My Very Best Friend (23 page)

My mother had packed up a few of them, the ones my father had given her, and kept them all these years. She had put them on the mantel of our home, and we saw them every day, but there were many she left.

“It’s not a garden now, luv,” Toran said, “but we could make it one.”

“We?” I turned to him and pushed my glasses up my nose. The tape had come loose on the left side and was itching my temple.

“Yes, we. You and I and a few men who work for me. I have a small tractor and rototiller, a roller, and other manly man tools.” He winked at me. “We can do this. We can get it ready for you to work your gardening magic.”

“Toran, you’re busy. You have your farm. The blueberries are ripe. . . .”

“Not busy at all.”

“It’s a project.”

“I like projects.”

“I’ll do it. Give me the names of the men and I’ll hire them.”

“I’ll send them over. I’ll pay them. I’ll come, too. This weekend.”

“No, I can’t take advantage of your time like that—”

“Charlotte.” He cupped my face, and I sucked in a breath. “Once again, luv, you are not taking advantage. I want to do this. Your mother’s garden gave me a sense of peace, of safety.”

“It did?”

“Yes. When I was in your home, your father and mum around, or out in the garden, I knew my father wasn’t going to be there preaching, yelling, going off on one hellfire and damnation lecture or another, my mother cowering. He was afraid of your father, and your mother. Next to them, he knew he fell short.

“Your home was safe, happy. I liked helping your mum in the garden. I listened to her, and Bridget did, too. That’s why, when Bridget is home, our garden blooms. It changes under her hands. It’s beautiful. She remembers your mother, she remembers us, all together. We can’t let it go.” He put his hands on his hips, surveying the garden damage. “I see the love of your mother’s garden as a link between your family members, even between Bridget and me, don’t you?”

“I do.” I nodded. How could a man be so tough and hard on the outside and be so intuitive and sensitive on the inside? “A link between my mother, my father, his parents and grandparents who lived here before us who also liked to garden. We have trees planted by my great-grandparents here.”

“Let me help you, Charlotte. I want to make you happy, as we were before you moved.”

“I am happy here.” I paused. I fiddled with my button, high on my blouse. I was happy. Happy in Scotland, happy with Toran.

There was a problem, though. I decided to speak freely. “If I start to love being here, then what do I do? I need to go home and write. I have a house on an island. I have four cats. They’ll need new sweaters soon.” I kept fiddling with the button. Maybe I would permanently unbutton the button, and not only when I was playing semidrunken poker at a bar. “That sounded breathtakingly bizarre. It’s not like my cats are pining to make a fashion statement. They probably don’t even like the damn sweaters.”

“If you love it here, I think it’s the Scot in you recognizing that you’re home. You can write here, right? We have pens and paper. I’ll buy you new journals. We’re on an island. We have an ocean, too. You can bring the cats over. They’ll need their sweaters more in Scotland than they do in America. Chilly cold here in the winter.”

“Move here, permanently?”

Those blue eyes were so bright. He smiled. “Someone has to take care of your mother’s garden, don’t they?”

I patted my hair down, made sure the clip on top of my head was on straight.

“Someone has to take care of your mother’s garden.”

“It is a wreck. The vines are out of control, I’m surprised they haven’t taken over the eastern half of Scotland yet.” I teared up. “I can see them both here, hear my father’s legends and stories, singing Scottish drinking songs with him, playing ‘Scotland the Brave’ on his bagpipes, my mother trimming her roses, humming Beatles songs and teaching me how to be a feminist. . . .”

“Me too, honey.”

He called me
honey
. I felt myself become warm . . . flushed.

I pulled on the top button of my shirt one more time. I think I could undo it.

Toran gave me a hug. In my mother’s overgrown garden, with my father’s bagpipes playing in my head, we hugged.

Three days later a pile of journals ended up on my desk in my bedroom. The covers told me all I needed to know.

Monet’s painting of his garden with the arched bridge in it. A man playing bagpipes. Irises in a vase. Swans, had to be from the swans I made out of the cloth napkins. A sailboat on an ocean. A desk with a quill and feather in the corner. Cats.

