The Sparrow Sisters (4 page)

That was a question; she sure didn't seem to like him. “I wasn't hiding,” Henry said. “How long am I going to be the new guy?” he asked.

“A while,” Frank said.

Henry stepped back, preparing to leave, but Frank stopped him.

“You should know that the Sparrow Sisters are something of a legend in Granite Point. Their family history, hell their own story, it's as much a part of this place as the harbor.” Frank closed the register. “I'm surprised you've seen one in your office. They aren't much for doctors after Marigold. Dr. Higgins was one thing, but the rest of the medical world, let's just say the Sisters aren't exactly fans.” Henry faked a shudder. “I wouldn't want any of them pissed off at me.”

“I'll remember that,” Henry said.
Too late,
he thought as he walked out and right into Simon Mayo.

“Whoa, there,” Simon said as both men grabbed each other's elbows.

As Henry apologized, he gave a slight hop to take the weight off his leg. He watched Simon's eyes travel down.

“So, the city doctor meets the country lawyer,” Simon said as he stuck out his hand. “I'm Simon Mayo.”

“Henry Carlyle,” Henry said as he shook. “The new guy. How do you know me?”

Simon gestured to Henry's face and leg and smiled. “I'm afraid you're already famous.”

“Oh” was all Henry could come up with.

“Can I buy you a beer?” Simon asked.

“I've got work to do,” Henry replied.

“Another house call to the Sisters?” Simon's voice thinned, and Henry heard the shift.

“No, I'm finished there.” Henry shook his head. “How does everybody know everything?”

Simon nodded and smiled again. “Very small town,” He said. “I'll let you go, then.”

Henry watched him walk into Doyle's. The light spilling around Simon's shoulders and the familiar greetings he got from people in the bar reminded Henry of the extent to which he was under scrutiny in Granite Point. Somehow Henry had ended up in a town with three odd sisters digging around at their nursery, making “remedies” in a cauldron no doubt, and
he
was the curiosity.

Frank had slipped out from behind the bar to watch Simon and Henry through the big window. He reckoned that the new doctor had a lot to learn about the Sisters if he wanted to
belong in Granite Point. Frank understood, or at least his wife had taught him, that each sister had a life that held in its smallness all the detail of a much larger tragedy. He'd listened to the story of the Sparrows because Claire had told it to him. If Henry seemed a bit undone by Patience, maybe it was because her story was still unwritten.

L
ike their mother, the Sisters loved the soil, though it took some years after Honor's death before any of them were willing to be around her beloved plants. But when they were ready, the Sisters made haste. First, they reclaimed Honor's garden, tending the flowers and herbs that spilled over pea gravel paths and dwarf boxwood hedges in the nearly half acre behind the house. The week after Honor died, Thaddeus Sparrow swept through the land in a rage, pulling up every plant and crushing them underfoot as he swore and wept over the loss of his wife. In moments it seemed the garden was gone and four years later, so was their father. For a full year after Thaddeus's death, the Sisters turned their heads as they walked past the screen
door off the kitchen. They pretended that the weeds that had crawled in so fast once Thaddeus wrecked the garden were just wildflowers finding their way home. Nettie longed to salvage the cosmos that struggled up through the rampant nutsedge and sow thistle, but she just clasped her hands and looked away.

It was Marigold who took the first step when she gave in and picked some foxtail for the kitchen table. The housekeeper who had moved into the big bedroom at the end of the hall frowned and tossed the spikelets back out the door. “Why don't you grow something pretty,” she said. “That garden is nothing but a hazard with all those weeds.” The sisters blinked owlishly and considered her idea.They didn't often listen to Mrs. Bartlet (who Patience called Mrs. Batlett as soon as she could talk) but it has to be said that she was often right, as she was this time.

Mrs. Bartlet stayed with the girls until the twins were eighteen. Then she came each weekday and took care that they ate sensible, stodgy food, and that Patience dressed in something other than bedsheet togas and didn't wear her slicker into the shower. She never did understand the murmured language the sisters made up to tell their secrets or the way Marigold could convince her to leave early on summer nights. But she loved them all the same and if any of the girls became mothers, they would remember how Mrs. Bartlet sent them back to the garden and made them safe after all.

