Page 111 of Where You're Planted

Then again,nothingfelt very good as their last minutes ticked down toward the hardest part. The grant committee and the rest of audience were just on the other side of the door, in a medium-size auditorium with a stage and lights and a microphone, and he was going to have to go in there and speak to them, whether Ian finished this slide deck or not.

“It has to work,” he said, jabbing a finger at Ian’s laptop. “Got a better chance if you get that finished, though.”

Ian got back to it, and Jack closed his eyes and drew in steadying breaths through his nose. He tried to remember how Tansy had held his wrists that day at the festival and jammed his thumb into a spot he hoped was close enough to relieve the churning in his stomach.

Then the door opened, a woman stuck in her head to say they were ready, and Ian yanked the flash drive from the computer.

The lights were bright and hot, and instantly, a wave of nausea made Jack turn his back to the crowd. He was going to be sick. Fuck, he was going to mess up this entire thing.

Ian gave him a thumbs-up from the side of the stage and then their first slide was projected before him onto the backdrop screen. He remembered why he was doing this. He swallowed down the thick coating in his throat, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and faced the audience. “Hello,” he croaked. “I’m Jack. I’m the director of Lerner Botanic Gardens.”

He blew out a shaky breath, and the microphone caught it, sending a roaring whoosh over the speakers and making everyone, including Jack, wince.

“Fuck,” he muttered. Then, “Shit. Sorry.”

Well, this was going fucking great.

The light from the projector screen flashed from behind him, and Jack twisted back to see that Ian had prompted him to the next slide. There was a collage of photos from the days immediately following the hurricane, the gardens completely submerged in a lake of muddy water, plants ripped from their beds, and fallen trees.

Someone cleared their throat from the front row, where the grant committee was seated. The auditorium wasn’t full, which should have been a relief, but all he could focus on was the sound of people shifting impatiently in their seats and his own long, panic-frozen silence.

“Um…” he began, blinking again at the screen.

A door at the top of the stadium seats banged open, making everyone turn in surprise. In spilled Tansy, Briar, Kai, Marianne, and Irma in a fit of giggling and shushing. They stopped abruptly, bumping into each other at the top of the stairs.

“Sorry!” Tansy whisper-shouted. “Can we— Are we allowed to watch?”

A woman with a sour face stood, motioned impatiently for them to sit, and then turned back to Jack. “Sorry, Mr. Reid. Please continue.”

But he was stuck on Tansy’s form as she took a seat in the very back row and shushed her friends again. When she turned to look at him, his knees nearly buckled. What did this mean? What was she doing here? He wanted to ask her rightinto the microphone, wanted to tell her he was so fucking happy to see her.

The projector screen changed again, another nudge from Ian, and Jack cleared his throat. “As you can see in these photos, we sustained significant damage at the gardens during the hurricane. In my proposal, I had a clear plan for this grant money. We lost our expansion budget to essential flood-mitigation projects on our property, so we hoped to recoup those funds to get phase one of the expansion back on track. That phase includes a state-of-the-art greenhouse and the conversion of an existing barn on the property to a storage facility and new administration offices.”

Some heads nodded in the front row.

“Since we submitted that proposal, though,” Jack said, looking past them, straight back to Tansy, “our needs have changed.”

35

Tansy

Jack was looking directly at Tansy as the committee members in the front made sounds of surprise and disapproval. She leaned forward in her seat, confused, nervous for him, but also strangely breathless, tingly. She felt like she was made of neon, buzzing and flickering with everything she couldn’t tell him yet.

“These past few months,” he said, his eyes still on her, “we’ve had the pleasure of hosting the Grant Gellman branch library in our park after their building flooded. You should already be familiar with their work because they also applied for this grant. What you may not know, though, is how the library’s presence has directly impacted the gardens. The librarians were an essential partner at our recent Pollinator Festival, and they’ve been running popular educational and enrichment programs in our space despite the challenges ofthe environment—wind, rain, disruptive lawn maintenance, ill-placed koi ponds…”

A ripple of soft laughter went through the small crowd. Tansy’s own laugh tumbled out, loosening something, possibly structural, inside her.

“But most importantly, they’ve forced us—me—to reimagine our own possibilities. They’ve reminded us of aspects of our mission that we’ve been neglecting—community engagement and educational outreach.”

He finally addressed the committee before him, his voice confident and commanding. “The gardens have always been a place of respite from Houston’s concrete, smog, and noise. We’ve never charged admission because we believe this space should be for everyone, just like public libraries. But our park can be more than anescapefrom city and suburban life. We should be anintegral partof our community. And we should support that community in the ways that the library already does, with regular programming that connects people with both the natural environment and with each other. We should be teaching practical and sustainable gardening, water catchment, and native landscaping. We should be feeding people with the food we growandteaching families how to grow it themselves. And in fact, these are steps we’ve begun to take, first prompted by the library’s example and now in collaboration with them.”

The projector clicked through pictures from the Pollinator Festival, the Garden Club from last Saturday, and various library programs—story times, Movement and Meditation on the lawn, and Teen Art Club.

“You might be wondering why I’m talking so much about the library. See, the thing is, in a short time, they’ve becomepart of our gardens family. In fact, they’ve become so enmeshed in our space, it’s hard to tell what’s them and what’s us at this point.”

Jack glanced at Tansy again and held her gaze.

Something swelled in her chest, pushing at her ribs, trying to expand as if to reach across the room to him. She heard what he wasn’t explicitly saying. His use of the wordfamilybrought her right back to his plea at the hospital and in the greenhouse. She was the library, and he was the gardens, andtheywere enmeshed now, too.

---