He Asked Me Out to Get Back at Her, I Gave Him a Rulebook Instead novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: The Pear Tree

He made spaghetti.

It was the only thing Jess had survived.

The gardener's cottage had one room, a woodstove and an iron bed against the far wall.

He'd built the table himself, out of two sawhorses and a door.

He'd put a jar of daffodils from the north beds in the middle of it.

The sauce was from a jar, too.

"I heated it myself," he said. "Personally. With my hands."

"It's very good heating."

"Thank you. I've been working on my heating."

We ate with the window open, because the stove made the room too hot and neither of us wanted to say so.

He told me about the grounds crew.

The foreman had started letting him drive the mower.

He said it like somebody else might say they'd made partner.

I told him about the interview in Boston on Thursday.

A room full of people in fleece vests.

A woman at the end of the table had seen the forum, and she asked me only one question.

What would you do with a garden nobody's allowed into?

"What did you say?"

"I said I'd open the gate."

He put his fork down and looked at me like I'd said something wonderful.

After dinner he took a flashlight and walked me around the outside of the wall to the iron gate.

I unlocked it.

He'd never once asked me for the key.

We went in under the ivy.

The garden smelled like turned earth and cold stone and sweet pear blossoms.

He swung the flashlight beam along the south wall.

Then he stopped.

The pear tree was in bloom.

Not all of it.

The bottom three tiers, along the oldest branches, were covered in small white flowers, hundreds of them, glowing in the light.

I walked up to it.

I'd pruned it in February with my hands shaking.

I'd fed it and watered it and told nobody, because if it didn't work, I didn't want anybody to watch it not work.

"It wasn't dead," Linc said quietly.

"Everybody said it was."

"You kept scratching."

I turned around.

He was standing very still with the flashlight pointed at the ground, waiting.

"It was good," I said. "Dinner."

"Yeah?"

"Good enough."

He kissed me under the pear tree, very slowly.

Then he walked me home to Jess's hall and said good night at the door.

The north beds opened to everyone the next morning, Saturday, May second.

My dad drove up from Scranton at five a.m. in his truck with a cooler of sandwiches.

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