Page 33 of Where You're Planted

“Stable,” Irma countered. “Different might be good.”

Marianne nodded in agreement, primly adjusting her skirt while she waited for her turn to climb up the ladder with the tape. “They’re hypoallergenic, too. Although, really, people should adopt instead of buying designer breeds.”

“Actually…” Tansy said. “Irma has a point. Not just about Ian. We’ve been trying to do everything the same as we used to, but maybe we can’t expect everything we did before towork in the gardens.” It burned that Jack’s words came so easily to her now, and that they felttrue. “Maybe we need to figure out how to workwiththe new environment instead of against it. We had issues in our building, too. It wasn’t perfect.”

“The air-conditioning was always too cold,” Marianne pointed out.

“Exactly. Yes,” Tansy agreed, although they couldn’t regulate the temperature now either. In fact, she already worried about how they’d handle the warm spring weather with just the one door, which would let in mosquitoes and do little to cool their cramped shed.

“Teen Art Club couldn’t use any supplies with strong fumes inside,” Kai said.

“The fluorescents gave me headaches,” Irma said. “And sometimes, we had to turn away people from popular programs because the meeting room was too small.”

They certainly were not at risk of having too many participants right now. But the courtyard gave them significantly more open space for story times, and the Movement and Meditation class worked better on the lawn.

Tansy had asked herself several times what Rashida, their old branch manager, would have done in her shoes, but maybe that had been the wrong question. “What if we figured out what we can do here that we couldn’t do there?” Tansy asked.

“Alcohol ink painting,” Kai said immediately.

“Gardens bingo,” Marianne added, climbing up the stepladder once more. “All the plant species are labeled. We could give people cards to mark off species as they found them, like a self-directed tour.”

Kai stabbed their spatula into their mud mixture with an air of victory. “Or a bookish scavenger hunt. We could makeourownsigns with popular characters and mix them in with the regular ones. Little Pete the Cats and Wings of Fire dragons peeking out from behind the ferns and shit.”

The hairs rose on Tansy’s arms, lifted by a zing of excitement, of genuinehope.

—

It was nearly five whenTansy washed the last of the joint compound out of the buckets and came back inside for a shower. The librarians had departed after making good on their promise to complete the entire house. She would still have to let the mud set overnight and add another layer tomorrow, but she wouldn’t have to lay any more tape, and she’d gotten pretty good with the mud spatula. She could prime and paint the walls soon. Maybe even next weekend.

“You need anything before I hop in the shower?” Tansy asked as she entered the bedroom, where Briar was…wearing a dress and checking her appearance in the flimsy mirror hanging on the closet door.

“Shower?” Briar parroted in alarm. “Mom, there’s no time.”

“What…is happening?” Tansy gestured at the sky-blue dress, which Briar had begged for and then refused to wear because Tansy had failed to cut out every last sliver of its tag.

“The ceremony is soon.”

It didn’t come to her until Briar stomped across the room and grabbed her by the hand, towing her back out the way she’d come.

The flyer on her windshield days ago. The rescuer recognition ceremony.

Tansy stopped short halfway across the living room. “Wait, honey. I wasn’t planning on— I’m not remotely dressed for—”

Briar tugged at her hand again. “I told you I want to go.”

“But why?” Tansy asked, legitimately baffled. The last thingshewanted to do was face the people who’d had to risk their own lives to come pull them from their homes—anyof them, not just Jack. Although she was at least pretty sure this would not be an event he’d bother to attend.

“What if we don’t go, and they don’t know how we feel?”

“Howdowe feel?”

Briar dropped Tansy’s hand and tugged at the back of her collar. That tag was going to aggravate her so much, she’d change her mind about this whole thing in two minutes. “We feel—” Briar huffed.

“You don’t have to wear the dress,” Tansy said gently.

“Wefeel—” Briar repeated, louder and more agitated.

Tansy waited.

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