Free Your Roots Are Showing by Elise Chidley Page B

married. You just don’t understand the language.”
    “We can’t plant these over there,” he said evenly, gesturing at the border she’d begun to attack with a trowel. “No sun. I was thinking of the beds along the garden path, back here.”
    He walked off to the shed — now cleared of toxins and crammed with outdoor toys — and came back with the rickety wheelbarrow. He loaded it with plants and tools and trundled off to the bed near the gate. Then he picked up a long-handled fork and began turning the soil over. Grudgingly, Lizzie came over to join him, clutching a trowel. Madge kept dropping a dirty old tennis ball in front of Bruno, and he kept kicking it away across the lawn. Lizzie didn’t feel like talking, so she just stayed quiet and contemplated the general earthiness of the dirt.
    “As a matter of fact, I have been married,” Bruno said after a while. “I’m a gay divorcé, just like you. That’s sort of why I keep showing up on your doorstep. I know how it feels, those early days. Not a time to be alone in a new place. Ingrid’s been a bit worried about you too, to be honest. Said you were drinking wine at tea time, that sort of thing. So between the two of us, we’re keeping an eye. Anyway, my wife and I, we didn’t have kids, so I don’t know the pregnancy argot.”
    For a moment, Lizzie was stumped. She simply sat back and looked at him, aware of a slight feeling of, yes, disappointment. Okay, she’d thought it a bit odd that Bruno seemed attracted to her, in her current state of disrepair. But it was still demoralizing to reflect that his flattering interest amounted to little more than a mercy mission.
    He seemed a bit tense, talking about his divorce. Maybe he was still smarting. Maybe he too suffered from insomnia and, when he did manage to sleep, maybe he too always woke with a horrible jolt, sweaty and panic-stricken because the other side of the bed was empty. Lizzie could feel her eyes filling with tears. She blinked, took up her trowel, and began to dig furiously.
    “I’m not divorced — yet — and you’re certainly not gay,” she said in a bit of a wobbly voice.
    “Not such a deep hole,” he replied, gesturing at her feverish trowel. “We want to plant it, not bury it.”
    “Okay, okay, I was just being thorough.” She was glad he didn’t offer any sympathy. Sympathy always undid her.
    “That’s about right,” he said as she tipped earth back into the hole. “Now, could you possibly fill up this watering can?”
    Lizzie trailed into the house with the large metal watering can, glad of the chance to blow her nose in private, but wondering why on earth there wasn’t an outside tap. It was so awkward angling the can into the kitchen sink. Walking back out with the full can, slopping on the sludge-colored carpet as she went, she felt as if her right arm were being stretched several inches longer than her left.
    “Why do men have muscles if they never do the grunt work?” she complained loudly. “Why is it that with their massive biceps and triceps and forceps and whatnot, they’re generally the ones sitting behind an office desk pushing a pen while weedy women cart ten-ton toddlers and trolley-loads of groceries around?”
    As she reached the doorstep, she saw that Bruno had company. Someone in sporty stretch pants and a trendy quilted vest was leaning casually against the garden gate, chatting to him. It took her a tenth of a second to realize it was Tessa.
    Two unexpected visitors on the same morning. Really, it was too much.
    “Tessa, what are you doing here? Why aren’t you working?” She had to admit it, she was a little stung to see Bruno grinning so appreciatively at Tessa’s legs.
    “Yes, I’m delighted to see you too,” Tessa quipped back. “Can you spare me a minute, or should I come back later?”
    Lizzie glanced at Bruno busily planting violas. “What do you reckon?” she asked.
    “Oh, go ahead, have a cup of tea with your mate,” he said.