I had just shrugged my shoulders. “Whatever you think.”
He did not move an inch. “Which one do you actually prefer, Hannah?”
“Either one is fine,” I murmured.
“I did not ask which one would avoid upsetting civilization,” he chuckled softly, holding the books up again. “What do you want?”
I looked at them carefully for a moment. “The blue one.”
“Great choice,” he said, placing it right in the display window.
It should have meant nothing, except Benedict kept doing that exact same thing every day with coffee orders, work schedules, display signs, and background music. He would ask me what I thought and what I preferred, asking tiny questions that I slowly realized almost nobody else was asking me back then.
One afternoon, Jeffrey came into the shop and openly criticized the sweater I was wearing, causing me to immediately apologize to him. Benedict was shelving books nearby, and without looking at Jeffrey, he looked straight at me and asked, “Do you like the sweater, Hannah?”
Jeffrey had laughed mockingly. “Well, apparently somebody has to like it.”
I looked down at myself and said firmly, “Yeah, I actually do like it.”
Jeffrey and I broke up three months later, but there was another person from those years whom I remembered even more clearly than Jeffrey: Benedict’s wife. She used to draw ridiculous little cartoons on Benedict’s paper lunch bags, and he would carefully tape her favorites right beside the cash register.
Every single Thursday, Benedict left work at exactly five o’clock sharp. When someone teased him about a regional manager meeting once, Benedict grabbed his coat and said, “I have dinner with my wife, and the meeting can survive without me.”
Then one Thursday, he did not leave at five, sitting alone in his office staring silently at his phone. The next week, he barely spoke to anyone, and a month later, he left the bookstore completely because his wife was terribly sick and he was going home to care for her full-time.
I never saw him again after that, though I eventually heard that she had passed away. Now, eleven years later, he was sitting right at my mother’s dinner table, and I could not stop wondering whether Mom truly understood what kind of complex ghost she was stepping into.
PART III: THE GARDEN AT NIGHT
Benedict stayed until just after nine o’clock in the evening. Mom stood at the open front door smiling brightly as his car slowly backed out of the driveway into the street. Then she closed the door and turned around to look at me.
“Well?” she asked with anticipation.
I kept looking through the window until Benedict’s red taillights completely disappeared into the dark. Mom’s happy smile faded the moment she saw the serious expression on my face.
“Mom, before you get any closer to him, there is something you need to know,” I said quietly.
She did not answer right away, so I told her everything about the bookstore years ago. I told her about Benedict, about his wife, and about how deeply that loving marriage had seemed woven into the very core of who he was as a person.
Mom listened intently without interrupting me once, and finally, I said the thought that had been sitting heavily in my chest all evening: “You have spent your whole life coming second, Mom, to bills, to work, to Dad when he was around, and to me.”
Her eyebrows drew together in concern as I swallowed hard. “I just do not want you spending the rest of your life competing with a memory of someone who is not even here anymore.”
Mom did not offer a verbal answer to my concern. Instead, she walked straight into the hallway and pulled her heavy winter coat off the wall hook.
“Put your shoes on right now, Hannah,” she instructed calmly.
I stared at her in complete confusion. “What are you doing?”
She grabbed her car keys off the table. “I could stand here and explain this to you, but you would still think I am just making excuses for him.”
She looked me dead in the eye and added, “There is something specific you need to see for yourself.”
Mom drove through the quiet streets for about fifteen minutes without explaining a single thing about our destination.
“Are you kidnapping me right now, Mom?” I asked into the silence.
“Yes, I am,” she replied without looking over.
“Good to know,” I muttered.
“You ask entirely too many questions, Hannah,” she noted gently.
“Well, you raised me to be this way, Mom,” I reminded her.
That comment finally earned a tiny smile from her, but she kept her eyes on the road until we turned into a quiet community garden tucked right behind a small local recreation center. Most of the garden plots were completely dark, but beautiful strings of warm yellow lights ran along the main walking path.
Then I saw Benedict standing under the soft lights. He was kneeling down in the dirt beside a tall tomato plant, carefully tying one of its thick green stems to a wooden stake.
Mom rolled down her driver’s side window and called out, “You are strangling that stem!”
Benedict looked up from the soil. “I am supporting it, Loretta!”
“It is clearly leaning away from you,” she teased back.
“Ungrateful plant,” he said with a subtle shake of his head.
I stared at Mom in utter shock. “You actually knew he would be here at this hour?”
“I knew he would probably be here checking on them,” she corrected as she parked the car.
Benedict brushed the dark dirt off his knees as the two of us walked up the path toward him, and his face softened the moment he saw me walking beside my mother. “Ah, hello again.”
I folded my arms across my chest tightly. “That is certainly reassuring.”
Mom touched my elbow gently. “Hannah, look around at these plots.”
I looked closer and noticed several small wooden plaques placed carefully beside the various garden plots, some bearing names and others displaying dates.
Benedict followed my gaze and explained softly, “This specific section of the grounds belongs to a local grief support group.”
“A grief support group?” I asked, turning back to him.
He nodded toward the tomato plants behind him. “My wife grew them every single summer without fail, and after she passed away, I could not even look at one without instantly thinking of her.”
He took a deep breath before continuing. “When I joined the support group, they told us to plant something we would have to keep alive long enough to see another season turn.”
“And you specifically chose tomatoes?” I asked.
Mom snorted amusedly from beside me. “Pure arrogance on his part, Hannah, because he killed two whole batches first.”
“It was one and a half batches, Loretta,” Benedict corrected defensively.
“It was definitely two full batches,” Mom insisted.
Benedict sighed dramatically. “Your mother is always so wonderfully supportive of my efforts.”
I looked directly at Mom. “You already knew all about his wife?”
“Of course I knew about her, Hannah,” Mom answered softly.
“How much did you know?” I pressed.
Mom slipped her hands into her coat pockets. “Enough to know that I would have really liked her as a person.”
That statement stopped me completely in my tracks. All evening, I had assumed Mom was simply too infatuated to notice what I had seen years ago, but in reality, she had seen far more than I ever had.
Benedict took a step closer to us, though he respectfully maintained a comfortable distance, and I looked him straight in the eye. “Do you still love her?”
“Yes, I do,” his answer came without a single second of hesitation.
Benedict glanced toward the crooked tomato plant behind him. “She passed away, Hannah, but she was not erased from my heart.”
Then he looked directly at my mother with deep affection. “Loving your mother did not require me to stop loving the woman who taught me how to love in the first place.”
I frowned, trying to process his words. “What does that even mean?”
