The Gardener

He was sitting in the lemon tree.

Ivy would think about that a great deal, later: that the first time she saw Matteo Ferraro he was eight feet off the ground in a tree older than the house, with a basket over one arm and a look on his face of a man who had found a wasp in his coffee.

“I’m not the buyer,” she said. “I’m the seller.”

“Ah.” The look got worse. “The granddaughter.”

“You say that like it’s an insult.”

“In Porto Lumia, it is a job title.” He climbed down, quite gracefully for someone so annoyed, and handed her the basket. It was full of lemons, fat and bright and absurdly fragrant, the kind you only ever saw in paintings. “She said you would come. She said you would want to sell. She said I should give you these and not argue.”

“And are you going to argue?”

Matteo looked at her for a long moment. He had very dark eyes and dirt on his cheek, and he did not smile, but something at the corner of his mouth considered it.

“Of course,” he said. “I never did what she told me either.”