Page 30 of Hunter Moon

I carried the flowers through the house and set them on the kitchen table. Then, I sat down in one of the wooden seats, the worn cushions tied to the spindles of the back of the chair, and stared at the blossoms.

Twice now, Aspen had given me flowers because he thought they’d make things better. That was two whole times he’d tried to show me he still gave a damn. Maybe the bar was on the floor, but I wanted to think he cared and I hadn’t been stuck on the idea of him for years without reason.

There was a little plastic trident stuck into the arrangement, a pastel blue envelope held up between the prongs. I plucked that out, took a shaky breath, and opened it.

There was a card inside, bright with lush green grass, a blue sky above, and a funny little smiling duckling planted right in the middle.

It looked like it could’ve been an Easter card, almost, except when I opened it, there was no kooky little phrase inside, just a note from Aspen:

I’m not gone. You can ask me to leave you alone, but I hope you don’t.

Aspen

Under that, he’d listed his phone number.

Yawning and rubbing her eyes, Harmony came in from the hall and put on a pot of coffee. “Somebody come by?” she asked, her voice slurry with sleep.

I tucked the card into the pocket of my hoodie and shrugged. “Becca Tartt. She brought flowers.”

Finally, Harmony focused on me. She crossed her arms and glared at the bouquet on the table that looked so much like the first one Aspen had gotten me.

“From Aspen?”

“Yeah...”

She took a deep breath, her nose flaring, and I was sure she was going to have something to say about that. Whatever it was, she swallowed it down and turned back to the coffee pot.

“Okay.”

That was less vehemence than I’d expected. But sure, even when she was mad now, Harmony sublimated it. I ran off and scared her, she said we should get out of town and ride some rollercoasters. I made puppy eyes at the guy who’d broken my heart, she kept her thoughts to herself.

I was sure she only mastered her temper so she didn’t risk hurting me, but that said something in itself. She thought raging about Aspen was more likely to do me harm than Aspen himself, and sure, if she was wrong, I fully expected she’d run the man out of town, but she didn’t say anything right then.

All she did was finish making coffee, fix it up with cream and sugar, and bring me a cup.

“They’re pretty,” she mumbled, then she shuffled to the living room and I heard the jingle of some daytime television program from the other room.

When I was alone again, I pulled out the card from Aspen. For a few minutes, I sat there staring at his messy, slanting script. He had a man’s handwriting—teachers had complained about it in school. Sometimes, his lowercase “A”s weren’t closed all the way. The words were written narrowly, like he didn’t want to take up too much space on the page.

I hadn’t seen that writing in so long, and it ached, how much a letter this short would’ve meant to me all those years he was gone.

But I had it now, and I couldn’t ignore it or pretend it didn’t matter enough to me to acknowledge. Aspen meant everything in the world to me, and he’d messed up. Maybe those two truths both had space to live inside me at once.

I took out my phone and pulled up his contact information. I still had his old number, but I knew he’d left that phone behind. Hope had kept me from deleting it.

Now, I replaced it with the new one, the number he’d given me, delivered across a bridge of flowers I’d never especially cared for until the meaning of them changed.

And I texted him.

Thanks for the flowers. They’re beautiful.

17

Aspen

If you’re willing to stick around and make it happen, I’ll tell Deb it’s fine.

I’d spent half the morning staring at the text from my brother. It was nothing, really. Just a single sentence, not even overtly approving, but what it did to my brain was on a whole new level.

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