Next Alonzo Jr. pulled out a small round figure made of plastic. “What’s this?”
“I hear it’s called a Weeble. According to the advertisements, Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down. You can try it out for yourself.”
Sam glanced at her watch, realizing Fido still needed to be let out, and her tuna casserole was about to be mush.
“Oh, shoot. I have to book it. I forgot dinner was in the crockpot, and my mother and Raul are coming over tonight.” Sam dreaded the fact that lately her lonely mother felt the need to chaperone her not-so-romantic evenings with Raul. “Gimme some skin, Alonzo Jr.” Sam held out her hand for a low high-five, which he excitedly slapped.
“Sam,” Bernadette said, pulling her into a hug, “do me a solid and please stop pushing Cook’s buttons. You’re like a dog with a bone, and I know you just want to make things right, but that’s not always how the world works.”
“I’ll try,” Sam halfheartedly agreed, though she had no plans of the kind to stop. As her mother often said when Sam was a child, she was a professional at pushing others’ buttons.
Thinking some fresh salad could make up for the tuna slop, Sam headed straight toward the backyard fence, stopping abruptly at the open gate. The yard was a disheveled mess, and her glass greenhouse didn’t look right. In fact, it looked completely wrong. Upside-down, and sideways all at the same time.
The hanging plants were buried under the germination pots. The shelf for vegetables was cracked in half and tossed where the fruit trees used to be. And where were the fruit trees, anyway? Windows were smashed, the roof punched through, the door crooked on one remaining hinge… the entire structure shattered, her entire life gone.
She ran across the yard, stepping on glass shards that were scattered across the grass, and all of her seedlings and shoots trampled. She knelt down, tenderly picking up a crushed remnant of spinach with the hope she could revive it for Bernadette as the urge to cry wretched her chest.
“Sam? What happened?”
Unable to turn around to answer Raul, she kept her back to him as he stood on the porch holding a bottle of celebratory wine at his latest news for their not-so-romantic evening. He had planned to tell her something that could change everything between them, but the moment was as destroyed as her yard.
“It’s… it’s gone,” she whispered, choking down the heartbreak. “All my work. My plants. My everything… gone.”
Raul didn’t know what to say, so he said what came naturally to him. “I’ll fix it, Sam. I promise.”
Sam turned around to face him, anger pouring from her. Anger at the destruction of her dreams. At the man she didn’t want to be rescued by. At the fact that she even needed to be rescued. Again.
“How, Raul? I don’t have the money to replace all of this on the pittance I make. I can barely afford to feed myself and Fido. And now he’s probably peed all over the house and I can’t even afford the paper towels to clean it up!” she wailed.
Raul ran down to the yard, pulling her into a hug.
“Hey, it’s okay. I’ll take care of it. I’ll pay for the materials and we’ll rebuild it together.”
Sam stiffened and pulled away. “So that Thomas Cook can just come back and destroy it all over again? It will never end until I give up. Bernadette is right. I put a target on my back and now I’m going to lose everything over that man.”
She stomped into the house, bringing the wilting spinach with her, wondering if anything in the former greenhouse, now garbage heap, was salvageable. She yanked the lid off her crockpot, the casserole having achieved an unusual crispy burned outer layer with mush in the middle, just as Minnie arrived carrying her mail.
“Oh, honey, that’s not what we’re eating for supper, is it?”
Minnie scooped a spoonful of tuna mush, chewing a small bite of what tasted more like rubber than food. Apparently the only edible thing in Sam’s kitchen was a sliver of sad-looking spinach. When Sam didn’t crack a grin or spit out a retort, her maternal instinct kicked in. Something was wrong.
“What happened? Why so glum, chum?”
“I’m just tired,” Sam answered moodily.
“Do you need a Valium? I’m sure I have one in my purse…” Minnie was already digging through her handbag searching for what she called her pep pills, advertised as such because they put some pep in her step.
“No, Mom…”
“Her greenhouse was vandalized,” Raul cut in.
“Not vandalized. Destroyed,” Sam corrected.
“Was it those new neighbors of yours? I heard they’re a terror, Sam. You need to move home and live with me for your own safety.”
“It wasn’t Bernadette. It was someone else. I’m pretty sure Thomas Cook sent whoever did it. As if unleashing the entire media army on me wasn’t enough.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t open this then,” Minnie warned, holding up an envelope. “Just in case it’s not fan mail.”
She set it aside on Sam’s counter, but the name above the New York return address written neatly on the front startled Sam out of her self-absorbed misery. She instinctively yanked the letter off the counter and tucked it into her pocket. It couldn’t be. Of all the letters in all the world… it couldn’t be him.
An extremely important message waited inside that envelope, and whatever it was, it was too heavy to deal with on an empty stomach. And certainly not with her mother—and Raul—present, monitoring her like she belonged in an institution. As Sam gazed out at her junk heap of a greenhouse, and felt the crisp edge of the mysterious letter, being whisked away to an institution sounded like exactly what Sam needed.
Chapter 32
