During the entire marriage, Janet was the only person in that family who never asked me how much I made. She never complained about my absences. She only ever asked one thing in that soft voice of hers. Have you eaten? She was a quiet woman.
Never one for a fuss with hands roughened by the shop and a habit of noticing things without mentioning them. Whatever else was happening at that dinner table, Janet never once made me feel like a problem to be solved. Not long after I moved back to Greenville, Janet started stopping by. She'd bring a casserole. She'd ask me to look at a wobbly shelf.
And every week she left a little bundle of lavender on my porch wrapped in brown paper with the same explanation every time. Just leftovers from the shop. It had only go to waste. She owned a flower shop called Walsh Florals on Augusta Road, and the smell of lavender drifted out of the front door whenever you walked by. Janet was going through her own ending by then.
Her husband Gary had cheated on her and left for Atlanta. She never told me much about it. All she said was, "He chose someone else." There was no bitterness in her voice, only tiredness. I settled into a rhythm.
Tuesdays, Janet came by. Fridays, Lavender waited on my steps. I didn't think about it any deeper than that. For 2 years, I never asked myself why she never left her leftovers on anyone else's porch. After Janet's divorce from Gary became final, about 14 months before that Saturday, she started coming around more often.
It wasn't only Tuesdays anymore. Sometimes it was Thursday. Sometimes it was a Sunday afternoon, the screen door creaking, her voice calling from the porch before I even heard the car. And the reasons were always small. A container of soup she'd made too much of.
A question about what color to paint the trim on the shop. Whether I thought maple or walnut would look better for a display shelf. I answered every question honestly. I thought that was all it was. Once she brought a jar of her own blackberry jam and stood in my kitchen reading the labels on my spice rack, though she had read them a dozen times before.
Once she asked me to hold a ladder at the shop and then didn't seem to need the ladder. Looking back now, knowing everything I know, I can see what any stranger watching from across the street would have seen in about 5 minutes. Janet always stayed longer than she needed to. She would finish her coffee and keep holding the empty cup, turning it slowly on the table, asking me one more thing about my week. She asked how my day had been, and she didn't ask it the way people ask to be polite.
She asked it like the answer mattered. She would sit there and listen to me describe the grain of a piece of oak for 10 minutes, and she would look at me the entire time, and the lavender kept growing. The first week, it was three sprigs. By the second winter, it was seven or eight, tied with more care, the brown paper folded at the corners like something wrapped for a gift. I noticed the bundles getting bigger.
I told myself the shop must have had a lot of extra. I was a recon marine. I spent a decade being trained to read tiny signals in the dark. A footprint that was too fresh, a door that had been closed a little too neatly. And I sat at my own kitchen table every week watching the clearest signal of my life and read nothing at all.