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the back of her hand and smiled. “So, yes, I suppose technically you’d have to call him a thief.”

    My mother dug up another clump. “There is nothing like a blue cornflower on a sunny day,” she said. I looked at the plant, but all I could see were roots and green leaves. “What I love most about these perennials is that each one has a story.”

    I picked up the pitchfork and handed it to her.

    My mother jabbed it into the plant. “Janice Rourke gave me this one. I wonder whatever happened to her. We had a big falling-out, and I can’t even remember why.”

    “Uh-oh,” I said. “You’re not going to start traveling around the world looking up your former flower friends to find out what went wrong with the relationship, are you? I think I’ve seen that movie.” I separated a few pots from the stack and started putting a cornflower section into each one.

    My mother stabbed the ground with the pitchfork and laughed. “No, but maybe I’ll look up my high school boyfriends, at least the ones who are still alive, and give them each a plant. I can tell them they gave it to me way back when and I’ve treasured it all these years and wanted them to have a piece of it back.”

    I had the hang of this whole garden thing now, and I was adding soil to the cornflower pots without even being asked. “Yeah, that might work. It’s not like they’d remember whether it was true or not at their age anyway.”

    “You’d be surprised what you’ll remember, honey.”

    “Did you have a lot of boyfriends back then, Mom?” I’d never really thought to ask before. It had always seemed like my parents must have come into the world joined at the hip.

    “My fair share.”

    I wondered what
my
fair share was. Maybe I’d already had it, and I’d kept right on going past the person I was supposed to end up with. Maybe I was with him now. “What made you pick Dad? How did you know?”

    Even to my ears, these sounded like questions that should be asked when you were, say, Rachel’s age. Maybe I’d even asked them back then. Maybe I’d thought I didn’t need to. It was amazing how you could think you knew everything as a teenager, and a couple of decades later, you realized you’d never had a clue.

    My mother was just kind of standing there, watching a worm work its way back into the dirt. “The truth?”

    “Sure,” I said.

    “He was cute, and he was crazy about me. And he could dance.” She shook her head. “I was so young, it didn’t seem all that complicated. You pick a nice boy, and you figure out how to make it work together.”

    She brushed some dirt from her hands and started a little grouping of pots off to the side. “I will say that the dancing part has held up quite nicely. Never underestimate the joy of being married to the one man at the party who knows how to dance.”

    Maybe I could call up every guy I’d ever dated and invite them all to a dance-off.

    My mother straightened up, a pot in each hand. “Okay, these are for you and Geri. We’ll put two of each perennial in Geri’s garden. You can dig yours up as soon as you have a house of your own.”

    I tried to imagine ever having a house of my own. Maybe it could be the bonus prize at the dance-off.

    “Unless you want to plant yours over at Noah’s?”

    “No, no,” I said. “Geri’s house is probably safer.”

     

    5

    RILEY AND I WERE FOLLOWING BRIGHT YELLOW PLASTIC signs, which were tacked to utility poles and planted in freestanding buckets of cement at the edge of the road. SHARK SENSE
BASE CAMP they proclaimed in tall block letters as they pointed the way with black arrows. As if we needed directions to the beach we’d been going to all our lives.

    I was telling Riley the St. Joseph story. “So,” I continued, “I waited just the right amount of time. You know,
one Mississippi, two Mississippi
. Then I shoved them all out and slammed the door, and they went flying down the stairs.”

    It was a slight