Front Yard Read Online Free

consider.
    â€œListen here, buddy, a few stray gold coins wouldn’t have hurt us any, especially since I’m guessing our current financial situation isn’t looking all that rosy. Eh?”
    George didn’t respond. He bit his lip and tightened his grip on the steering wheel. He had begun to fret that they’d been burning through their recent first-place Burdick’s Best Yard prize earnings at a clip they couldn’t keep up. Maybe he should start paying more attention to their bank accounts and mutual fund balances. Hang on—what mutual fund balances? Oh, yeah, he had cashed those out a couple of months ago.
    â€œDid you hear me, George? Huh?”
    George jerked the steering wheel violently to the right to turn onto Old DanTroop Drive. The tires squealed and the car tilted a few degrees as the left-side wheels lifted an inch or two above the road. Nan froze in rigid attention as she heard the squeal and felt the lurch, then leaned against the tilt of the car with a leering grin.
    Nan was always excited and sometimes transformed when he took that right-angle intersection at forty, actually speeding up into the turn instead of slowing down. George figured it was because it gave her the sort of adrenaline thrill she didn’t often feel among the more subtle attractions of their gardens. Could it be that for those few seconds she was actually inhabited by the spirit of some dangerous woman from times gone by? Annie Oakley, for instance? Whatever it was, it would occasionally create in Nan a trance-like state. That would last about fifteen seconds. Then, once she came out of it, she started with a fresh slate, and anything said or seen during the previous five minutes might as well have never happened.
    â€œWhew!” she gasped. “That was rockin’, Pops!”
    George chuckled. After a few seconds of silence, he knew he had passed the crisis point; there would be no contentious discussion about the family finances on this drive.
    They only had a few blocks to go to one of Livia’s finest and most extensive stretches of residential gardens. This, along with Waveland Circle and the Billings Lake neighborhood, was where Livia’s gardening bluebloods honed their craft. It was a place that was hallowed—like Gettysburg or a Sagelands merlot vineyard—and through which you traveled awestruck: respectfully, quietly, and attentively.
    But they weren’t quite there yet.
    Nan smiled and rocked her head back slightly. She’s lost in appreciation of her own ingenuity, thought George. Brace yourself, buddy, ’cause here it comes.
    â€œKnock-knock,” Nan said.
    â€œWho’s there?” answered George for whom Nan’s plant jokes and riddles had all the appeal of a prickly sow thistle–induced skin rash.
    â€œPhlox.”
    â€œPhlox who?”
    â€œPhlox of luck getting those marigolds to grow in that shady place next to the rock border.”
    â€œYou watch, Nan-bee,” sputtered George. “You just watch. That spot gets six hours of sun a day.”
    â€œNo, it doesn’t. It gets two and a half hours max. Besides, you were looking at it before the silver maple leafed, and even then it was only getting four hours of sun. Those marigolds will produce no floral display of note. Lord knows, I tried to warn you. Slow down, George.”
    They had turned onto Cabot Drive.
    George lifted his foot off the accelerator and gently applied it to the brake. Their new, gun-metal-gray Toyota Avalon slowed to five miles per hour—Fremont garden cruising speed.
    There were signs of the messy, unattractive beginnings of gardening activity everywhere. Husbands and wives were out in their shorts and T-shirts, baseball caps and broad-brimmed straw gardening hats, working the soil in their flower beds, and carefully inserting little blobs of color into them with their gloved hands. Flats of petunias, alyssum, pansies, coleus, and impatiens seemed to