Disclaimer: They characters are not mine and I make no profit from them.
Rated: G
Author's note: Just a little Valentine gift. This takes place three days after "The Long Ago Girl" which aired Feb. 11, 1985.
Thanks to Cheri for beta-ing.
Hearts and Flowers
By L. M. Lewis
McCormick leaned on the shovel and studied the nearly completed ditch, then the stack of drainage tiles, and then the ditch again. "We're gonna need at least a half-dozen more," he announced. "I'll just take the truck and run over to the garden center-"
The judge looked up from the pile of papers he'd been sorting out on the table near the pool. "Nah, I can do that. You just keep digging." He stood up, pushing the remaining papers into a folder.
"Judge, it's no problem; I could use a break."
"Not if you want to be done by five; I thought you said you had a 'hot date' tonight, what's her name . . .?
"Audrey. Her name is Audrey." McCormick smiled. It was Thursday. He wasn't going to mention that Audrey sat across the aisle from him in Introduction to Macroeconomics and the hot date would probably consist of pizza and maybe one beer afterwards. "But you looked like you were doing something important over there," McCormick added. "Picking up tiles is more in the 'heavy lifting' category." He'd still been hoping, since it was also February 14th, that he'd have a chance to get something, maybe roses, in the floral section of the garden shop.
"I can still do the heavy lifting. And how heavy can six tiles be, anyway?" The judge already had the papers under one arm and was letting himself back in to the house.
McCormick shook his head and turned back to the project, reconciling himself to a quick stop at a florist's on the way over to class, and the hopes that they'd still have something left by then.
00000
Forty-five minutes later, he heard the truck return. McCormick leaned the shovel against the wall and wiped his hands off on his jeans. As he walked around the house to the front, he heard the phone ring, and saw the judge letting himself in the front door to answer it.
McCormick strolled over to the truck, unlatched the back and picked up three of the tiles. Passing back along the passenger's side, he glanced in and saw something lying on the seat. He stopped and looked more closely. It was a white rose with petals hinting pink at the tips, its stem wrapped loosely in a piece of green floral paper.
McCormick frowned. They'd seen Jane Meadows off at the train station three days ago. The judge had seemed pretty okay-maybe a little pensive, but mostly okay. Now he's out buying roses.
McCormick hefted the tiles and walked back around the house, pondering. He couldn't honestly say he'd ever thought of Hardcastle in terms of flowers before, but if he had, he would probably have pegged him as a dozen-long-stemmed-red-roses kind of guy, the sort of thing that is a spinal reflex. God knows he could afford them.
A single rose was more the territory of the impoverished romantic. There was an art to giving one. A single rose neededwords to go with it. I do stuff like that.
He put the tiles down alongside the others and heard Hardcastle coming around from the front. He was carrying the other three.
"Don't say I didn't help," the judge remarked.
"Dammit, Hardcase," McCormick took the tiles from him. "If you rip the stitches out of your shoulder-"
"I'm going out again."
"The phone?"
"Nah, something else."
The rose, Mark smiled to himself. Then out loud he warned "No freelancing. You were looking at that file for a long time this afternoon."
Hardcastle waved it off as he walked away. "Nothing like that, just an errand."
00000
McCormick pondered the short list as he laid the other tiles. There was Mattie Groves, one of the judge's regular opponents across the poker table. Mark liked her; she could give as good as she got and she never tried to fill an inside straight. But the judge had known her for a long time, why start with roses now? 'Course he's on the rebound, anything can happen. Then there was Angie Mather, who'd been awfully friendly at the neighborhood watch meeting last month. She'd sent a plate of cookies over afterwards, chocolate chip. Maybe this was by way of a 'thank you'.
He had put down fifteen tiles, tamping each one in place, before he heard the truck return again. He checked his watch. Thirty minutes? He laid and tamped the last three tiles. The judge did not appear. McCormick wiped his hands again and walked back to the front of the house. The truck was there. No judge.
McCormick walked past the passenger side again, glancing casually to his left. No rose, either. He stood there a moment, leaning back against the side of the truck with his arms crossed, staring at the house. Judge Groves lived all the way down by Long Beach. Angie was a lot closer but, still, it took ten minutes to get almost anywhere, park the car and get out, that didn't leave much time for conversation unless . . .
