by Isabel North
After four days, she was done.
Unfortunately, after four days, she still hadn’t heard from Derek about her car, and every time she picked up her phone to call for an update, she chickened out.
It wasn’t the car she was worried about. If the thing was unfixable, she figured Derek would have told her the same day. No, what gave her palpitations was the conversation he’d warned her they were going to have.
The conversation about Gabe.
The man Jenny, in all her gutless wisdom, had used as a shield to hide behind when she’d woken up, found Derek in her bed, and freaked out.
Not her finest moment. Not one of her best ideas, either. Jenny knew that. She’d known it at the time. She’d known it at an even deeper level in the following months when Derek kept his distance.
It still surprised her how much that had hurt, Derek being…polite.
One of Derek Tate’s defining characteristics was how relaxed he was. Physically. Socially. He never lost his temper; she’d not once, in all the years she’d known him, seen him in a bad mood. Jenny wasn’t even sure Derek knew what a mood was.
Up until the morning she’d sent him away, she’d thought it was his ease that made him so great to be around.
After that morning, she discovered that she’d been wrong.
The few times they had run into each other, he’d treated her the exact same way he treated everyone else.
Meaning Jenny had been hit with the realization that Derek had never before treated her the same way he treated everyone else. With her, he’d been teasing and pushy and fun. And when he stopped, she missed it. She missed him.
The worst was the night she’d been eating at Kurt’s with Kate, Elle and Alex. Derek had passed their table en route to the bar, and he’d paused to say hi.
Politely.
Her hypersensitive skin had registered his body heat, warming the air between them as if reaching out to her, and at the precise moment that she had looked up into his familiar face, Jenny had missed him. The ache of it had left her breathless.
She hadn’t known you could miss someone even while you were looking into their eyes.
And then that morning five days ago. He’d heard about Gabe’s baby, the fact that some other woman—not her—was having it, and boom.
The old Derek was back.
Her Derek.
“I’d offer a penny for your thoughts, dear, but the way you’re blushing tells me you’re not likely to share.” A quavering old voice broke in on Jenny’s musings.
She was watering the hanging baskets at the garden center, and smiling like a fool. Blushing, too? Great. She straightened her face. “Enjoying my job, Mrs. Bressler,” she said and released the trigger on the hose.
“Mm-hmm.”
“Don’t stand under the basket, it’s dripping on you.” Jenny curled a gentle arm around Mrs. Bressler’s hunched shoulders and steered the old lady from under the enormous arrangement.
“I know, I know.” Mrs. Bressler allowed Jenny to relocate her. “Feel like brightening my day and sharing what put that smile on your face? Or should I say what young man?” She raised thick white eyebrows.
Jenny scowled.
“Hah!” Mrs. Bressler made a fist and pulled her elbow back a slow half-inch. “Called it.”
“There is no young man!”
“Liars go to hell, dear.”
“They do? Darn. Wish I’d known. Never mind. Since I’m headed there already, one more isn’t going to change my final destination.”
Mrs. Bressler cackled. “Confirmation. You’re really not very good at this. Good job you’re pretty.”
“Why, thank you.”
The old lady grinned.
Mrs. Bressler had the distinction of being Jenny’s very first client. Okay, Jenny didn’t have her business set up yet, and Mrs. Bressler paid in cookies not money, but to all intents and purposes, and as far as Jenny was concerned, Mrs. Bressler was her first genuine client.
Her plan had been to get her professional landscape and horticultural design qualifications, and strike out on her own.
It hadn’t happened. Yet.
She’d played with Lila’s yard, and she’d done her own twice.
She’d hacked back the wilderness that was Alex’s yard, swearing to him that she’d burn his shrubbery to the ground and salt the earth if he allowed it to fall back into the hellscape of rusted rejected metal sculptures and tangled overgrown lawn it had been before she’d worked her magic on it.
Now, it was gorgeous, with paved paths and colorful beds. He’d even let her build a romantic gazebo, an adorable little wooden structure with fairy lights threaded through the latticework sides.
