Chapter 23: The Garden

It was a coffee tin, the red kind, wrapped in two freezer bags and sealed with tape.

I dug it out with my hands.

The dirt was cold, and I kept at it until my fingernails hurt.

Then I sat back on my heels in the gray before dawn with the tin in my lap and couldn't make myself open it.

"You want company?"

Devin stood at the edge of the garden in a coat and bare ankles, with another coat over his arm.

"How long have you been there?"

"Since you left the bed."

"You didn't say anything."

"You were doing something that was yours."

He crossed the dead vines and put the coat around my shoulders.

Cal came out of the back door behind him, yawning, with three mugs balanced in his hands and the coffeepot under his arm.

"I'm told this is how a family does it," he said. "Coffee in the garden."

"Who told you?"

"Your mother. The week before she died."

I looked at him.

"She said you'd find something out here and you'd need a hot drink and two idiots," Cal said. "I was to bring the drink."

My eyes filled.

Cal set the mugs in the dirt and sat down next to Devin.

They put me between them, shoulder to shoulder, in front of my mother's rosebush.

I peeled the tape.

Inside the tin was one folded sheet, and a small silver heart on a chain.

It was the heart I knew from the bottom of every birthday card I'd ever gotten.

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