Part 9 — “The Bloom and the Scar”
August came heavy and loud.
Cicadas sang like electric wires. The air stuck to your skin before sunrise. Everything smelled like ripe tomatoes and hot pavement. And the garden — the stubborn, blessed garden — was in full bloom.
Zinnias exploded in reds and oranges. The beans curled around trellises like secrets. The collards were tall and bold, their wide leaves catching the morning light like sails.
And yet, not everything was beautiful.
The building across the street — the old laundromat that hadn’t been saved — was now a shell of concrete and steel. Construction crews came every morning at 7:02 sharp, pounding and drilling and raising a new kind of skyline. One without memory.
Mabel stood at the edge of the lot, Roo pressed against her leg, and watched the workers move like shadows.
She didn’t hate them.
But she hated what they didn’t know.
She hated that progress came with so much forgetting.
“Feels like a scar,” she said aloud.
Layla stood nearby, painting a new sign to mark the pollinator section. “It is. But even scars remind the body what it survived.”
Mabel looked at her — so young, so fierce, her curls tied back, arms freckled with sun and paint. “That a quote?”
Layla grinned. “Nah. Just what came out.”
Mabel turned back to the garden. “Sounds like something Jayson might’ve said.”
Layla was quiet a moment. “Maybe he did. Maybe it’s floating around in here somewhere.” She tapped her chest. “Waiting.”
That Saturday was the first community harvest.
Kids plucked cherry tomatoes into recycled yogurt containers. Someone brought baskets. Ms. Patrice passed around hot biscuits wrapped in foil. Marcus set up a table with bowls and tongs and labeled the food: “From the Grove Garden: Take What You Need.”
There were collard wraps, rosemary potatoes, tomato jam.
And over by the pecan tree, a cardboard sign read:
“Tell us what you remember.”
They weren’t sure who wrote it, but the box below it filled fast — with notes, photos, even small trinkets. A friendship bracelet. A marbled shooter. A folded napkin with a phone number and the words: “Met her here, 1996. Married her 1998.”
People cried. People laughed. People sat on milk crates and told stories like they were planting something too.
Late that afternoon, as golden light cut through the zinnias, Roo walked straight to the mural.
He sat down and stared at it.
Not a glance. Not a lazy blink. A stare.
Layla noticed first.
“He does that sometimes,” she whispered to Mabel. “Like he sees something we don’t.”
Mabel watched him — the dog who had lived through it all, alone, half-blind, still standing.
“He does see something,” she said. “He sees what stayed.”
That night, after the others had gone and the candles flickered low, Mabel sat alone under the trellis.
She held a photograph in her lap — an old one, recently found — of her and George in the garden back in ‘87, both in overalls, holding a basket of greens, smiles wide, hands dirt-stained.
Roo lay at her feet.
Layla came and sat beside her, barefoot, silent.
“I used to think this was the last place,” Mabel said softly. “The last patch of good in a world that didn’t care anymore.”
Layla didn’t respond right away.
Then she said, “Maybe it is the last place. But maybe the last place is where the new story starts.”
They sat there, shoulder to shoulder, as night fell.
The moon rose.
The city hummed its strange, uneven song.
And beneath it all, in that small stubborn lot, life bloomed beside the scar.