“I love the Arboretum,” she said, interrupting Gavin’s account of a joke Jason had told at lunch. Clearly talking about Jason was not what she wanted to do. “I know some of the trees have already changed color.”
“I love the Arboretum, too,” Gavin said. “My mother used to bring me here in the spring, when I was little, and read the signs to me.”
* * * *
He had been thirteen the last time he and his mother had come.
Deep yellow daffodils, daffodils with white petals and yellow trumpets, white jonquils, tiny bright yellow buttercups, and orange daylilies, fire-colored daylilies, everywhere. She had brought him here in the spring after his father had left with the twins. It had been one of the last times she had told him a fairy story, this one about the Arboretum and the UNC professor who
