Page 107 of Where You're Planted

“Yeah? You never ran a library out of a botanical garden either, but look at everything you made here.”

“Because I had no choice. And it was a failure in the end anyway!”

“It wasn’t a failure, Tansy. It wasn’t a fucking failure. What you did here means something. And whatwemade in all this, you and me, is just as rare and and significant as a goddamn thousand-year flood. It’s once in a lifetime—inmorethan a lifetime. That’s entirely clear to me, even if it isn’t to you. Just—what exactly is your hang-up? What’s the excuse you’re holding on to here? Because if it’s not that you don’t want me, and it’s not Briar, and it’s not the grant or a drive across Houston, then what is it?”

“We started this whole thing with you saving me!” she shouted.

He huffed an incredulous breath. “That’s it? I saved youmonthsago, so you can’t be with me?”

“I know it doesn’t make sense to you.”

“You’re right, it doesn’t.”

She continued as though he hadn’t interrupted. “But it means something to me, how we started. I mean,God, you just compared us to a thousand-year flood, Jack. That flooddestroyedmy life.”

“No. You know what? I think it was actually regenerative. Like a forest fire. It made room for something new.”

“Can we please stop talking in metaphors?”

“Fine. Say it plainly, Tansy. Make it make sense.”

“I just—” She shook her head. “I swore I wouldn’t need—”

“But you did! You needed help. I had a boat. Hell, anyone else might see that as fate, not some impossible obstacle.”

“But it establishes a dynamic.”

“That I’ll always care for you? That I’ll always show up? Fuck it. I will. Because that’s what you do when you love someone. You come when they need you.Youdo it for the people you love all the time. You just did it for me at the hospital. But I don’t get to reciprocate? I don’t get to love you when you’re down, only when you don’t need anything?”

“I don’twantto need you, Jack. And I’m not going to be in a position to reciprocate your help anytime soon.That’swhat’s impossible here.”

“I thought I could protect myself, too,” Jack said quietly. “By putting myself in a box from the start, making sure people knew I wasn’t a long-term bet, making sure I could never want more again. I wastedyearsbelieving my own lie. Years I’ll never get back. And if that’s how it had to happen for me to get here with you, then fine, but I didn’t have to be so goddamned afraid.”

“You’re saying I’m lying to myself?”

“I’m saying…” He sighed, rubbing his hands down his face. “I’m saying the stories that protect us the most alwaysfeeltrue, but that doesn’t mean they are.”

Suddenly, he felt exhausted going around and around with her on this. It was hopeless. He was terrible with words, could never make heads or tails of things as the conversation was unfolding, and Tansy was particularly agile, just like the barn swallows that swooped and veered in a blink. No matter what he said, she’d pivot. She would have crawled out of the back woods the day she’d hurt her ankle, and she’d do the same to get out of this conversation with her beliefs intact.

He knew this deep in his bones because he knew how fiercely he’d believed his own bullshit all these years. No one could have convinced him to give it up. Not until a little seed had lodged into one of his cracks and rooted down, against all odds, in the inhospitable environment of his heart. That seed had produced a delicate blossom from the most unendurable of circumstances. His own Katrina rose.

“It’s getting late,” he said. “We should get to the garden.”

She hesitated, surprised that he was giving up. Disappointed by that, maybe. But she nodded, smoothed her skirt, and led the way to the door.

33

Tansy

When Tansy entered Irma’s house Friday evening with Briar in tow, she was prepared for tears, for questions, and even for her friends to scrutinize her leadership during the last few months, wondering if there was something else she should have done, if she should have kept them better apprised of the situation before it was too late.

What she did not expect was to find her friends gathered around Irma’s kitchen table in party hats, arguing over who had a steady enough hand to pipe a message onto a large sheet cake. When they entered the kitchen, Marianne shouted, “Oh no! Surprise!” and then, for some reason, dove under the table.

Startled by Marianne, Irma knocked the party hat she was wearing down over her own eyes.

Kai broke into a burst of laughter at the two of them, slapping their palms on the table. Only, one hand hit a cakeserving knife, which caught the edge of a stack of paper plates and catapulted it to the floor with a soft thud. When Marianne went to retrieve them, the two bumped heads, which made Kai giggle even harder.

Irma, now half choking herself with the elastic string of her hat as she corrected it too far back on top of her head, asked, “How is it a surprise party if she’s the one who planned it?”

---