Wayne Cartwright pulled his Cadillac into Mill Creek, Georgia, after twenty years in Atlanta, and the town did not know what to do with him. This was, in itself, a source of considerable amusement to Mrs. Higgins at the First Baptist Church, who immediately called a prayer circle before the Sunday sermon and spent twenty minutes asking the congregation to pray for Wayne's soul and twenty minutes asking them to pray for Dorothy's virtue and five minutes asking them to pray for Cecilia's patience, which Mrs. Higgins considered to be the most valuable of the three.

Wayne was forty-five years old and owned a chain of gas stations that he had built from nothing and was now losing to everything. His Atlanta business was failing—bad management, worse luck, and a partner who had disappeared with forty thousand dollars and a mistress in Macon. He came back to Mill Creek because his son—whom he did not know he had, Edgar—had written him a letter that Wayne found in a box of his late brother's belongings, and the letter said simply: I want to meet you. Wayne is a man who responds to simple requests with complicated solutions. He bought the children Walkmans. He took Dorothy to dinner at the only decent restaurant in town, which was The Golden Frying Pan, a diner with neon signs that flickered and coffee that tasted like it had been brewing since 1954 and a waitress named Pearl who knew everyone's business and sold it for a dollar a pop.

He told Cecilia he wanted to make things right. Cecilia is thirty-eight and the library director of Mill Creek, which is a prestigious title in a town that has three libraries and two of them are just bookshelves in the post office. Cecilia raises her younger cousin's children after their parents die in a car accident on a rainy Tuesday in October, and she has spent every day since keeping this family from falling apart with a meticulousness that borders on pathology. She irons her own blouses. She catalogs the library books by a system she invented herself. She cooks dinner at six o'clock every evening and she sets the table with the good china even though they are only four people because order is the only thing that keeps chaos at bay.

Wayne's return was, from Cecilia's perspective, an act of chaos wearing a suit.

Dorothy, on the other hand, was enchanted. She is thirty-two and a part-time waitress at The Golden Frying Pan and she dreams of escaping Mill Creek with the desperate hunger of a woman who has spent her entire life watching other people live while she pours coffee for them. Wayne is wealthy. Wayne is worldly. Wayne drives a Cadillac and wears a watch that costs more than Dorothy makes in a year and tells stories about Atlanta that sound like movies and movies sound like Wayne's stories.

The affair happens the way affairs happen in small towns—not with passion but with pathetic convenience. They are both lonely. They both think the other person is different from what they are. It does not matter.

It happens on a Thursday. Wayne takes Dorothy to dinner at The Golden Frying Pan. He buys her a glass of wine that costs eleven dollars and she drinks it slowly because she wants the evening to last. He tells her about the coast—Savannah and Charleston and the ocean that is blue in a way that the rivers in Georgia never are. He says she deserves to see it. She says she has seen pictures. He says pictures are not the same as standing on a beach and feeling the wind and knowing that the world is bigger than Mill Creek.

She believes him. She believes him because she wants to.

Cecilia notices. She notices because she is a woman who has spent her life noticing things—the way Dorothy's hair is done differently on Wednesdays, the way Wayne's Cadillac is parked outside Dorothy's house on Friday nights, the way Dorothy comes home smelling of sandalwood and regret.

She does not confront Dorothy. She confronts Wayne at his gas station, where he is personally pumping gas for a customer because he cannot afford to hire help anymore. He is wearing a grease-stained shirt and a smile that does not reach his eyes and he looks at Cecilia with the expression of a man who knows he is caught and hopes that charm will save him.

"Leave my family alone," Cecilia says.

"I am not—"

"You are. You have been. And I am telling you, for the last time, to stop."

He says he will. He does not.

Dorothy tries to run away to Atlanta with him. She packs a bag in the middle of the night and leaves it by the door and Cecilia finds it at breakfast and says nothing and Dorothy sees that she has found it and says nothing and they eat their oatmeal in silence while Edgar eats his oatmeal in silence because Edgar is thirteen and he has learned that silence is the only safe place in a house full of people who are shouting without making sound.

