God she shouldn't have cooked Gordon swordfish last night. She let the pot she was scrubbing slide into the soapy water. Sent to bed without supper, Katy had fantasized about ripping Mom's flower garden up by its roots, starting with the lilacs. Katy's green thumb had turned a sickly shade of chartreuse somewhere at the age of six, when she'd dumped a bucket of mud on a prize species of two-tone rose.
Mom had a string of blue ribbons from flower shows across the panhandle. Her mother, Althea, was a gardener, though her Floridian climate was eight hundred miles and four thousand feet of elevation removed from the North Carolina mountains.
The kind featuring a fashionable mom who could clean the house, build a career, raise three kids, and still manage to be dynamite in the sack, all without rumpling the pages of Cosmopolitan. She hoped Gordon wasn't the type of man who believed in packaged deodorizers, those little plug-in things that looked great on a television commercial.
It was late September, too deep in the Appalachian autumn for any flowers but goldenrod, jewel weed, and hummingbird plant. The scent drifted from the cupboard and crossed the kitchen as if riding a late spring breeze.
0 kommentar(er)
