“Yesterday. God, I missed New York.”
“What, Dallas wasn’t kicking it for you anymore?”
“Oh, it was kicking something. More shit than anything, judging by the percentage of cowboy boots worn in that city.” She chuckled at her own joke along with the chorus of our laughter. “Honestly, I was looking for a reason to get out of there. I missed the city.”
“You say that like there aren’t a couple million people there,” Marcus argued.
“But it’s not New York,” she said, as if that explained everything. “It wasn’t hard to walk away from my corporate job, not even a little.”
“What, you didn’t get turned on doing social media for a computer company?” Kash asked with a brow up.
“Nope,” Laney said. “Now, if it’d been Apple, you’d have had to drag me back kicking and screaming.”
Mom laughed a little too loud. “You didn’t all have to come home. Really, we were doing okay, weren’t we, dear?”
Dad cleared his throat. “Okay being a relative term? Sure.”
“See?” Mom said, gesturing to Dad in confirmation.
Marcus’s face flattened.
But when he opened his mouth to speak, Mom cut him off. “Now, we appreciate you kids coming home to help out, but don’t you dare feel obligated. Your father and I will be just fine. Don’t you worry about us.”
Jett cast a glance around the table at us before covering Mom’s hand with his. “We’re happy to help out, Mom. Anyway, it’s not like we had anything else going on, did we?”
We echoed our affirmatives in solidarity, which were, of course, lies.
Laney had a great job with a stable, growing company. Jett managed a bookstore on the Upper West but had taken a leave of absence to come home. I’d been living on the other side of the country, not that I had any real roots there or any long-term prospects to speak of. Not that I did long-term either. But if I did, I still would have dropped it all to come home.
Kash had never left though. Instead, he took to the greenhouses to help Dad, who wasn’t getting any younger. If anyone was going to take over the shop that’d been in our family for generations, it’d be Kash.
And Marcus … well, after making a relative fortune in hedge funds, he’d bailed to day trade. And then to buy the shop—and its substantial debt—with the sole intention of turning the business around.
The honest truth? Mom was perfectly content making pretty things and ignoring ugly ones, and Dad was happier in the dirt than the paperwork. When business was booming, Longbourn had taken care of itself. But when times got tough, no one possessed the acumen to patch up the holes in the boat. And it had almost sunk.
I only hoped we would get it back on the water. With our bullheaded bunch, I had no doubt we’d get it moving again, if powered by nothing more than dog-paddling and sheer will.
“You starting at the shop tomorrow?” Kash asked, kicking my boot under the table.
“I dunno. Mom?”
“If you’re ready. Not that we have much business these days, but we always do more in the summers, especially when you’re on the counter,” she said, patting my shoulder.
Laney snickered.
“Yeah,” Kash said. “I’d be willing to bet Cougar Judy orders a couple of bouquets once she hears you’re behind the counter.”
Mom’s smile fell. “Judy always was one of our best customers. I wonder if she’s been getting her arrangements from Bower Bouquets.”
A collective chorus of derisive noise filled the room. Bower was the name on the company dartboard. They’d come in with a corporate swoop that put an end to almost every other shop in Manhattan. Ours had only survived this long because Longbourne provided wholesale flowers to neighboring shops and existed as a monument, a cornerstone of the neighborhood, and the only greenhouse of this size in Manhattan. The hip little boutiques and the big chains had driven everyone else out, and even the boutiques had to fight for scraps, what with Greenwich Village rent and the convenience of ordering flowers on 1-800-Roses4U.
“You know,” she started, “at garden club last week, Evangeline Bower was on her high horse about the new stores they just opened. She looked down her long nose at me through her whole humblebragging speech. She thinks I’m crass? Well, I think she’s a snob, plain and simple.”
“Maybe her French twist is too tight,” Laney joked.
“Judy’s not going to Bower,” Jett soothed. “She just loves Luke.”
Laney laughed. “We can put his pretty face in the front of the store and watch the ladies roll in.”
Mom softened, laughing when I framed my face and batted my lashes at her.
“Maybe we should put him in a sandwich board out front,” Laney joked.
“We can write Plant one on me on the front.” Jett smirked.
“Only if he’s naked,” Kash added.
“With a bell,” Marcus insisted.
“I mean, I wouldn’t say no,” I said with a shrug.
“You always were the one I couldn’t get to wear pants when you were little,” Mom said. “And by the fifth baby in six years, I found it hard to be bothered to care.”
“We cultivate many things,” Dad said. “Roses, poppies, and a penchant for exhibition.”
Mom laughed again, beaming at us as we volleyed. “All of the Bennets under one roof. It’s just a dream to have you home again.”
“Not all,” Marcus corrected.
Mom gave him a look. “Marcus Bennet, you are here every single night for dinner, and you do your laundry in my mud room. Do not pretend you don’t love it here, or I will call you a liar.”
He glanced at the ceiling and shook out his newspaper, but a ghost of a smile flickered across his lips.
As I scanned the faces of my family, I had to admit, I found my own sense of peace along with a shift I had yet to place. It’d been years since all of us were able to get home for a holiday, years more since we were in permanent residence. And now we were home, banded together with a sole purpose—save Longbourne.
I had the feeling it would take everything in us to do it. But if I had faith in one thing in the world, it was the Bennets’ ability to tackle every obstacle in our path like the feral, determined dogs we were.
And we wouldn’t give up the fight until we won.
4
Let Her Be Wild
TESS
“Daddy, I’m home!”
The door closed with a snick, and I flicked on the light in the apartment where I’d grown up.
There was the same old couch, the same dated table. The same old wallpaper Mom had loved so much and the same faded curtains that matched said wallpaper so exactly, you could barely tell where one stopped and the other began. It was a time capsule, left unchanged for fear we’d lose another piece of her to memory.
I dropped my bag by the door and made my way through the living room, setting my flowers on the kitchen table as I passed. “Daddy? You here?”
“Back here, baby,” he said, his voice dulled by walls and a hallway.
I wandered down the hall and into his office where I found him sitting at his table under the harsh light of a lamp, painting a tiny soldier under a magnifying glass.