Chapter 9 - The Garden on Wadmalaw
One year after the wedding, the Lowcountry had settled into the golden, lazy warmth of late May.
On Wadmalaw Island, twelve miles south of the city, the dirt road wound through ancient live oaks draped in Spanish moss, ending at a twenty-acre farm that had once belonged to an old indigo planter.
The sign at the gate was made of carved cedar: THE CHARLES & HARPER FOUNDATION — LOWCOUNTRY PEDIATRIC RESPITE CENTER.
The old horse barn where Clara had once filmed her rustic lifestyle reels had been completely gutted and rebuilt. The dirt floors were gone, replaced by soft, antimicrobial rubberized flooring colored like river sand. Sensory swings hung from the hand-hewn oak rafters; climbing walls, balance beams, and specialized hydrotherapy pools filled the three bays where thoroughbreds had once stood.
In the southern pasture, six children with cerebral palsy and severe sensory processing disorders were laughing, tossing red rubber balls to a pair of golden retriever therapy dogs that Mallory had helped train.
I sat on the wide cedar porch of the main farmhouse, wearing a faded denim shirt, linen shorts, and leather work boots. Beside me on the porch swing sat Harper, now seventeen, holding a college catalog from Clemson University’s agricultural engineering program.
"Aunt Rachel?" Harper asked, looking up from the glossy pages.
"Yeah, bug?"
"Dad called this morning from Savannah," she said, her voice quiet, peaceful. "He said Grandma Beatrice’s parole hearing was denied."
I took a slow sip of sweet tea from my mason jar. "I know. Croft called me yesterday."
Beatrice was serving four years at the Leath Correctional Institution in Greenwood for state procurement fraud and perjury. According to the warden's reports, she had spent her first nine months attempting to reorganize the prison laundry facility into an auxiliary society committee, earning herself three disciplinary write-ups and ninety days of revoked commissary privileges. Arthur had moved into a studio apartment in North Charleston, working as a night watchman at an auto salvage yard, too humiliated to show his face on the peninsula ever again.
"Does it still hurt?" Harper asked, her eyes moving to the top of my head where my dark hair was pulled back into a simple, functional ponytail.
I reached up, running my fingers over the small, two-inch silver scar hidden beneath the curls.
"Only when the weather changes suddenly," I smiled, nudging her shoulder with mine. "Like an old barometer. It tells me when a storm is coming off the ocean."
"And what does it say today?"
May you like
I looked out over the pasture. The live oaks were green, heavy with leaves; the children’s laughter drifted across the clover on the salt breeze; and in the distance, the Bohicket River sparkled like a ribbon of crushed diamonds under the clear, southern sky.
"It says the sky is completely clear," I said. "Not a cloud for fifty miles."
