Edge of the Garden Pt. 01 of 02

Satisfied with the stunned expression on her soon-to-be ex-husband's face, Rani beamed to herself as she skipped up the stairs, on her way to having the soundest sleep she'd had in years.

***Two years later***

Only mad dogs, Englishmen... and the odd Indo-Canadian woman, Rani thought, feeling the unyielding midday Sun on her arms as she trudged from her car into the school yard with a floppy-brimmed hat and a huge water bottle. It was the first Saturday in July, and she was confident she would have a nice, solitary hour or two of gardening.

Payal and Lavanya had just graduated eighth grade the previous week, and were set to attend the high school next door in September. But Rani's commitment to the community garden transcended her kids' being students at the elementary school. It had become her passion in the 18 months since her divorce had been finalized, not to mention a source of therapy.

After the split, Rani had kept their house, and Dhanush found an apartment for himself about 10 minutes away from the school. They initially alternated weeks with the girls, but that ended when the now 13-year-olds asked to join her on the most recent family court date.

Each submitting a letter to the judge, they asked to have only one week per month with their dad and the remaining weeks with their mom--year round, even in the summers. Although that explosive court session had happened almost a month ago, Rani still shook her head at Dhanush's outburst before the judge and his accusation that his ex-wife had turned his daughters against him.

While Rani had been trying to process what was going on, Payal calmly stood up and reminded the judge of her letter where she listed all the times her dad had dismissed her when she asked him for extra help with school.

Before Dhanush could respond, Lavanya stood and said their dad was lucky they were still willing to see him one week per month instead of not at all. She added they'd kept this move from their mother because they were sure she would discourage it. Humbled, Dhanush reluctantly accepted the twins' terms.

Being a teacher, Andrea was enjoying her first week off from school, but promised Rani she would be joining her later in the garden if she was still there. Expectedly, there was not a student to be found on school property. Rani surveyed the field, content that she was alone in the vegetable patch, and content that Payal and Lavanya wouldn't cause trouble at home where she'd left them with a few friends and a pizza for lunch.

The chicken wire fence around the edge of the garden was tall enough to hide small animals, not to mention people crouching in the dirt. But Rani couldn't imagine another person would want to be out there today. Even when a few leaves rustled in the cabbage patch about 10 meters away, she thought it was just a rabbit or two. Until she saw a large figure stand up from a kneeling position in the shadows.

"Hello?" she called out, recognizing it to be a man, and too tall of a man to be a student. "Do you... do you need something, Sir?" The man was tall and muscular, but his face was hidden by a straw hat. Rani lifted the brim of her own hat as she peered at him, trying to make out a face.

"Yeah," he shouted back. Rani froze upon hearing that voice. "I need a bouncy hop ball rematch."

Rani dropped her hand shovel and it almost landed on a tomato vine, but she didn't notice as she stepped closer to the tall man wearing a raggedy t-shirt and dingy jeans.

"Hayden?" she almost whispered. He took off his hat, gave her a tired smile, and she bounded over to him in just a few steps to leap into his arms. "What happened to you?" she asked with concern, noting that he'd grown a bit leaner and his face was a little more worn. The three or four days of stubble didn't disguise the fact he'd lost weight.

"Never mind any of that," he shook his head and held her hands. "How have you been, Rani? It looks like you haven't changed at all in the last three years." That's when he noticed her bare ring finger on her left hand, and then glanced up at her collarbone where her marriage necklace used to rest. Rani followed his eyes and her hand flew to her neck as she gave a sheepish laugh.

"I don't think I've changed, but circumstances have," she said, knowing he was smart enough to deduce her marriage had ended. She looked down at Hayden's left hand where his wedding band still sat.

"How are Lisa and the baby?" she asked. It was impossible to miss Hayden's face darken as he pulled his hands back and stepped away to grab the shovel he'd left in the ground. "Hayden?" Rani called as he turned around and jabbed the spade into the dirt. "Is everything okay?"

"Rani, it's wonderful to see you again, but I really can't talk about this yet," Hayden grunted as he tried to get to the root of a large weed. Rani wasn't sure if this was one of those situations where she should press, or whether she should let it go. She chose the latter.

"Are you... are you back teaching here?" she asked instead, going back to retrieve her hand shovel.

"I'm pretty sure I will be," he responded. "I spoke to the principal a week back and she said they'll put me down for any vacancies come September. There's always a few."

"And your... have you found a place to live?" Rani was being careful to word her questions so that they may or may not include Lisa and their baby.

