Seeds of Misunderstanding

I'm thirty-two years old and I own a board game cafe in a small town on the Nova Scotia coast, and for the past two weeks I have been useless. That's the setup. My boyfriend Ravi moved out fourteen days ago with four boxes and a rice cooker, and ever since then I've been running the place on autopilot, pouring coffee for the retirees who play cribbage at the corner table and hearing maybe half of what anyone says to me.

"Amelia, you gave me change for a five and I gave you a ten," said Dot, one of the cribbage ladies, for the third time.

"Sorry. Sorry." I counted it out again. My hands knew the work even if the rest of me didn't.

It was late May, which in our town means the tourist season is thinking about starting but hasn't committed. The ferry was running, the fog was doing its usual thing, and the cafe smelled like coffee and the plywood shelving my father built when I opened the place six years ago. I'd spent the morning rearranging the same shelf of Monopoly variants and pretending that was a task.

The truth was I wasn't even that sad about Ravi. We'd been drifting apart for a year and we both knew it. What stung was the boredom. Four years of my life, and now there was this big empty stretch of evenings where I used to argue about whose turn it was to cook. I missed having plans. I missed being someone with a Friday.

Sean came in around two, wearing his ferry coveralls still zipped, smelling faintly of diesel, holding a rolled-up piece of paper like it was a subpoena. He's thirty-three, a deckhand on the town ferry, and he's been my friend since we were both younger and dumber. We dated for about four months back when I was twenty-two and he was twenty-three, right after college, and then we sat down like reasonable adults and decided the friendship was worth more than the awkward makeout sessions. It was the correct call. He's the closest thing I have to a brother who isn't actually my brother, which I realize is a strange sentence, but small towns work that way.

"You got mail at my place," he said, dropping the roll on the counter.

"My place gets mail at your place?"

"Some company called Verdant Something. Seed catalog. The delivery guy can't read, apparently." He unrolled it. It was a seed catalog, glossy, with a tomato on the cover the size of a newborn's head. "Address says this building, but it's got your old landlord's postal code or something. Anyway, I fixed it. I'm basically the postal service now."

"You took the ferry to work holding a seed catalog."

"I did. It got me out of hosing down the car deck. Don't tell the captain." He leaned on the counter and looked at the catalog. "You should start a garden. Look at this beet. That beet is obscene."

"I can't keep a fern alive, Sean."

"Then get the fern a friend. Community of ferns. They'll teach it how to live." He flipped a page. "There's a squash in here called Muscle Mountie. I need you to grow that just so I can see it."

I actually laughed, which surprised me. First real laugh in two weeks. "Thank you for this. Genuinely. This is the dumbest thing anyone's given me all month."

"That's what I'm here for. Also I'll take a coffee, black, and whatever's fresh that you didn't burn."

"The everything muffins are fine and you're a jerk."

"I'm a jerk with a ten-minute break and a squash to show you."

I poured his coffee and he took his usual stool at the end of the counter, which was where he'd sat for six years, back when the stools were new and so were we. We talked about nothing for a while. The ferry's engine was making a noise the captain hated. Dot was accusing her cribbage partner of cheating, which she did every day as a form of affection. It was normal. It was the first normal ten minutes I'd had in weeks, and I noticed that, and I was grateful for it in a way I didn't say out loud.

His phone buzzed in his coveralls and he pulled it out, glanced at it, and stood up.

"Gotta take this. Back in a sec."

He walked to the far end of the cafe, near the window, and turned away from me. And I want to state I wasn't eavesdropping. But the cafe was empty except for the cribbage ladies, who were busy with their accusation, and Sean was ten feet away talking at a volume he clearly thought was private, and I was bored, and I'm only human.

"Yeah, no, I know," he said. "It's a surprise, so don't say anything... No, she has no idea... Saturday, seven, I booked us the corner table... Yeah, the anniversary one. I already told them it's our anniversary, they're doing the special thing with the... Okay, okay. It's handled. Just don't blow it."

He laughed at something the person said, low and warm, the laugh he uses with people he likes.

"Alright. Saturday. Seven sharp. Wear something nice... No, I mean it, last time you showed up in running shoes... Fine, fine. Bye."

He hung up and came back looking pleased with himself, in a way I recognized. Sean has a face he makes when he's pulled something off.

