The Probable Future

“You’re not planning on getting back together with Jenny, are you?” Elinor wanted to know before she allowed him inside. She eyed the flowers, pathetic stalks of half-bloomed phlox. Catherine would have been embarrassed by such a paltry bouquet from her garden.

“Oh, no,” Will assured Elinor. “We’re through.”

Elinor’s ability to spot a liar seemed to be failing her; either that, or Will was actually telling the truth.

“Liza told me Jenny had the flu. I thought it was only polite to stop by.”

“So now it’s Liza.” Elinor opened the door wide. What a relief to know he’d finally moved on. “You should have said so.”

Will took the staircase two steps at a time, then wandered down the hall to Jenny’s room. Jenny used to sneak out her window at night to meet him, climbing down the twisted wisteria which grew along the roof so that she smelled like flowers and often made him sneeze. He was so allergic, Liza had convinced him to carry an Epi-Pen in his pocket when he went out running, in case he met up with a bee. He ran fastest when he passed that oak on Lockhart, for inside, where the wood was dead, a huge hive was nestled. Will could hear them humming as he ran past and he made sure to quicken his pace. Some people commuting to work in the city or over to North Arthur didn’t even recognize him as they drove past: he was a blur, nothing more. A man who was running from everything he’d ever been.

“You look terrible,” he said when he found Jenny in bed. She was feverish, her nose red, wearing flannel pajamas though the day outside was fine.

“Thanks so much.” Jenny tried to run her fingers through her knotted hair. She’d been working on a watercolor propped up on her knees. She’d taken up painting again.

“Nice landscape,” Will said.

Jenny laughed, then blew her nose. “There’s a tiger on the hillside. If you bother to look.”

“‘Tiger, tiger burning bright.’ But not, I suspect, on the hillsides in Unity. I didn’t know you could paint.”

“What did you know about me?” Jenny couldn’t resist that dig even though Will was arranging the flowers he’d brought in her water glass.

“Not much. I didn’t know much about my mother, either. I had no idea she was a gardener, but apparently she was. This stuff is all around the house.”

“Phlox,” Jenny informed him. In spite of herself, she had picked up stray bits of gardening lore from her own mother, though she herself had never grown so much as an avocado plant from a pit. “It naturalizes. It may even do better when there’s no one around to tend it.”

Jenny narrowed her eyes when Will started tidying up her bedside table. He moved the bell that her mother had left so that Jenny could ring if she needed anything. A ridiculous notion, truly. Elinor herself wasn’t well and could hardly be anyone’s nursemaid, and when had she ever been so? Not when Jenny was a child, not on the day Jenny phoned Dr. Stewart herself, when her fever reached 104 and her throat felt like sandpaper, and her mother was out in the garden, heedless when it came to anything that existed beyond the gate.

“Isn’t this from the glass case?” Will said of the bell. It made a sweet sound when he held it up and shook it. “Didn’t it belong to Rebecca?”

Jenny took the bell from him and put it down beside her water glass filled with phlox. His fussing was making her uncomfortable. “Why are you here? What do you want? Frankly, I’m amazed that my mother let you in the house. Especially after it turns out you stole that arrowhead the very first time I brought you here.”

“That was terrible,” Will said sadly.

“Yes. It was. So what do you want now that you’ve returned to the scene of your crime?”

“I want your forgiveness.”

Jenny laughed, even though her throat hurt. Then she looked at Will. He wasn’t kidding. “And I should do this because …?”

“Because we’ll be better parents if we’re working together.”

Jenny stared at him, shocked. “And when exactly did you have this revelation?”

“Actually, I didn’t come up with this idea myself,” Will admitted. “I was helped along.”

“A woman’s influence,” Jenny guessed. “Marian Quimby?”

Marian had always been jealous; she had wanted Will for herself. All through high school she’d called Jenny the dead-horse girl and the whore of Cake House. She’d traipsed around after Will, not that it did her the least bit of good: in the end, Marian went to law school and now had a practice in North Arthur.