"I'm staying at my sister's spare apartment that she uses when she's at Grace Memorial and doesn't want to drive back late," he responded, referring to the main hospital in town where his older sister sometimes got calls for her services as a pathologist. "Just until I find my own place."

His own place? 'I'm staying at my sister's apartment'? Rani distractedly poked her hand shovel in the ground while her brain picked apart Hayden's language for clues. They hadn't been confidantes but she thought they'd at least grown close that last summer when they'd worked together several hours each week in this very garden.

She thought about how devastating his smile had been when they'd had their bouncy hop ball race three years ago. That man was not the one dejectedly spearing the dirt in front of her, seemingly answering her questions out of obligation and not because they had been friends.

As Hayden wasn't even looking at her while responding to her queries, Rani let the conversation drop despite how worried she was. They each worked in silence for the next 10 minutes, Rani facing away from him. The only sounds around them were birds chirping and the occasional vehicle that sped by the school.

"So how are the twins?" Hayden finally broke the stillness between them, just when Rani almost forgot he was there.

"They're... they're great," she said, spinning around. This new Hayden was so aloof--and broken?-- that she wasn't sure how much detail she should delve into. Did he really want to know how they were now, which would involve talking about the divorce, or was he just feeling bad about being so terse a few minutes ago?

"They'll be starting high school in September," she offered.

"How... how's Payal?" he followed up. "I mean, how is she dealing with school? I remember she was something of a prodigy when it came to certain things but she struggled with concentrating sometimes."

Rani was surprised he remembered her daughter's name, let alone what kind of student she was after a five-year gap from being her teacher.

"Well, you were observant," she smiled. "More so than I was anyway. We were able to diagnose her with autism and ADHD a couple of years ago and get her some help that has made school more manageable." Hayden nodded with a small smile of his own.

"I didn't want to say anything back then and alarm you in case I was wrong," he clarified. "General educators aren't actually trained to observe these things, especially not when you're teaching eight-year-olds who are full of energy anyway."

"Then how did you know?"

"You get to notice patterns after being in the classroom for a few years," he explained. "There's being energetic in a typical kind of way, and then... there's walking around the room with a pencil a couple of times in the middle of writing a paragraph."

"Payal did that?" Rani smiled.

"Yup, pretty much daily. I waited to see if she would actually make it to the sharpener with that pencil but she rarely did." Hayden's lips curved further upward than Rani had seen them go all day. They worked for another 45 minutes before Rani looked at the time. She didn't want to leave Hayden but she couldn't leave her kids home alone with their friends for too long either.

"I... I have to get back to the girls," she told him after they'd been silent for a while. "Do you know when you'll be back here, though? I mean... it was nice to have some company while weeding." Hayden looked long and hard at her, as though he was contemplating something serious.

"Uh, no," he finally said. "I just dropped by today on a whim and I'll probably stay a little longer, but I don't know when I'll be back."

"Oh," Rani said, feeling a bit foolish. "Of course. I guess I'll see you when I see you."

She went home and found herself trying to calculate when the next most likely time would be to run into him again in the garden.

"Mom, are you okay?" Lavanya asked her when her mother got up during dinner to retrieve the sugar jar from the cupboard. "I just asked you to pass the salt, and it's right there in front of you on the table."

"Right. Sorry, ma," Rani replied, shaking her head.

"Something happened at the garden," Payal stated, her gaze boring a hole into her mother's face. "You weren't like this before you left, mom."

"I..." Rani longed for the days when she could just tell her kids a poorly constructed lie and have them believe it. "Fine. I ran into Mr. Stahl in the garden today."

"Mr. Stahl!" Lavanya exclaimed at the mention of their favourite teacher.

"Is he back?" Payal asked at the same time.

"Yes. I mean, probably," Rani stammered. "He's very likely back at the school teaching third grade again in September."

"Maybe we should tag along with you if you go tomorrow, mom," Lavanya suggested. "It would be so cool to see him again."

"No," Rani said to a look of confusion on both girls' faces. "That's what I've been so preoccupied with. He's--something took place in the last few years and I don't know what it was, but he's not the same person anymore."

"Was he mean to you?" Payal asked.

"No, he was perfectly polite," Rani answered, trying to come up with the right description for what she saw was missing in Hayden. "But he was... broken somehow." Both girls were silent, trying to figure out what their mother meant.

"Is he still married?" Lavanya queried, breaking the hush in the room.

"What does that have to do with anything?" Rani questioned back.

"Well, is he?" Payal pressed. The twins exchanged a fleeting look between them, knowing what the other was thinking.