What the journals told me? Toran knew me. He got me. He was trying to help.

I almost disgraced myself by giggling.

9

When my mother was backpacking through Europe with her friends Jody and Paula, she met my father, unsurprisingly, at Molly Cockles Scottish Dancing Pub. She told me he was “huge, with a heavy Scottish accent, red hair and beard, and so loveable I lost my head.”

She didn’t even return to America. Nine months after they were married in our garden, I was born.

My father told me that my mother was “his angel. The winds of Scotland brought her to me.” Then he cleared his throat. “On a serious note, your mum took to farming like a unicorn to magic. I think she may know more than me. Plus, she understands the business of selling our crops. She knows how to work with the stores, the middlemen. She is one tough woman, and I am telling you, Charlotte”—he leaned in close and tapped his head—“she’s got brains, and thank the ever-loving God you’ve got hers.”

My mother talked to me as an adult starting when I was about five. I remember because the day after my fifth birthday she said to me, “You are old enough to be a feminist. So let’s talk about what it means to be one. A feminist is . . .” and she told me what it was.

I remember she had me sign a piece of paper that said, “I am a feminist. When you are a feminist it means that you believe in equal rights and opportunities for women. When those rights and opportunities aren’t granted, it is your obligation to fight for them, for you and for your fellow women.” I signed it in purple crayon. She signed in pink. My father signed in green.

She would discuss with me social issues on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly women’s issues. It was the sixties, and the war was raging in Vietnam. Her brother had been shipped over to fight, and her father was there, I later learned, working for the CIA.

My mother raged against that war, especially when her brother came home in a body bag. I had loved Uncle Tony.

She talked about women’s jobs, how women were being discriminated against in education and in the workplace, not getting the promotions and salaries they deserved. She was a raving liberal who could cook, as my father said, “Heaven in a dish. She is heaven, your mother.”

I remembered her baking an apple pie for my dad one day, he loved her apple pies, while discussing how women must be independent in their thinking, their careers, and their marriages.

My father had gone to university before returning home to work the land. My mother had a degree in English.

They were both temperamental, intellectual, and passionate. I remember a number of fire-breathing fights. My poor father would cry when they got in a fight. He tried to hide it, but I saw his eyes and he had to leave the house and walk away, or play his bagpipes in a particularly mournful and pathetic way until my mother went outside and gave him a hug.

They would go upstairs and sort things out. Things were cooking in the bedroom. I know this now because I used to hear the bed springs squeaking, slow at first, then faster and harder.

Often.

I told my mother one time—I must have been about six, because I remember I was holding my favorite stuffed alligator, Señor Spook—that her bed sounded like it was going to break.

She said, “Why do you say that, darling?” I made the sounds of the springs creaking, faster and faster. “Are you and Daddy bouncing on the bed? You told me I shouldn’t do that because it will break the springs.”

They had a new bed in that bedroom the next day.

My mother still loves my father. She has never stopped loving him and has never seriously dated anyone else, like McKenzie Rae has never stopped loving her first love, as I have never stopped loving Toran. Scottish men can get deep into your soul and they don’t leave. You live with them, right close to your heart.

My father told Bridget and me a Scottish legend once. He made it up on the spot as he was staring at my mother, who was making his favorite blueberry muffins at the time. He pulled us onto his lap, his red beard tickling my face.

It was about a poor Scottish lad who was in love with the princess in the castle. He played the bagpipes outside her window. The princess had created a garden, filled with a wandering purple clematis over a white picket fence, a statue of a little girl holding an umbrella, a three-foot-tall purple star, a rose garden, and silver watering cans nailed to a post.

She painted birdhouses—one in a Japanese style, another shaped like a cottage, then a cat.

It was colorful and serene, an oasis, and when the princess smiled across the roses at him, his heart wept with love. When the princess’s father had a competition for her hand, the Scottish lad worked night and day perfecting all of his skills—marksmanship, bow and arrow, running, spear tossing.

