Page 17 of Wildly Yours
“We bought a scanner, and Meredith is slowly scanning old files. We’re starting with anything that people may want to be able to use for research. Birth and death records, marriages, that sort of thing.”
“What are we looking for down here?”
“If I recall, the original park land was donated by a family who settled here in the eighteen hundreds. Let’s start there and work our way to the last land acquisition we discovered yesterday. Maybe there’s something that can help us.”
We work in silence, but the quiet feels loaded, like words hang in the air between us.
“Check this out!”
She lays a file out on the old wooden table that sits in the middle of the room. There are some documents in there about the family who donated the land to the city after the patriarch died. One of the documents is an old savings bond certificate.
“Think it’s any good?”
“I don’t even know what bank this is, so probably not. But we can at least try to find out. I’m going to run it upstairs to Meredith and see what she can find on the Internet.”
“Actually, do you mind if I do it?”
“She can handle it.”
“It’s not that. I want to run down any leads we find so I can learn more about the history of the park. It feels like the kind of research I would enjoy.”
“Knock yourself out, Hermit.”
My chest clenches. I know people call me a hermit, but they all think it’s because I’m not sociable.
I don’t care what most people think of me, but Serena? She’s different. And it pains me to hear her call me The Hermit. Because she doesn’t know that it’s mostly forher. I have to stay away from her for her own good.
She walks back to the cabinet and starts flipping through files again, so I look at the rest of the documents in the file.
“Did you know about the grave?”
“What grave?”
“Seems they buried the patriarch up there after he died. Said they wanted it tended to as a condition of turning the land over to the city. I bet this savings bond was supposed to help pay for that.”
Serena walks back over and looks at the papers, and then at me.
“You’re the Park Ranger. Where is the grave?”
We flip through the files and find a poorly drawn map of where they buried him. “I know this spot. Never noticed a grave marker. Seems like something that should be pretty clear, don’t you think?”
“Yes. Yes I do. What do you think happened?”
“Maybe the answer is in the rest of these files.”
She moans in response and turns back to the cabinet to search. I sneak a peek at her in my hoodie, and feel my chest warm.
Let it go, Hermit.
Chapter Nine: Serena
It seems we’ve found an equilibrium, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. I want to be angry at him for what he did all those years ago.
Is it stupid to want to hold onto anger?
My therapist would ask me what point I am trying to prove. What does it earn me?
He’s noisily rummaging through the files two cabinets away, and I sense that even though we seem to be on friendly terms, he’s stewing in something. The old me—the one who was close to Cody—would ask what is wrong. But he hasn’t earned it. Because it’s work getting a man to talk about something and we aren’t there anymore. We aren’t who we used to be.