In the end, it took the Sisters three seasons to tame the back garden, and when they saw how beautiful it was, they realized that they were indeed their mother's daughters and that their
hands thrummed with the same gift. Still, as they looked after Patience and worked at the jobs each had chosen after going to Granite Point College (Marigold at the library, Nettie at the small catering company one town over, and Sorrel in charge of the family finances) the girls felt thwarted. So, when the four acres just off Calumet Landing came up for sale at the start of Patience's freshman year at the very same college, the Sisters needed barely ten minutes of talk before they put an offer on the land. There was money in a trust from their father (the Sparrows had been clever with their cash over some three centuries), and more from their mother's family, and it seemed right and proper that it go into a garden. The flowers, herbs, fruit trees, and vegetables that now lived in orderly plots at the Nursery were Honor's real legacy.

Patience was only seventeen when her sisters started their business, and Marigold had only three years, hands buried deep in the sandy soil, before she failed. Sorrel, who cared for her twin with an almost single-minded devotion in Marigold's last year, left most of the day-to-day work to Nettie and Patience. After classes and on weekends the youngest Sparrow grumped around the Nursery, unwittingly absorbing the knowledge that would eventually define her. Together, the Sparrow Sisters became, if not quite legend in the town of Granite Point, certainly a good story to tell: three sisters, the last of the Sparrows, still living in their childhood home, fingernails rimmed in the now rich soil of the Nursery. Nettie and Sorrel were firmly settled into a life alone, although they would never call
themselves anything so dry and hopeless as lonely. Patience was considered young enough to avoid her sisters' fate. After all, Granite Point was hardly a prison; she could leave at any time. It was generally agreed that Patience was just bold enough to do that. Yet, here she was, still.

Nettie and Sorrel didn't wish anything so solitary as they sometimes felt to claim Patience. Neither did they want her heart broken. So they made their lives in Ivy House and the Nursery as full and busy as they could, hoping that if Patience was distracted enough by the lush world they had planted together, she might not want to look beyond the high privet hedges, she might never be in danger of getting hurt. There wasn't much they could do to prevent heartache while Patience made her way through high school, but they needn't have worried. She showed as little interest in the moony boys who left her notes or waited by her locker as she did in actual schoolwork. If her fumbling romantic collision with Sam Parker, her closest friend since grade school was any indication, there wasn't a chance she'd lose her head. Nettie was a little disappointed that she herself couldn't experience the wildness of first love, at least through her sister. Sorrel was only relieved.

The truth was that Sorrel had been in love once. Simon Mayo, the oldest of three very accomplished Mayos, had loved Sorrel Sparrow from the moment he saw her. And that was in first grade. Her black hair was already long, and Honor had plaited it in two thick, glossy ropes that lay across her shoulders like epaulets. Simon, the son of a white-shoe Boston lawyer
and as tightly bound by his parents as Sorrel's braids, was undone by the little girl who stood, lunch box under her arm, a wilting Shasta daisy for the teacher in her hand, next to the swings in the schoolyard. She met his stare frankly, and Simon found himself moving away from the noisy crowd of jostling boys to stand next to Sorrel. They would be best friends until Simon came back from his last year in law school with a sporty blond and an engagement announcement. Sorrel had broken Simon's heart, not by falling for someone else but by never falling for him. But, of course, she had loved Simon too. Sorrel never knew how to tell him, and Simon was afraid to tell her. They were both so frightened of losing the other that, through silence, they did.

As for Nettie, she was as light and flyaway as her hair, although she had shown amazing fortitude and focus as she cared for her father in his last year. None of the other girls could bear to see him so reduced by alcohol and grief. They'd all felt robbed of a father when Thaddeus couldn't recover from Honor's death but grateful—later—that he didn't see Marigold's. Each sister felt cheated that they were forced to look out for the younger one, except Patience because she was the one who got all the care. But all the girls blamed him for leaving them to be the last. Only Nettie was able to forgive that as she sat beside his bed waiting for Thaddeus Sparrow to leave as well. And when he did, she made sure his ashes were buried next to his wife at the top of the hill in the cemetery that rolled along Monument Road. She stood alone as Ben Avellar shov
eled the last of the dirt into the small grave. She lingered until dark, and Ben stayed too, worried that she was on her own. It wasn't until Nettie had thoroughly soaked his bandanna with her tears that she left, climbing into the old Toyota, heading away leaving a trail of exhaust and a pinch in Ben's throat.

Only Nettie came back the next spring to watch as Thaddeus's headstone was placed next to Honor's. When the sisters brought anemone and alyssum from the Nursery to plant for their mother, Nettie stayed behind to tend the heather she'd dug in that first year after her father's death. It didn't matter how any of the girls felt about either parent now that they were gone. Soon, both gravesites were buried under the woody stems and hardy purple blossoms of Thaddeus's heather. If the girls couldn't forgive him, it seemed that Honor had.