It wasn’t that she was dragging her heels, Jenny told herself. It was simply that starting a business was a big deal.
For a single mother and sole breadwinner of the family, it was a terrifyingly big deal.
Jenny had decided that it made sense to keep her job at the garden center and focus on adding to her savings account until she had enough of a buffer that she could take the jump, with a well-prepared soft landing in case it didn’t pan out.
You know.
For a change.
Until then, she had folk like Mrs. Bressler. At the last count, Jenny had somehow collected eight senior citizens with varying yardwork needs—or in Ms. Irwin’s case, window box needs—who kept her on her toes.
Mrs. Bressler had started it the day she came to the garden center and spent a full hour debating the virtue of azaleas over roses, until Jenny had offered to take a look at her yard and give her a professional opinion.
It turned out that Mrs. Bressler didn’t actually have a yard, she had a postage-stamp-sized patch of gravel with a few sad cracked pots.
That was then. Now, she had a dainty wrought-iron table and chair set arranged on a minuscule patio that Jenny had laid. The seating area was screened in by a rose-covered trellis, and the remaining space was filled with a cluster of brightly-glazed mismatched pots that Jenny checked on every couple of weeks.
“What can I do for you today, Mrs. Bressler?” she asked. “Are we thinking a new pot?”
“I brought a picture. Hold on a moment.” Lifting her enormous purse high against her chest so that she could squint into it, Mrs. Bressler dug around. After some muttering, she pulled out an iPad.
Jenny stuffed her hands in her pockets and forced herself not to interfere as Mrs. Bressler hung her purse in the crook of her elbow, flipped open the iPad case and poked at it.
After she’d nearly dropped the iPad three times before she’d even managed to hit the power button, Jenny reached for it.
“No.” Mrs. Bressler smacked Jenny’s hand away. “I can do it. I am great with technology. Ask Edie Irwin. On second thought, don’t. She can’t tell her microwave from her television set.”
“Let’s sit over here on the bench. I’ll take a load off while you try to remember your code.”
Mrs. Bressler did not resist as Jenny directed her to the bench by the herb display. She sat with a sigh. “Ah. Here we are.” She unlocked the device, tapped around for a few minutes more, then turned the iPad to face Jenny.
Jenny caught it before it hit the ground, pretended Mrs. Bressler absolutely hadn’t dropped it for real this time, and scanned the picture the old lady had pulled up.
She rolled her lips in, contemplated the sky for a moment, then said, “That’s a jar of jelly.”
“What? Did I get the wrong…?” Mrs. Bressler leaned over, then sat back. “No, that’s the right picture. And it’s jam, not jelly. Yes. That’s what I want.”
Jenny looked at Mrs. Bressler. “Do you need me to buy you some jam?” she asked. “You want me to go to the store for you?”
“I can buy my own groceries, thank you, dear. I want to make it. Strawberry jam. From scratch.”
Huh. “You want strawberries.”
“Going to be a challenge to make strawberry jam without any strawberries.”
“We do have strawberry plants, but—” Jenny shot a furtive glance around “—it would be cheaper to buy them fresh from the grocery store.”
“When I say from scratch, I mean from scratch. I want to grow the strawberries. Harvest them.” Mrs. Bressler brought her arthritis-knotted hands together in a squishing motion. “Make jam out of them.”
Good thing she wasn’t trying to make chicken pot pie from scratch.
“We can do that. But it’s kinda late in the season.” As in, too late. “They’re already fruits, not flowers. We may have a few everbearing varieties flowering, but it makes sense to hold off a bit, plant some runners in October and make the jam next summer.”
Mrs. Bressler patted Jenny’s knee. “Come now, dear. What are the odds I’ll still be here next summer?”
Jenny blinked. “Excellent, I hope.”
Mrs. Bressler laughed as if she’d said something funny. Jenny didn’t join in. Mrs Bressler sobered, shaking her head. “If I want to make jam, I need to make it now. This year.”
