Page 8 of Freak
“Well, yes they are, and they’re lovely. They for me?”
“Yeah, yeah. I ...” While confusion danced across his brow, he watched Abigail take the flowers from him. “Sorry, they’re nothin’ special. Not from the florist or nothin’. I got these growing along my garage.”
“If you ask me, flowers picked from your own garden are a sight more special than anything you can buy in a shop. Thank you, Mel.”
She went to a shelf at the other side of her kitchen and pulled down a large Mason jar. As she filled it with water, Mel came over, ducking the cords of drying herbs she had strung across the room.
He leaned back against the drainboard, six inches from her shoulder. He did not smell like a man who worked on a construction site all day, which she would expect to be something like wood shavings, paint, machine oil, and sweat. He smelled like rosemary and cedarwood, a soap she’d given him, and the combination slipped up her nose and made her brain a wee bit muzzy.
“Everything smells amazing, Abs,” he said, and for a flash, she’d wondered if he’d heard her thought—but no, he meant her cooking. “I really appreciate you doin’ this.”
She wasn’t sure when he’d started, but somewhere in the past few weeks, he’d taken to calling her ‘Abs.’ She’d been ‘Abby’ briefly in school, when there were two Abigails in fifth grade and the teacher decided there couldn’t be, but otherwise no one had ever called her anything but her full name. Granny Kate had had a spate of endearments for her, but they were things like ‘honey girl’ and ‘sweetie pop,’ not a true renaming.
She wasn’t sure she’d noticed when he’d first done it; when she had noticed, it seemed somehow familiar, as if he’d been doing it awhile already. She wasn’t sure what she thought of being ‘Abs’—to anyone, or possibly specifically to Mel. But it seemed both too small a thing and too fraught a thing to mention.
“Well, I really appreciate all the help you been givin’ me ‘round here—and the supper company’s pretty nice, too.”
With the flowers—a delightful medley including lupines, daisies, Jacob’s Ladder, Star Tickseed, Blue-Eyed Mary, Snow-on-the-Mountain, Evening Primrose, Queen Anne’s Lace, Wild Bergamot, and Beeblossom—arranged in the jar, she opened a drawer in the hutch and withdrew a length of pink calico ribbon. After she tied it around the threaded top of the jar and made a pretty bow, she handed the arrangement to Mel.
“Do me a favor and set this in the middle of the table? And light the candles, too, if you don’t mind? Supper’ll be ready in just a tick.”
He took the Mason-jar vase from her with a grin. “Well, you took these silly weeds I brought you like a present and made ‘em into something real pretty.”
“Hey, hon.” She set her hand on his arm to pull his attention back to her as he began to turn toward her dining room. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Call your flowers weeds. In the first place, there’s no such thing as a weed. A plant growing where Nature wants it to grow is right where it’s supposed to be. And in the second place, that’s a gift you’ve given. Why would you devalue a gift from your own hand?”
He blinked at her silently for a few ticks. Then he grinned broadly. “Damn, Abs. Sometimes I wonder if you’re not a thousand years old.”
With a grin, she dropped a hand to her hip. “Well, if I were a different woman, I think that might hurt my feelings! I hope I don’t look a thousand!”
He blushed again and then laughed. “No, that’s not what I mean! You’re beautiful, and you don’t look a day over about thirty. But I don’t think I’ve ever known anybody as wise as you. It’s like you’ve always been here, learning the right ways of things.”
She’d only been teasing; she’d figured he meant wisdom, not elderliness. It was an excellent compliment, and she smiled at him. “Well, thank you, kind sir. Now git on and finish the table, ‘cuz once I mash the taters, we’ll be ready to eat.”