He won, despite a conniving king from a distant land, a greedy merchant, and a “dandy” trying to stop him every way they could. The princess was stubborn and willful, but she agreed to marry him as long as she could still be independent and could attend university. (My father was a feminist and believed in education.) The lad readily agreed, and his life was a “golden song” from then on out.

It was his love story to my mother. She turned and hugged him, bent and gave him a smooching kiss right in front of us. His eyes filled with tears. I giggled and patted his shoulders. “It’s okay to cry, Daddy.”

Bridget handed him a napkin.

But that’s how my mother felt about my father.

That’s how he felt about her.

After we left, my mother never gardened again.

Toran came over with three men on Saturday, a pile of tools, wheel barrels, and machines that made loud grinding noises, and we went to work in my mother’s garden. Another bin arrived for all the yard debris. I liked the men, all employees of his farm. It was amazing what five people and a bunch of machines that growled could finish in one day.

At the end, Toran and I, covered in dirt and dust, stood back.

“We have a start, luv,” he said.

The weeds had been rototilled and dumped. The bushes had been brought under control and looked like bushes instead of ten-foot-tall, green monsters. The vines had been cut back. The earth had been churned, ready for new plantings; the bricks from the pathways were piled up, to be relaid later. The tipping trellises and arcs had been taken down so we could reuse the wood in new trellises and arcs. The arc under The Purple Lush was repaired and cemented. We had saved the purple star, the post with the silver watering cans, and other birdhouses we’d found.

“We’ll stick to the spirit of your mother’s design when we replant, if you’d like, Charlotte.”

“I would love that.” It was touching that Toran would think of that. “I would love to put my mother’s garden back together, as she had it. It was art.”

“Yes, it was. Peaceful. Safe. Flowers everywhere.”

I turned to him, my hair in a ponytail, my glasses slipping off my nose because I was sweating. “Thank you, Toran. I can’t believe you did all this for me.”

“Anytime, luv. Anytime. I will want payment, though.”

I grinned. Oh boy! Payment! I envisioned a strip tease if I had two shots of whiskey. Maybe a dance? I could pull off my whale sweater slowly, drop my corduroy skirt an inch at a time, kick off my sturdy brown shoes....

“A Scottish Whisky Gateau cake?”

I tried to hide my disappointment. At least he had the whiskey part right. “I’ll make it.”

“Thank you.” So heartfelt. “You made that for me when we were fifteen, do you remember?”

“I do.” We were dating by then. He had kissed me over the mixer.

After Toran left for a shower, I stood in my mother’s garden, put my arms out, and spun, one time, not twice, I don’t like dizziness. Toran had always been my hero. Today he was my garden hero. He’d helped me because he knew it meant something to me.

That was so romantic—at least to me, not to him probably—that I fought not to giggle.

I would not giggle. I do not giggle. I am Charlotte Mackintosh, feminist, lover of biology and physics and all things science, and I do not giggle. It’s ridiculous and immature.

I coughed.

I would not giggle.

So I laughed, then I teared up, then I smiled and felt . . . peace.

Yes, peace, in my mother’s garden.

I made a Scottish Whisky Gateau cake with sponge fingers for Toran. The look on his face was all worth it.

“Like it?” I asked him.

“It’s the best thing I’ve eaten since you made it for me twenty years ago.”

I am a feminist. I am in the kitchen because that’s where I want to be. I love to cook. And I love seeing Toran loving what I make.

Now, that was a treat.

I went back to my cottage the next day, giddy. A clean garden palette. I remembered where my mother had everything, her paths, the picnic table, the rose garden, the herb garden, cutting beds, wild flower borders, the fountain with the girl with the umbrella, the post with the silver watering cans, the birdhouses, the garden rooms. I started planning.

At one point it rained, briefly, then the sun came out, and a rainbow stretched across the sky. I stopped. I had to. I remembered.

My father had told Bridget and me a story about one of our ancestors. Her name was Irene “The Loving” Mackintosh. She had six daughters and sons, all fiery, sword-throwing Scottish warriors. As she grew old, her bones brittle, she wanted to leave something behind so her children would always remember she loved them.