Unlike Dr. Sproot’s yuccaland, here was a vast variety of different plants with exotic names he had never heard of: hosta, phlox, petunias, monarda, clematis. How were they ever able to find and nurture such a motley assortment? Why, it beggared description! Nevertheless, Roland scribbled furiously in his notebook, asking for the spelling of every plant name, which Nan and George furnished without complaint. And such humility! As the framework of the story began to rise in his head, Roland saw this as only a slight variation on his original theme. It would be a suburban idyll, a story about a couple of carefree suburbanites removed from the travails of city life, creating their own Nirvana in the form of a peaceful plant kingdom, where beauty and tranquility reigned supreme.
The screen door flew open with a bang. Out charged Sis, wailing for George and Nan, and screaming back at Ellis and Cullen, whose taunting voices could be heard following her from the dining room.
“Mom, Dad, make them stop! They keep teasing me about getting pregnant. Make them stop! And they keep calling me ‘Sis’! I’m Mary now. Mary, Mary, Mary!”
George and Nan smiled wanly as Roland and the photographer, attracted by the commotion, walked over after making a brief detour to inspect one of the rose trellises.
“Oh!” said Sis, suddenly burying her burning face in her hands to hide her embarrassment. “Sorry. I didn’t know we had guests. Jeez, I’m sorry.”
“Excuse us,” said Nan as she put her arm around Sis and ushered her back into the house. George smiled self-consciously at Roland and the photographer.
“Trouble in paradise, Mr. Fremont?” said Roland.
“Teenagers,” said George, wondering ruefully whether Sis really was pregnant.
At this point, Roland’s story construct had crashed into a pile of dust-choked rubble. New story foundations began to rise. One portrayed the Fremonts as a dysfunctional family where some kind of abuse—physical or mental, but it made no difference—was going on, forcing the family to seek escape and redemption in the solace of their gardens. Another put the onus on the teenagers; they could be terrors beyond the control of their mom and dad, manufacturing drugs in the basement, holding sex parties in the bedrooms, driving their poor parents to seek shelter in an ersatz outdoor paradise.
“Lemonade anyone?” said Nan, pushing through the door with a tray of glasses and a pitcher of rich pink lemonade with pieces of lemon pulp still floating around in it, just the way Roland liked it.
“Yes, absolutely!” said Roland, so glad to get some refreshment on such a steamy day that he draped a mental drop cloth over his story ideas to be uncovered sometime later. He and the photographer then sat down to enjoy some of the best lemonade they’d ever tasted.
“Sorry about the disturbance,” Nan said. “Sis’s older brothers were teasing her a little too cruelly. And, for the record, she is not pregnant! Three teenagers—uh, I mean two teenagers and one twenty-year-old—can be a handful, Mr. Ready.”
“I can imagine,” said Roland as the photographer jumped up to snap some photos of two goldfinches that had landed on the feeder perches, and promptly scared them away.
“Wow!” said Roland. “That was the yellowest bird I ever saw. What was that?” He whipped out his pen.
“Goldfinch,” said George. “G-O-L-D-F-I-N-C-H.”
“Hey,” said the photographer, who had sat back down and lifted his camera with its big lens to his squinting eye. “Check out the blue bird at the other feeder. Pure blue.”
“Wow! And that is . . .”
“Indigo bunting,” said George. “I-N-D-I-G-O B-U-NT-I-N-G. And you’ve gotten a treat there. It’s the first time we’ve seen that guy around this summer.”
Orange-and-black monarch butterflies fluttered over the monarda, which were starting to show signs of life, and lighted on some daisies.
“Monarchs?” said Roland. Nan and George applauded.
“You’ve done your homework, I see,” George said.
As Roland and the photographer were getting ready to leave, Nan told them to wait for a moment and ran back into the house. She emerged carrying two plastic bags filled with Asiatic lilies in full bloom.
“A parting gift for you as a thank-you for showing interest in our humble efforts,” she said. “You, in turn, might want to present these to your girlfriends or wives. Women are suckers for lilies.”
The story Roland wrote appeared three days later, in the Sunday edition. It got centerpiece display on the front page of the metro section with a beautiful photograph of the indigo bunting and another of the smiling Nan holding her daylilies.
Roland, in what he considered to be his best effort to date, described in effortless prose a suburban wonderland, a refuge from the roar of the crowd, a haven from the troubles of our time. He also made sure, at the insistence of his editor, to insert a couple of paragraphs with more prosaic details about the Burdick’s contest. As his fingers flew on his computer’s keyboard, he barely recalled the unruly teenager who had run, wailing, toward her parents, and what that might portend.
Praise was fulsome. The Fremonts called to thank him. Readers called and e-mailed to laud his writing and the positive light it had shed on gardening. Even old grump Joe Edwards, his editor, gave him one of his rare “tip o’ the hat” praises. There was one jarring note: Dr. Sproot called in a fury.
“I can’t believe I went to all that effort, and then you don’t even insert me in the story . . . not at all!”
“You told me not to.”
“Yes, but I didn’t mean it! I didn’t mean it! Couldn’t you tell that was just a gambit, and I didn’t mean it?”
“No, I couldn’t tell.”
“And those Fremonts. Ha-ha. What a blunder to focus on them! Why . . . why, did you know they pretend to talk to their plants? Talk to their plants. . . .”
“Hmmm.”
