Page 91 of Swan Song

When Coco gets home, she finds Leslee in the library seated at the escritoire with—Coco blinks—two fingers of bourbon in front of her (it’s a quarter past eleven) and her checkbook out.

“Hey,” Coco says. She waves the card. “This was declined a couple of times this morning.”

Leslee glances up. “Ridiculous.”

Right, Coco thinks. Except it’s not.

“It was declined at the farm. I had the girl try it twice.” Coco will obviously not mention Delilah. “Then it was declined at the gas station.”

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you, and Bull’s not here.”

“He’s not?” Coco says. “Did he go on a business trip again?”

“New York,” she says. “Or DC. I can’t remember which. He’s meeting with lawyers about god knows what. He’ll be back tonight.”

“Do you want to look at your account online and see what the problem is?” Coco asks. “I can help you.”

Leslee sips the bourbon. “No, I do not want to look at my account online,” she says. She tears a check from the checkbook. “I have to pay Benton before he sues us.”

There are two other checks on the desk, one made out to Tiffin Academy for a hundred thousand dollars and one made out to the Francis Ambrose Memorial Scholarship Fund for seventy-five thousand. Leslee takes pictures of each check on her phone.

“Would you like me to mail those?” Coco asks.

Leslee rips up both checks and lets the pieces float into the wastebasket. “No, I would not.” She glances up at Coco impatiently. “Anything else?”

“What should I do about the card?”

“I have no idea, Coco,” Leslee says, picking up Benton’s check, which is still in one piece. “I have to deliver this so that he’ll finish the garden so I can have my hot-tub party.” She throws back the rest of the bourbon. “I need to go.”

The next morning, Coco and Lamont eat the juicy, sweet Rainier cherries in bed. “Elite cherries,” Lamont says. “The Amalfi lemons of cherries,” Coco says. She’s been considering getting a tattoo of an Amalfi lemon on her inner wrist.

“Do you think Bull and Leslee have money problems?” Coco asks.

“You’re kidding, right?” Lamont says.

Coco tells him about the credit card (Leslee gave Coco a new card from something called ANZ, an Australian bank). Then she tells him about Leslee taking pictures of the two donation checks before ripping them up.

“I don’t pretend to understand why Leslee does what she does,” Lamont says. “And you probably shouldn’t try either.” He holds a cherry between his teeth and Coco leans in to take a nibble. Juice dribbles down her chin, leaving golden drops on her white sheets, but in the next second, the cherry is devoured and she’s kissing Lamont and who cares about the sheets and who cares about Leslee?

In the days following, Benton Coe’s crew work around the clock on the circular garden. (Twice, they arrive so early that they almost catch Lamont leaving Coco’s apartment.) The progress they make in just a few days blows Coco’s mind. She feels like she’s on the sofa with her mother watching an episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Where are you, Ty Pennington? she wonders.

Leslee invites Coco for the big reveal and tells her to close her eyes. Leslee must not realize Coco can see straight down into the garden from her apartment.

But there is a certain amount of wonder once the arched wrought-iron gate opens and Coco steps inside. The boxwood hedges enclosing the garden are eight feet tall and too dense to see through; she feels like she’s entering a room. A low stone wall topped with granite benching runs around the base of the boxwoods. There’s a maze of cinder paths that wind around hydrangeas, rosebushes, a bed of cosmos and zinnias, a bed of snapdragons, pansies, and foxgloves; there’s a gazing ball on a pedestal amid cool green hostas. The flowers are in full bloom, buzzing with fat bumblebees, aflutter with butterflies. In the center is an eight-sided mahogany hot tub with elegant copper ladders hanging off each side. The bottom of the tub is tiled cobalt blue. It’s the bougiest hot tub Coco has ever seen.

Coco feels weirdly proud of Leslee for imagining such a lovely space. Leslee saw this in her mind’s eye and now they’re standing in it. “It’s like something out of a storybook,” Coco says. “Did you read The Secret Garden as a child?”

Leslee gives Coco a blank look. “It’s a party space,” she says. “We’re having a party.” Later that morning, she gives Coco six ivy-green envelopes to deliver.

Only six? Coco thinks. She wonders if Leslee made a mistake, because a lot of people are missing. But Leslee doesn’t make mistakes.

Heads, Coco thinks, will roll.

Please join us for a garden party on Tuesday, August 13,

at 6:00 p.m.

Cocktails and light bites

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