"Sorry," he said. "Work stuff."

"Sure," I said. "Saturday, huh?"

I don't know why I said that. It came out before the better part of me could stop it.

His face did a thing. "You... heard that."

"Just the end. Anniversary. Sounds nice." I wiped a counter that was already clean. "Who's the lucky person?"

"Nobody you... it's not like that," he said, too fast, and then he did the worst possible thing, which was change the subject. "Anyway. Muscle Mountie squash. Think about it."

He downed his coffee, said he had a boat to catch, which was literally true, and left. The bell over the door rang behind him and Dot looked up from her cards.

"Your fellow's got a spring in his step," she said.

"He's not my fellow."

"Anniversary dinner, is it? Kara saw him at the florist yesterday. Buying a big bunch of something pink."

The floor dropped out from under me in the slow, stupid way it does. Florist. Anniversary. A corner table booked for Saturday. Wear something nice.

I picked up the seed catalog and rolled it back up with more force than the paper deserved. Muscle Mountie squash. A garden he wanted me to start. And now a secret woman with pink flowers and a reservation at the Anchorage, which is the nicest restaurant we have and the one place in town where you take someone if you mean it.

He'd said "she has no idea!" She. Not you. Though I supposed a man talking about a surprise for me would say that too.

Two weeks single and apparently the universe's idea of a joke was this: my oldest friend, the one person I could count on not to make things weird, had a girlfriend he was hiding, and every kind thing he'd done for me lately, the coffee, the catalog, the sitting with me while I stared at the wall, was probably a man managing his guilty conscience.

"It's not like that," he'd said. Sure. That's what people say right before it's exactly like that.

I looked at the catalog. I looked at the door. I looked at Dot, who was back to cheating at cribbage.

Saturday was four days away. Sean had the late shift Friday, which meant he'd be stuck on that boat with the cars and the foghorn and nowhere to go while I marched up the gangway and asked him to his face what the hell was going on. It was a ridiculous plan. It was the most dramatic possible venue.

I was already looking forward to it. First thing in two weeks I'd looked forward to.

Friday came and I closed the cafe early, which Dot approved of loudly from her stool.

"About time. You've been moping over that counter for two weeks."

"I have not been moping. I've been restructuring my priorities."

"Is that what they call it now!" She gathered her cards like a dealer who'd seen everything. "Go yell at the boy. You'll feel better."

I hadn't told Dot the plan exactly, but Dot extracts information the way other people extract teeth, slowly and with the victim grateful when it's over. She knew enough.

The ferry docked at half past four and the last cars rolled off, and by five the deck was empty except for a couple of parked trucks whose owners were probably at the lobster wharf arguing about prices. I walked up the gangway like I had business there, which technically I did, though the business was nonsense.

Sean was on the car deck coiling a rope. He looked up and did a visible double take.

"Amelia. What are you... is everything okay? The cafe's not on fire?"

"The cafe is fine. I need to talk to you."

"Okay." He set the rope down. "Here? It's kind of cold."

"It's fine. I like it here. It's dramatic."

"That's one word for it." He leaned on the rail and waited, which was more patience than I deserved, because what came out of me next was an ambush I'd spent three days rehearsing and still botched on arrival.

"Are you seeing someone?"

Silence. A gull screamed somewhere, showing off.

"Sorry, what?"

"You heard me. Are you seeing somebody and hiding it from me. Because I heard your phone call, Sean. Saturday, seven, the corner table at the Anchorage, the anniversary, wear something nice. And Dot says Kara saw you buying pink flowers. Big ones. So either you have a secret girlfriend or you're running the worst-organized affair on the coast, and honestly I don't know which one is worse for me."

He stared at me. Then his mouth twitched. Then he made a sound I want to describe as a laugh trying to escape through a closed door.

"Amelia."

"Don't you 'Amelia' me. I've been losing my mind for three days. I thought you were being nice to me out of guilt. Like I was your charity case because Ravi left, and all along you had some woman with pink flowers..."

"Amelia." He put both hands up. "My mother."

The word landed and just sat there.

"Your mother."

"My parents' anniversary is Saturday. Thirty-five years. I'm surprising them with dinner at the Anchorage. The corner table, the flowers, the whole thing. The phone call was