“Good God,” Brian says faintly. He sounds like he’s just reached the life raft, climbed out of a cold sea. He takes a gulp of wine, then rubs at the inner crease of his arm. “I don’t know how you do that. That kind of exertion. And every single day — my God.”
It had been a long and intense workday, but there was something more to it, Avis thinks — the strain of the day itself, the aftermath of the storm. She’s so tired she feels as if she’s floating just above the chair. “Trust me — not typical. I didn’t even know if I could still push like that.”
“You are something else, kid,” Brian says. “But as for me. Boy, you never really expect it. I mean, getting older. It almost seems like you ought to be able to imagine your way out of it. Do something.”
“Ha. Right. Like what?”
“It’s nuts. Try to push back against it.” He tilts his glass of wine, then gazes over its lip. “You start to see the edges of your life. It’s like being able to see the curve of the planet.”
Avis fingers the bowl of her own glass. “I know. Like you always knew it was there but you never believed it?” The night is forming into a dark glittering sky: the world is a bright machine carrying them inside itself. Though she sees Brian every evening, it seems it’s been years since she’s heard this — the actual sound of his voice. Being with him like this is like watching a tiny boat far out on the water, slowly, slowly borne back to shore. Avis turns on her lounge chair and touches his hair with the tips of her fingers. He doesn’t move or speak: his eyes seem open wide. She trails her hand across the nape of his neck. “Let’s go home,” she murmurs. He cups her shoulders, slides his palm across the wings of her shoulder blades; his lips are dry, they taste of sea salt.
DURING THE COURSE of that week, she avoids the kitchen. She stays outside with Brian, clearing and raking the grass, sweeping the sidewalk, then the street in front of the house. Their power was restored on the afternoon following the hurricane, and for days afterward they’ve been one of the few houses on their block with electricity. The Handels run an extension cord to their house; other neighbors come to fill their coolers with ice or simply to sit in air-conditioning for an hour or two. Ella Regale’s father comes over to watch his favorite Spanish game show. They finally make contact with Stanley, who assures them that he, Nieves, and the market, are all fine — though his voice sounds a bit dark and compressed to Avis, and he rushes off the phone after just a few minutes, promising to call again soon.
After the front of the property is cleared, Brian and Avis go into the backyard, pulling out fallen branches and fronds. The local businesses have started to reopen and will soon send their bakery orders, for which she is glad. But she isn’t quite ready to go back inside yet. Avis starts cleaning out the sprawling, wasted gardens Stanley had built, gathering brush, then weeding on her hands and knees for hours. The next day she returns to drag a metal trowel through the soil, over and over, until she is turning up fine, dry furrows, the soil sparkling. She leans toward the narrow rows and imagines the warm scent of planted tomatoes — it drifts into her senses as if they grew before her. She remembers the way Solange sat in the grass, the quick flint of her eyes, scanning the earth. It comes to her as she works that gardening is a way of staying put. That evening, Avis calls Stanley again and before he can vanish, she asks, “But Stan? Do you have one more minute?” She tells him about reviving his old gardens, how beautiful the clean plots are, and how she’d imagined the scent of tomatoes. He chuckles. “Oh yeah. That’s how it gets you. One second, you’re fooling around in the dirt, next thing you know you’re up to your ears in squash and parsley.”
“Could I do that? Squash?” She realizes that is just what she wants to do.
Stanley is drawn into it, despite himself: she can hear him give way to his old love of gardening. His voice warms with interest as he tells her how to amend the soil, the importance of organic compost, how to determine the best sun exposure, the uses of earthworms. She gets out paper and takes notes. They talk for over an hour, losing themselves in the discussion of vegetables, berries, herbs, their voices running together, trading ideas, the way they did in the days when Stanley assisted in her kitchen.
Avis says, “I thought it’d be fun to start from seeds.”
“Sure, sure, just to make it as hard as possible.”
“Isn’t that the whole point?” She’s laughing. “Seedlings are for wimps.”
Then Stanley says, “Yeah, well, why don’t you come here. We’ve got good heirloom seeds at the market. I’ll be around tomorrow. Bring Dad too, why not?”
When she gets off the phone, Avis is still smiling, excited to tell Brian about this invitation — a sense of being readmitted to Stanley’s life. But that night, Avis sits up late in the kitchen, moon glowing in the window, fretting over what to bring them. She feels nervous as a teenager worrying over a prom dress. She lingers over the cards in her notebooks — scraps of recipes tucked behind plastic sleeves — an enormous collection she’s curated for years. She turns the pages slowly, in an agony of indecision, wanting to make them something perfect and beautiful. She considers a tray of flaky jésuites, their centers redolent of frangipani cream, decorated with violet buds preserved in clouds of black crystal sugar. Or dulce de leche tarts — caramelized swirls on a pâte sucrée crust, glowing with chocolate, tiny muted peaks, ruffles of white pastry like Edwardian collars. But nothing seems special enough and nothing seems right. Nothing seems like Stanley. Avis brings out the meticulous botanical illustrations she did in school, pins them all around the kitchen like a room from Audubon’s house. She thinks of slim layers of chocolate interspersed with a vanilla caramel. On top she might paint a frosted forest with hints of white chocolate, dashes of rosemary subtle as déjà vu. A glissando of light spilling in butter-drops from one sweet lime leaf to the next. On a drawing pad she uses for designing wedding cakes, she begins sketching ruby-throated hummingbirds in flecks of raspberry fondant, a sub-equatorial sun depicted in neoclassical butter cream. At the center of the cake top, she draws figures regal and languid as Gauguin’s island dwellers, meant to be Stanley, Nieves, and child. Their skin would be cocoa and coffee and motes of cherry melded with a few drops of cream. Then an icing border of tiny mermaids, nixies, selkies, and seahorses below, Pegasus, Icarus, and phoenix above.
You are lucky, Avis’s mother told her, if you know what in this life you’re hunting for. Avis has always known her hunt. She believes that her work is hard and essential, like that of nurse, firefighter, carpenter: she’ll be needed after the collapse of civilization. Not the same as building houses, but still a crucial grace note. Avis exerts herself wholly and physically to produce an evanescence of sugar and butter — a phoenix’s wing. She’s proud to bring people the reprieve of a slice of torte, a bite of scone: a sort of remedy. Just enough to keep everyone going.
But Avis doesn’t move. She’s sunburned from kneeling in the garden and her back and arms ache. She stares at the cake sketches, and now they look gaudy, almost baroque. None of this interests her son. The cake fantasies seem like an indictment of her career: she sees herself drawing sweet vapors through the air, outlining the contours of a sugar castle. A bare, dry place in which to live. Too much sweetness, it occurs to her, is almost worse than too little. Swept by remorse, she presses her knuckles against her mouth. The moon is so bright it seems hot and the streetlights outside burn like match heads. Her eyes film with tears. Finally Brian is at the kitchen door. “Avis?” He comes to her side and slides his arms around her. “Come to bed, sweetheart,” he murmurs. “Leave the cake for now.”