A Wedding To Remember. Joanna Sims

was going to clean up this garden, one weed at a time. Savannah found her toolshed virtually untouched; she pulled on her gloves, and retrieved hand tools and a sturdy hoe. Armed with her weapons to beat back the weeds and decay, she stepped into the garden, reclaimed the ground as her own, dropped to her knees and began to yank out the weeds. A couple of weeds into the process, sweat began to form on her forehead and on her neck. It felt good to sweat; it felt good to take out her frustration on these stupid, creeping weeds that had ruined her beautiful garden.

      “What are you doing?”

      Savannah had been deep in thought, focused on ripping as many weeds from the ground as possible; she hadn’t heard her husband approach. She sat back on her heels and wiped the sweat from her brow before it rolled down into her eyes.

      “Pulling weeds.”

      Bruce—to her, the most handsome man in the world—had his shirt unbuttoned and his stomach, chest and neck were covered in sweat. Normally—at least the normal she remembered—she would have stood up and wiped that sweat from his neck and chest with her hands, stealing a kiss along the way. It hadn’t taken her long at all to figure out that this sexual flirtation wouldn’t be welcome. Not long at all.

      “You have a concussion, Savannah,” he reminded her in a slightly condescending way.

      She stared at him in response.

      He added, a little less bossy, “The doctor said you needed to rest.”

      “This is how I rest,” Savannah argued. She turned back to her weeds. “If I go to bed now, I’ll be awake all night. You know that’s true.”

      Silence stretched out between them, and then she heard him walk away. She didn’t glance behind her to watch him; she focused on the blasted weeds instead. She hadn’t expected him to join her—they didn’t spend Sundays together anymore. And yet, he did return. Wordlessly, Bruce came back to the garden with Buckley and Murphy following at his heels. He knelt down in the dirt and began to pull out the weeds in the second row.

      They worked like that silently, side by side, until they had completely cleared the first two rows of her garden of the layers of overgrowth. Bruce stood up and then offered his hand to her, which she accepted. Toward the end of the row, she was beginning to feel exhausted and woozy. But she was determined to finish at least one row before she gave in to her body.

      “Well,” Savannah said, more to herself than to Bruce. “It’s a start.”

      Bruce was staring at her face with an inscrutable expression in his slightly narrowed, bright blue eyes. “Yes,” he agreed after a moment. “I suppose it is.”