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the retort.
Speedy-Sari-bumps, that’s what Isaac called the craters Sari’s tires had gouged
into the driveway. Potholes and noise, Sari had brought both into Tilly’s
life.
    “You still pissed about the James thing? Is that why you don’t
want a lift to the airport tomorrow?” Sari smiled, but the gesture was laced
with menace. Her challenge might have worked three years earlier, before guilt
became a constant companion. But now? Hey, good luck on that one.
    “Sari, you’ll be too busy here to drive us to the airport.”
Tilly’s voice dragged in the heat. “And ignore James if he calls.” Just as I’m ignoring my memories of Sebastian. But
there he was again: her first love, taking up space in her mind.
    “James is…loaded.” Sari increased her pace with a pant.
“I…looked him up on Google.”
    Sari rabbited on, sharing details of her Google search. James
had invented an interactive web game that millions of people were addicted to,
including Sari’s two teenage boys. She dismissed the game as having to do with
accumulating assets and dominating the world. As always, it was the bottom line
that interested Sari: James had made enough money to sell his software company
in Chicago and retire to North Carolina at forty-five.
    Sari batted away a mosquito. “Tils, you need to step outside
your comfort zone, discover the world of clients rich and ready for the
taking.”
    Tils. A lazy word that slid from the side of Sari’s mouth, an
abbreviation of an already abbreviated name. Tilly shook back her hair,
forgetting she’d lopped it off a few weeks earlier with the kitchen scissors.
Something clicked and scrunched in her head. Her brain rusting up in the heat?
She shook her head again. Click, scrunch. What
depressing sounds to come from the center of your consciousness.
    “You have zilch vision,” Sari said.
    “Yup. Visionless and proud of it.” There was no point
disagreeing. Tilly didn’t want vision, she wanted survival—hers and Isaac’s. The
jury was still debating the survival of Piedmont Perennials, a business that had
sprung out of the infertility of grief. Her secret fantasy niggled, the one in
which the business folded and she and Isaac retreated to England. Of course,
Issac would be devastated, which made her daydream his nightmare. No, Piedmont
Perennials had to survive, and for that Tilly needed the woman she longed to
fire.
    “Come on, hon. Look around you.” Sari circled her arms as if
she were an overweight swimmer flailing in a rubber ring. “You’ve created five
acres of landscaped heaven out of jungle. You know a thing or two about
landscape design.”
    How had Sari sneaked into Tilly’s life? Was it the tricolor
cookies? She had already disarmed Tilly with a nasally slide of vowels and
dropped r ’s that screamed “Brooklyn!” before dumping
the pièce de résistance: Sari grew up two blocks from David’s childhood home in
Sheepshead Bay and still bought tricolors, moist and rich with raspberry, almond
and semisweet chocolate, from the bakery in David’s old neighborhood. She even
had a box in her freezer and had promised to share. The tricolors, when Sari
finally brought them over, were stale.
    The pileated woodpecker hammered into a tree then flapped away.
He was the reason Tilly hadn’t hacked down the decapitated pine that, as Sari
loved to point out, leaned over the propane tank. See? Sari was clued in. All
would be fine, just fine.
    “Sari, you’ve been a godsend.” True, until
the James debacle. “If you didn’t load up my truck and not return
till every shrub was sold, I’d be donating plants to the Salvation Army.” True again. “But you want to rush around corners and
see what’s next, and I want to poodle along. Wholesale customers are easy. They
demand x, y, z on such a date and I, or rather you, deliver. But design
clients?” Tilly shuddered. “They’d suck up all my make-nice happy juices.”
    Sari harrumphed, and they trudged on.
    Be nice, Tilly.