Page 60 of Save the Date
“This is stupid,” he muttered, slowing to a walk, as he approached the house. He looked down at Shaz, who was panting heavily. “I could just tell her you need a drink. She might turn me down, but she would never turn away a thirsty dog.”
Shaz seemed to agree. In fact, as soon as they got in front of the stoop leading up to the shop, she abruptly sat, and refused to be moved, no matter how hard Jack pulled on her leash.
He wound the leash around the wrought-iron window box beside the door and rang the bell, shifting nervously from one foot to the other as he waited.
“We’ll just act like we were passing by, and decided to stop on the spur of the moment.”
Five minutes passed. He looked down at Shaz, who didn’t seem perturbed by the delay. “Maybe she’s at church.”
Shaz gave him a baleful stare.
“She could have gone out to brunch. Like a date or something. Or out of town for the weekend.” They heard a short, excited bark then, coming from the other side of the door. Shaz stood now, her ears pricked in excitement.
Finally, the paper shade on the glass shop door was pulled up. Cara Kryzik looked out at them, bemused. She wore shorts and a tank top and her hair was wrapped in a towel.
“Or maybe she was in the shower,” Cara said, opening the door. Poppy stood directly behind her, peering around her legs.
Jack felt his face redden. “You heard, huh?”
She pointed upward. He took a step back, off the stoop, and saw the open window directly above the stoop. “My bedroom. When that window’s open, I can hear everything out on the street. It can make for some pretty interesting nights.”
“You don’t have air-conditioning?” It was the best comeback he could think of.
“Not right at the moment,” Cara said. “It’s on the blink, which is not at all unusual. I’ve been calling the landlord for two days, but she hasn’t called back. If I don’t hear from her by tonight, I swear, I’m gonna buy myself a window unit and deduct the cost from my rent.”
“You should,” Jack agreed. “It was in the high eighties last night.”
***
“It was in the low nineties upstairs,” Cara said. “Did I hear you say something about some water for Shaz? And how about you? I could fix us some iced coffee?”
As she’d promised, the interior of the shop was steamy. While Cara disappeared into a small kitchenette, he looked around.
It was a small room, no bigger than his living room on Macon Street. But she’d hung a dozen old mirrors on the exposed brick walls, and they made the room look larger. There was a large zinc-topped worktable, a small antique table with three chairs in a bay near the front window, a glass countertop with a cash register, and a large glass-doored cooler full of buckets holding flowers. An alcove hid behind a half-opened curtain, and he could see a desk stacked with papers, a computer, and a phone.
“How’s your friend Tommy?” Cara called from the kitchen.
“Alive.”
“Thanks to you.”
“He was passed out cold by the time I got him home. It was all I could do to unload him from that Camry and dump him on a lawn chair under the carport. He left a pretty sheepish message on my answering machine the next day. I think the experience might have helped him sober up—and grow up—a little.”
“And how did you get back to town to your truck?”
“I texted Ryan and he gave me a ride.”
Cara came out of the kitchenette holding two tall frosted glasses of iced coffee. “Let’s take the drinks and the dogs out to the courtyard garden. I’ve got dog bowls out there, so Shaz can have that water you promised.”
He followed her down a narrow hallway, passing a stairway that led to the upstairs apartment, and a closed door that he guessed held a bathroom.
The garden was a surprise. There were a pair of tall palm trees at the back of the garden, and these were underplanted with lush banana trees, hydrangeas, hostas, ivy, ferns, and a dozen more plants whose names he didn’t know. A walkway of mottled Savannah gray bricks bisected the planting beds. She set the drinks down on a teak table shaded by a large market umbrella, and motioned for him to take a bench opposite the one she sat on.
“Nice,” he said appreciatively. “But I guess it makes sense you’d have a great garden, you being a florist.”
“It’s my escape hatch from reality,” she said. Poppy found a place in the shade of the umbrella, while Shaz roamed around, sniffing the plants, until finally spotting the aluminum bowl of water near the hose bib.
Jack took a sip of the coffee, but he was still studying her garden. There was something different about it, and it took a moment before it dawned on him.