Unless the lady wasn't talking back . . . It felt like the moment when the last tumbler falls into place and the door swings open.
It was a pretty short drive over to Woodlawn. What, some sort of apology? McCormick shook his head slowly. Jane Bigelow had been ten years before the judge and the future Mrs. Hardcastle had met, and last week's reunion had been ten, no eleven, years after Nancy's death. I think she'd understand.
McCormick walked back around to the patio, kicked off his muddy shoes and let himself into the kitchen. He stopped at the sink to wash his hands, then walked down the hallway, managing to be fairly quiet, without intending to be, on account of his stocking feet.
He saw him sitting at his desk, half-turned away from the hall, looking steadily toward the mantel, where her picture sat. His elbow rested on his crossed knee, and his chin rested on his fist.
McCormick stood in the doorway and cleared his throat. Hardcastle looked over at him. "You done already?"
"For today, yeah." Mark shrugged. "I'll cover it over and throw some grass seed down tomorrow. Unless you got some plans involving those files you were looking at."
"Nah, needs a little more time."
"Long weekend then. Hey," McCormick smiled. "I think I left a couple of trout in that river last week. Maybe we should-"
"Oh, that's what this is all about, huh? No, McCormick, I'm not pining. Besides, don't think I'm quite up to casting yet." He moved his left shoulder experimentally.
McCormick shrugged and then scratched the back of his neck, looking over at the picture of Nancy and then back at the judge. "Okay. Well, I just thought-"
The judge's eyes narrowed as he took in McCormick's gaze. He appeared to be assembling pieces with the speed of an experienced investigator. "Of all the . . . you are the snoopiest, most interfering-" the judge sputtered. "You think on account of me seeing Jane again-"
"I dunno, Judge, I was just trying to remember the last time you ran over to Santa Monica with a rose."
"Just so happens, hotshot, that that's something I do every February 14th
since . . ." The judge trailed off, his eyes narrowing again. The conversation had obviously taken an unwanted segue.
There was a pause before he began again, slowly. "She liked them. They're called Lydia's. She tried to grow 'em in the back there, but they got the root rot, lost the last one about a year after . . ." The judge paused again.
In the silence that strung out from there, McCormick interjected, "I'm sorry," and then, "I didn't mean to pry." ('The hell you didn't,' he heard Hardcastle mutter under his breath.) "I just thought maybe this whole thing with Jane had-"
Hardcastle held up one hand. "Wait a sec, put that one down. It's not that at all." He sighed; having come this far he looked like he just wanted to finish it up. "With somebody like her," he pointed to the picture on the mantle, "it's a big hole when they're gone. You never really fill in something like that; you kind of learn to work around it.
"Anyway, she would have been the first one to say 'Don't sit around feeling sorry for yourself.' It's just that, hell, you don't get over it very fast."
McCormick leaned against the doorframe and shook his head. "You make it sound like a disease, Judge."
"Hrmph. You go find the right girl, kiddo, settle down, and get back to me in twenty years; then we'll talk about it."
"Okay," McCormick laughed. "Step one; I gotta go take a shower."
He left the older man sitting at his desk smiling.
00000
Ten days later
The problem with not following doctors orders, Hardcastle concluded, was that it made it hard to take the moral high ground when telling someone else they should. He'd heard McCormick take the truck out right after breakfast this morning, only one day back from the Arizona Modifieds, and still not fully recovered from the bullet he'd taken to the right shoulder.
The judge himself had had an appointment with Frank. He took the Corvette, and by the time he returned, the truck was in the driveway. Hardcastle strode purposefully through the house, fully intending to give the kid a lecture on the meaning of 'taking it easy with the shoulder'.
Not in the kitchen, not by the pool. The light green strip of new-growth lawn overlying the drainage tiles caught his eye. It seemed to have sprung up overnight, with the onset of an early warm spell. His eye followed the line back to the garden, and he caught sight of some freshly dug soil.
He walked over to it, although he suspected he recognized the plant even from a distance, even with only the earliest buds of spring. He bent over to read the tag on one of the thorny stems. He straightened up and smiled, and thought just maybe the way to fill a hole, is to plant something new.