Once the Sisters settled into the Nursery, and the town of Granite Point settled with them, it seemed that each had found a way forward. Everyone knew where they belonged, how they were meant to fit into the town, just exactly where the ground was solid. When Henry Carlisle appeared, it wasn't just Patience who felt the shift.

A
FTER HIS DINNER
at the bar Henry walked aimlessly, not ready to enter the empty little clapboard house. Unlike the rest of the town, he was confused about the Sisters' place in Granite Point. Henry did not yet appreciate the order of things. He sifted through his visit with the women, his conversation with Frank Redmond, and the manner in which this town
made way for Sparrows. He might have been able to dismiss Nettie and Sorrel as a couple of accomplished gardeners, isolated by circumstances, eccentrics even, but he couldn't reject Patience so easily. She was young, she was lovely, and she was still so fresh in his mind that for a minute Henry considered going back to Ivy House and demanding that she tell him why she was so pissed off, as Frank said. When he got back to his house, Henry made straight for the patient records: a long triple row of folders, their tabs marked with colored labels. Marigold Sparrow had a fat one while the folders for Nettie and Sorrel were slimmer. The thinnest was for Patience, only childhood vaccinations. Pulling Marigold's folder onto his lap, Henry had only to read her death certificate to understand why the Sisters were skittish about doctors. He guessed that her end had been painful and hard on her sisters, and Henry felt an unexpected sadness wash over him. When he looked at the dates on each of the folders, including Honor's and Thaddeus's, he began to put together the Sparrow timeline. Looking more closely at Honor's file, Henry saw that she had died in childbirth. With a start he realized that Patience must have been that child. Dr. Higgins kept track of the girls; there were notes in both files covering the death of Thaddeus, the purchase of the Nursery, even the date of Patience's high school graduation, then college—with honors. Perhaps the old doctor hoped that they would reconsider their mistrust and that some new internist would need their records. Out of habit, Henry organized the charts by the Sisters' ages and read them the same way.

What Henry couldn't fully learn from the charts was that Marigold was Sorrel's twin, and was only thirty when she died. Breast cancer took her as quickly and shockingly as the first frost killed the dahlias she had so carefully planted. There was a single mammogram for Sorrel just after the diagnosis, and one for Nettie, but nothing more for either. Henry noted the botanical names for the sisters, but he couldn't quite figure out how Patience fit into that tradition.

In fact, Patience came by her name (and her nature) after her mother's untimely death. Honor had gone into labor prematurely and as she bent over a kitchen chair, sweat already soaking the back of her sundress, she tried to joke with the frightened girls who clustered around her. “Boy, this one is impatient,” she said between pants. Nettie, who was so frightened by her mother's pain that she could barely breathe, thought Honor had already named the new baby Impatiens after the small shade-loving flower. When Honor died in the hospital (an embolism, unpredictable, unbelievable), her husband came home alone carrying an impossibly tiny bundle. Nettie held out her arms and said, “Hello, Impatiens.” Thaddeus Sparrow looked at Nettie and then at his newest daughter and managed a smile. Marigold always said it was his last.

Impatiens became Patience as she learned to be the youngest of four motherless sisters. She found that she had to wait for nearly everything and that if she fussed, the rest of the girls just called her “Impatience.” So, patient she was and Patience she became. It wasn't until her tenth birthday that Patience actu
ally understood her own story. It had now been years since she wrote her given name on a school form, years since she signed it on the papers for the land that became the Sparrow Sisters Nursery. Patience wouldn't have an official part in the Nursery for some time after it started, but she would smell and eat and feel the fruits of her sister's labors. By the time Henry moved to Granite Point, Patience was so deep into the soil that it was as if she had sprung straight from it.

Each Sparrow Sister file came to a sudden halt when Marigold died. And with the exception of a sprained wrist suffered by Sorrel the winter it snowed nearly every day for two straight months, none of the girls had ever returned to Dr. Higgins.

Henry put the files back and took the stairs to his apartment slowly. He suspected that he'd lost the Sisters that evening when he questioned Patience. He wanted them back, not just because he was worried that their stubborn rejection of modern medicine was reckless. No, Henry wasn't that noble. Henry wanted in. He wanted to belong in Granite Point, and it looked like the best way was to convince the influential sisters to join him in the twenty-first century. What Henry wouldn't acknowledge to himself was that he hoped that if Patience found that she liked a shiny new world, she just might like the man who introduced her to it. Of course, that logic was flawed: the Sisters were perfectly comfortable in the current century; they just knew when to plant around it.