Jenny processed the heavy implication. “You’re not…you’re not dying?”
“Yep. Reeeeeal slow. But it’s happening.”
“Are you sick? Why didn’t you say something, I—”
“I’m not sick, honey. I’m old.” She sighed and held her hands up to the heavens. “So, so old. So old. About those everbearing varieties. What are they?”
“Uh, they’ll be good for picking maybe mid- to late-September.” More like tomorrow. “I think we’ve got a couple of varieties that’ll go to first frost.”
“Those are the ones for me!”
“All right, then.” Jenny helped Mrs. Bressler up and they headed for the vegetable section. Agonizingly slowly. “I have to ask. Why strawberry jam?”
“I’m getting into homesteading.” Mrs. Bressler paused for a break. “It’s the latest thing.”
It was?
“I decided I’d start easy with the jam. Then maybe I’ll get adventurous.”
Don’t say chicken pot pie.
“I’m thinking squash, but I’m open to being persuaded about potatoes.”
“We have some baby squash. We could tuck them into your garden with a bit of rearranging, no problem. Potatoes might work. With your limited space, we’ll have to wait until the strawberries are over, as you’ll need a large pot. I’ve already got one in mind for your strawberries, and there isn’t enough room for two.”
“Squash it is. But what can I make? The whole point, Jenny, is vegetable patch to plate.”
“I’m not much of a cook. How does soup sound?”
Mrs. Bressler considered it. “Soup could work.”
They arrived at the vegetable section at long last. Mrs. Bressler shooed Jenny on her way so she could browse the plants and choose a container—Jenny nudged her firmly in the direction of the stackable planters—and promised to come and tell Jenny her selection after she’d had a coffee in the attached cafe.
Jenny got back to her watering and that’s where Ronnie found her ten minutes later, stomping up with a stern expression on her tanned, seamed face.
“Hi, boss,” Jenny said.
“Taking your sweet time with the baskets, aren’t ya?” Ronnie said.
“I was helping a customer.”
“Do that a lot, I noticed.”
“All part of the job.”
“Yeah. Except it’s come to my attention you do it after hours, too, and I know I’m not paying you for that.”
Jenny’s stomach dropped.
“You moonlighting?” Ronnie barked.
“No!”
“Not what I’m hearing. That customer you spent the last hour helping, isn’t she one of your ladies?”
“She’s not paying me, Ronnie, and neither is anyone else.” Apart from cookies. “I just help some of the older customers out every now and then. They need help deciding what to do with their yards. Once they’ve decided, they need someone to help dig and do the heavy lifting. That’s all.”
“I don’t like it.”
Shit.
Ronnie continued, “Time to stop your after-hours garden fairy shtick. We need to rethink your employment.”
Great. She was about to get fired? Again?
Jenny had worked at the garden center before Ronnie had bought it. When she’d slipped on a wet paving stone and broken her leg, the former owner had fired her. She really didn’t want losing her job to become a habit. “You’re seriously going to fire me for helping out senior citizens?”
“No!” Ronnie jerked with surprise. “It’s time to stop selling yourself short, Jennifer,” she said, frowning. “You’re qualified, but more than that, you’re talented. You’re sure as heck keen. You go out of your way to mess about with plants and yards. Most people don’t have it in them to get that excited about dirt.” She lifted her chin at the lanky teenager over by the mulch and compost section. “Next to you, Abel is my most motivated employee.”
As they watched, Abel yawned. He stretched, exposing a strip of grub-pale skin between his cargo shorts and polo shirt. He finished his yawn, spotted a customer heading his way, and with practiced ease, ambled off toward watering cans and hoses.
Ronnie turned back to Jenny. “You’re better than that.” She hitched a thumb over her shoulder at the departing Abel.
“What are you saying? Do you want me to be a supervisor or something? Motivate the team?”
“Most of the team are between high school and college, or they dropped out of college to concentrate on their music or their YouTube channel, or they’re my lazy-ass nephew.” That was Abel. “If you think you can motivate any of them, please, knock yourself out. But I had something else in mind.