Mabel tells Cecilia. Mabel is sixteen and sharp-tongued and reads paperback novels under the covers and secretly writes poetry in a notebook she keeps in her backpack and she tells Cecilia because she is angry—not at Dorothy, exactly, but at the way the world keeps taking things from her and she wants to do something about it even if what she does is tell her aunt that her cousin is trying to run away with a man who owns gas stations and lies about his income and calls Dorothy honey in front of the entire diner.

Edgar builds a listening device. He is obsessed with radios and electronics and he builds things in the shed behind the house—a shortwave receiver, a transistor amplifier, a device that can pick up signals from the next county if the weather is right. He builds the listening device to hear his fathers talk, because he has heard them arguing in the kitchen at 2 AM and he wants to know what they are saying and whether he is supposed to be part of the solution or the problem.

He hears everything. He hears Wayne and Dorothy arguing about money. He hears Dorothy crying. He hears Wayne say I am sorry three times in a row and mean it each time and not mean it any of them. He hears himself, on the recording, saying I hope they burn, and he deletes the recording and he never speaks of it again.

The town finds out before the week is over. Mrs. Higgins at the church sees Wayne's Cadillac parked outside Dorothy's house. Old Man Peabody recognizes the license plate from Atlanta. By Sunday, the entire congregation knows, and the prayer circle is called before the sermon, and the preacher's wife whispers to the bank teller's wife and the bank teller's wife whispers to the schoolteacher's wife and the schoolteacher's wife whispers to Mabel, who whispers to Edgar, who whispers to nobody because he has learned that silence is the only safe place.

Cecilia shows up at the church bake sale wearing a sign that says I Know. She does not mean it as a joke. She means it as a declaration of war. The sign is handwritten on cardboard with black marker and it is the most honest thing anyone in Mill Creek has said in twenty years.

The family falls apart not with a bang but with a series of deeply embarrassing misunderstandings. Wayne accidentally calls Dorothy honey in front of the entire diner. Cecilia shows up at the bake sale with her sign. The children's teacher writes a letter to social services for their own safety, which is deeply ironic because the only thing threatening their safety is the collective judgment of a town that has never done anything interesting in its entire existence.

In the end, Wayne leaves for real. He gets in his Cadillac, which is covered in dust and bird droppings and the accumulated grime of a man who has spent twenty years running from things he should have faced, and he drives out of Mill Creek and he does not look back. Dorothy stays. She does not cry. She goes to work at The Golden Frying Pan the next day and she pours coffee and she smiles at the customers and she does not speak of Wayne except once, to Pearl, who says well he was a fool and Dorothy says yes he was and Pearl says you are better off without him and Dorothy says I know and it is the truest thing she has ever said.

Mabel goes to Atlanta anyway. She gets a scholarship to a community college and she packs a bag and she leaves on a Tuesday in August and she does not look back. Edgar keeps his listening device and records everything, including his own voice saying I hope they burn, which he deletes and records again and deletes again until the device breaks and he does not fix it.

Cecilia stays in the library, cataloging books nobody reads, in a town that has already forgotten them. The church moves on to the next scandal—the preacher's wife and the bank teller, which is less interesting than Wayne and Dorothy because it involves fewer Walkmans and less money and therefore less drama.

The garden behind the Ferguson house grows wild. Thorns everywhere. Roses that nobody planted and nobody tends and nobody dies from because nobody goes near them anymore. The thorns are beautiful in the way that dangerous things are beautiful—sharp and red and absolutely indifferent to whether you understand them or not.

OTMES Code: V-04-THE-GARDEN-OF-THORNS M1=7.0 M2=3.0 M3=8.0 M4=4.0 M5=2.0 M6=4.0 M7=2.0 M8=0.0 M9=4.5 M10=1.5 N1=0.35 N2=0.65 K1=0.70 K2=0.30 TI=51.6 (T4 Regret Level) Theta=225 (Absurdist Type) R=0.15 I=0.80 V=0.65 C=0.60 S=0.70 Style: Southern Gothic Dark Comedy Direction: Grotesque characters, violent irony, absurd cascade of misunderstandings