"Uh, I... I can't be sure," Rani responded. "He still had his wedding ring on but he said he was staying with his sister across town until he had his own place. That was really what I've been wondering about all afternoon."

"He's getting separated," Lavanya confidently concluded. "Now's your chance, mom."

"What?! Lavanya Parvathi Menon," Rani lectured, only to be cut off by her other daughter holding her hand up like a stop sign.

"Mom, don't full-name us right now," Payal said. "We're 13 and we've been watching how good you and Mr. Stahl are together since we were 8." She stimmed with the pepper mill, sliding it from hand to hand across the smooth wood of the kitchen table.

"You deserve it after all those years of dad!" Lavanya added.

"Girls, stop," Rani said, pushing her chair back. "I know this may seem so easy at your age, but it's not point A to point B. First of all, something was wrong with Mr. Stahl today, and when you have a friend who's in that shape, the last thing you do is think about yourself."

Payal stopped sliding the pepper mill and Lavanya looked over at her with her lips pursed.

"Also, there's no evidence that he's no longer married. I'm not even thinking about that, though; I'm thinking about what happened to turn such a caring and open man into someone who looks like he's been to hell and back.

"If you two want to come with me to the garden tomorrow, sure, I'll take you. But you have to promise me that if we see Mr. Stahl, you will not talk to him about anything I told you in confidence tonight. And you will not mention his personal life."

The girls nodded, chastened.

They were extra responsible the next day, Rani noticed, not only doing their chores but helping her with cleaning and prepping meals for the week. It was obvious they were waiting for after lunch with bated breath, which was when Rani typically went to the garden on summer weekends.

Payal and Lavanya ran out to the field from the car, their water bottles sloshing as they hung off each girl's wrist. Rani strolled to the tool shed, not wanting to glance toward the garden for fear of being disappointed that Hayden wouldn't be there.

When she returned with weeders and hand shovels, she found she'd guessed right. He wasn't there.

"Well, this is kind of a waste," Payal said, peering in the winding leaves that grew among the lettuce.

"What?" her mother replied in mock confusion. "You mean you weren't on your best behaviour all day long so that you'd get the chance to weed with me?" She handed each girl a hand shovel. "Imagine how happy Mr. Stahl will be whenever he happens to return and sees that a bunch of garden fairies came along and did a tonne of work in the meantime."

Personally, Rani was also a bit relieved Hayden wasn't there because she was sure her demeanour changed around him and she didn't want her daughters to notice it. But when she heard the fence door creek some 20 minutes later, she knew she was sunk even before turning around.

"Mr. Stahl!" Lavanya exclaimed, dropping her hand shovel and skipping over to the entrance. She hugged him with the reckless abandon that only a teenage girl could muster.

"Oh wow, Mr. Stahl, you need a sandwich," Payal observed, making Hayden's grin reach all the way up to his eyes.

There's the smile I missed, Rani thought as she watched the man she'd mutedly loved for years, gently pat each of her daughters' backs.

"Seriously, did you have lunch yet?" Payal continued. "Do you want to come over for dinner? Indian food will fatten you right up." Hayden began to chuckle.

"It's so good to see you two again," he said. "And yes, I've already eaten. But I have something to do tonight so I can't accept your very kind invitation, Payal."

"Is it a date?" Payal asked, making Rani's eyes widen in alarm. She knew part of Payal's autism was not having the same social filters as neurotypical people, but she'd hoped her daughter would have remembered to not ask about Hayden's personal life.

"Uh, no," he said, glancing up amusedly at a mortified Rani. "It's a meeting with some friends. But it's important and I can't miss it. Maybe some other time."

"Girls, let's keep going so we're not out here forever," Rani reminded them. Lavanya took her sister's hand and Rani was sure she was telling her what Rani had just been thinking.

"It's nice to see you again," she told Hayden when her daughters had walked away. Living with Dhanush had trained her to assume men didn't want to talk unless they spoke to her first, so she turned to resume her gardening.

"Rani, hold on," Hayden said instead. "I want to apologize for yesterday."

"There's nothing for you to apologize for," Rani told him. "I shouldn't have been peppering you with so many questions."

"Which is exactly what a friend does when she sees another friend after many years," he countered. "I'm sorry, I just wasn't--"

"It's okay," she said softly, looking into those eyes which were greener than the garden in which they both stood. "There's nothing you have to say or do right now. These weeds are going to keep growing back so I'll be here all summer." She warmly patted Hayden's shoulder after seeing his tired smile, then kept working.