“I want you to be a consultant. Garden design. You’re doing it anyway on your own time, might as well do it during work hours and get paid. Who knows, maybe that’ll free you up to get a life where you don’t spend your free time dead-heading old ladies’ geraniums.”
“Garden design consultant?”
“Don’t go thinking it’ll be as fancy as it sounds. I intend to pimp you out as project manager and labor, too. Gonna brand you as the Swiss army knife of garden needs. Been waiting months for you to quit and set that shit up on your own but you haven’t done it yet. I’m going to take advantage of you while I can.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
Ronnie grunted. “Say, ‘Yes, boss. Thank you for this wonderful opportunity. I will do a great job and bring in a lot of money’.”
“Yes, boss. Thank you for this wonderful opportunity. I will do an amazing job and bring in loads of money.” Jenny held up a hand for a high five.
Ronnie glared at her until she dropped her hand. “Got a project lined up for you. Be a good trial. Put you on it, see how it goes. Goes well, we’ll look into making it formal.”
“A project already?” Jenny zinged with excitement. “What is it?”
“The community center wants to overhaul their land at the back. Get the structural stuff and planting done now ready for next spring. Jennifer, I’m warning you, the place is a freaking wilderness. Could be bears.”
“Wildernesses are my specialty.”
She’d done Alex’s yard, hadn’t she? By her estimation, no one had done anything there for the last thirty years, other than mow the grass. And the grass had been waist-high before she’d started on it.
“They better be, since as I mentioned, you’ll be designer, project manager, and labor. Translation: you’re on your own. Less they get volunteers. You can work that out with the committee.”
“When do they want me to start?”
“I’ll call and tell them we’ll take the job, get the ball rolling.”
Jenny was already sketching out ideas in her head when Mrs. Bressler found her an hour later. The old lady was behind a cart, throwing her slight weight into it and managing to propel it along at a snail’s pace. Jenny took over and whisked them off to the vegetable section, where she selected some plants.<
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She deposited Mrs. Bressler and the plants at the checkout, and ran back to snag a terracotta strawberry planter which she carried to the till in time to get rung up.
“What do you think?” Jenny stood beside the tall planter, showing it off like a game show hostess. Its old-fashioned style was a perfect fit for Mrs Bressler’s pretty garden. “Ooh. Aah.”
Mrs. Bressler eyed the planter, nodded her approval, and Georgia behind the checkout scanned the barcode.
Jenny heaved the purchases into the cart and pushed it out to the parking lot. She loaded up Mrs. Bressler’s car, slammed the trunk shut, then realized that there was no way the old lady would be able to get the planter out herself.
With images of her trying it anyway and ending up flattened in her driveway beneath it with only her shoes and curly white head showing, Jenny said, “Do not hurt yourself trying to lift the planter. Leave it and I’ll swing by and sort it for you. My shift’s done in thirty minutes.”
“Nonsense, dear. I know you don’t have your car and Frank’s playing chauffeur. Tell him to pick you up from my house later. I’ll sit here and listen to my book on tape until your shift is over. We can have tea. I have cookies.”
“Can’t say no to cookies.”
She should say no to cookies, because apparently it wasn’t clear from looking at her that she wasn’t, in fact, five months pregnant, but whatever.
* * * *
Enough was enough. She was being driven around by old ladies, and paying more than she could afford for her own personal chauffeur.
Jenny took a deep breath, and made the call she should have made days ago.
The phone at the other end rang twice before Derek picked up. “Jen.”
“Hey, Derek. Listen, I need to know about my car.”
“I’m good, thanks. You?”
“Yes. Good. How about my car? Is my car good?”
“It’s fifteen years old, so no. It’s not good. And it’s a Honda. It’s never been good. What it is, is fixed.”
“Oh, thank God. Thank you.”
“Welcome, honey.”
“Is it ready to come home?”
“Yeah,” he said, amused. “You want me to drive it over?”