeds swelled and split and became tiny green plants that would be offered to customers starting in April, even though the last freeze date for the region was in late May.
Clipboard in hand, Tyrese counted off the trays of seed geraniums, his finger punching the air in front of him, the mumbled numbers adding up under his breath. My boots scuffed along the soil-strewn floor, leaving trails of bare concrete behind me like the gravel two-track drive that had first led me to Nora’s doorstep back in August. The chill air smelled of promise, of gardens that would soon be planted and watered and tended.
I thought of my own little plot of land, the garden I had worked so hard to renew. Of Nora’s beautiful quilt. Of Mary’s silent grave. Mute testimonies of our family’s story, a story I had known nothing about until just a few months ago. A story I was in the middle of right now.
If everything really happened for a reason, then I must have lost my job at the Free Press so that I would be free to come to Nora’s—to deliver Mr. Rich’s photos, to assess Nora’s independence for Barb, to help her through the ice storm. But that was all for other people. Was the Beat God’s way of telling me my work here was done? Was any part of his so-called plan for me?
I watched Tyrese scratch notes onto his clipboard as breath streamed from his lips in a white cloud.
“Don’t stay in Lapeer for me or even for Nora if what you really want to do is be a journalist.”
His heavy shearling-lined leather coat was marred by a year’s worth of dirt from transferring living things from one place to another.
“You’ll never be happy that way.”
All the things he worked to grow in this cavernous space reached their full height and beauty in gardens he would never see.
“You’ve got to do what’s right for you.”
I felt something inside of me shift and click, like the right key in the right lock.
“Hey,” I said when the clipboard dropped to his side, “I think I’ve made up my mind about that job.”
He turned guarded eyes on me from across two long tables filled with seed trays. “Yeah? And what did you decide?”