Homewrecker

43 - 𝓭𝓪𝓲𝓼𝓲𝓮𝓼

I grasped the stem of a weed that had sprouted through the potting soil in one of the ceramic planters near the French doors at the back of the lake house on the patio, discarding it into a used Trader Joe's paper bag beside me after shaking the dirt from the roots over the orange petals of the gerbera daisies, my favorite flower.

The petals closest to the center were paler, a lighter shade of orange, and the further the petals spread away, the darker they became. I found a gardening store on my phone in Shelridge, not too many miles from the lake house, but even after three weeks of living here with the Solidays, I still didn't feel as if I could ask to drive one of their cars somewhere, even if they had offered to actually give me one of my own.

Instead, I went rummaging through the shed in the backyard, gingerly moving aside the old water wings and kayak paddles caked in mud from the back to look for gardening equipment, finally deciding to accept that Ethan gave up the side job as their gardener for me.

Eventually, after not having any luck looking in the shed or in the garage, I had to ask him during one of our shifts at Starbright if he knew where they kept any of their gardening supplies. In the garage, apparently, and when I argued that they definitely weren't in the garage, he waited outside for Andi and me to drive back home, the flashlight app on his phone shining down on his shoes as he told me to come on, he was going to show me where.

Which was, apparently, actually in the garage and Ethan spent more than a few minutes gloating over this fact, holding up each trowel and examining the labels on the fertilizer bags and asking out loud, what is this, Bronwyn, then, what do you use this for? I blamed it on the Solidays having an unusually large garage, and Ethan laughed the whole way back to his house.

Weeding was one of my least favorite things about gardening, in fact, I hated it and wouldn't have minded if that was one aspect of his old job that Ethan would've kept. But it was always something I went back to whenever I was frustrated, like whenever my mom slept the entire day when I had a lacrosse game she said she wouldn't miss or if I found an emptied canister of pills stashed somewhere in the cupboards.

Usually, whenever my garden looked the most immaculate, it was when things were falling apart with my mom. No pricker bushes behind the rocks I used to edge my gardens, it meant my mom was on something. No dandelions masquerading as one of my flowers meant she was apologizing for something I pretended didn't disappoint me.

I looked down at the dandelion in the planter with the gerbera daisies, a bright yellow amongst the orange that almost blended in, but not quite. Not totally unlike myself, I thought, as I yanked on the stem and it snapped unsatisfyingly under my gloved fingers. I scrunched my nose at it, as if it could somehow sense my disappointment over this and its remaining roots and reached for my trowel to dig them out.

It had been a week and a half since I found out that Andi had written letters for me, ones I never found in our mailbox, and I still wasn't sure what that meant. It seemed pretty clear, at least to Andi anyway, that this meant my mother had hidden them from me because she was jealous or maybe scared, something like that, but it didn't make as much sense to me as if it did her.

My mother obviously didn't like the Solidays, insisted before that she was the one reaching out to them and they were the ones unresponsive, and even though that didn't make as much sense anymore, it was harder to let it go completely. David admitted not to paying child support for me, and if my mother was actually ignoring their attempts to reach out, there were legal things he could've done. His name was on my birth certificate, as a politician he would've had access to so many different resources to help him if he wanted and, obviously, for some reason, he didn't.