“They also grow psychedelic plants.”
“What?”
“Psychedelic plants. You know, plants that make you crazy if you eat or smoke them. That’s probably why they talk to their plants.”
“Hmmm.”
“Don’t you ‘hmmm’ me, Mr. Stupid Reporter. You just gave free publicity to a couple of people who are not only drunks but certifiably insane. Didn’t you realize that? Didn’t you do any fact-checking on this? Furthermore, if I lose this contest, I will threaten to sue you. I will threaten to sue over the loss.”
“Thanks for your time, but I am very busy,” said Roland.
He hung up with Dr. Sproot’s voice still crackling over the receiver and turned his attention to his next assignment: a triple homicide that looked like a love triangle gone bad just reported in from the sleepy bedroom community of Triace.
22
A Watering
Rain was finally on the way!
A vigorous cold front charged down from the north and collided with the moist, slovenly soup-air that had been loafing over Livia. The prospect of atmospheric combat lured the Fremonts into the front yard. It was distasteful to them, but what could they do; the front yard, with its panorama of Bluegill Pond and open sky that stretched for miles, was the only place on their property where they could take in the full measure of weather in the making. On this morning, it was still sultry (“Dew point in the mid-seventies,” George reported), and clouds were piling up overhead and to the west, into ungainly stratospheric columns. Some were tumbling outward and darkening at the base.
“Pretty impressive buildup,” George said. “We should get something good out of this.”
Nan nodded.
“Let’s water anyway, just in case.... I hope we don’t get any hail or worse.”
Little dust-settling showers came and went throughout the morning and into the afternoon. By three, the mercury stood at 94, and it appeared that the rain was going to be a no-show. Either the moisture in the air was insufficient or the temperature aloft wasn’t cold enough to spark the thunderstorms they had anticipated for the past three days, when the weather forecasters had fir
st predicted them.
That evening, things changed. Their backyard was unusually animated. Either the Fremont flora were anxious about something or joyfully anticipating it; George and Nan couldn’t tell which. Their queries around the backyard went unanswered, even by their favorite backyard informants, the spirea.
“They’re not telling me jack,” George said.
“Me neither,” said Nan. “It’s like they’re keeping a big secret. Maybe they want to surprise us.”
“They must know the rain is coming,” George said. “Somehow they can feel it and they just can’t stand the anticipation.”
“Either that or they’re afraid. They sense the big wind, the downpours that wash away before they can get a decent drink, or the hail that could slice them into bits.”
Pondering the ineffable vagaries of the plant world, George and Nan ended their work day by uncorking a bottle of Sagelands and toasting their successes in the backyard over the past week and a half.
They were imbued with a new confidence that victory, and, with that, financial solvency, was within their grasp. It was less than two weeks now before the judging began. It would start with seven judges doing three days’ worth of quick inspections, winnowing the entries down to seven finalists. On the third day, reserved for a Saturday, all the judges would tour the gardens of the finalists, consult with one another, and announce the winner at the new Livia Arts and Culture Center that evening.
As George and Nan refilled their glasses, and waved to the Boozers passing by at an unusually brisk pace, they settled into a peaceful euphoria brought on by alcohol and a wonderful premonition that what had started as a mere hobby and a way to keep busy, and which had morphed into this magnificent obsession, would now truly become their life. A distant growl startled them out of their reverie.
“Thunder?” Nan said.
“Too far away to tell. Might just be traffic.”
The stillness was absolute. Not a leaf or a petal stirred. A second growl, this time closer, got them up out of their chairs, ambling slowly toward the front yard. Far off to the north, there was milky sky punctuated by cloud pillars and few gray masses with cauliflower tops. Directly above them and off to the south haze gauzed over the sky, giving it a coppery tint. In the west, the sun shone thinly through a screen of ice clouds.
Farther west, just above the horizon, was the source of the noise: a dark, distant smear brightened with intermittent flashes. It was moving fast. Five more minutes and the cloud blotted out the sun. Then, the oppressive stillness was gone, whisked away by the fresh breeze that preceded the storm. The thunder was doing its impersonation of field artillery now. Nan and George stood there, entranced, as the flashes turned into ragged white lines ripping across the clouds, and the sky erupted in the crash of flying electrical charges. The sky to the west turned a purple-black, and the first fat raindrops of the storm came splattering down.
“Good rain for sure,” George said. “We’re right in the bull’s-eye of this one.”
“Anything besides rain, Mr. Meteorology?”
“Don’t think so,” said George, taking a long, slow sip of merlot as the rain spattered against him. “Sky’s not that black. No straight-line winds. We would have had them by now. Looks like a nice light show and a garden-variety thunderstorm. Just what the doctor ordered. Let’s just hope it’s more of a steady rain than a deluge.”
A couple of cyclists zipped by on Sumac. Then came a jogger with a dog straining at its leash. The elderly Smiths were walking along the sidewalk and paused to stare at the purple sky descending on them, and the ripples and puckers covering Bluegill Pond. They turned to wave at the Fremonts.
“You can shelter here if you need to,” yelled George, knowing that the Smiths had two blocks to go.
They smiled and shook their heads, then continued walking. That was when the apparition came hurtling down the sidewalk, a block away. It was a bicycle, a racing bike from the look of it, and bearing down fast on the Smiths. The rider had a freakishly tall and pointed head and was wearing metallic-looking robes sparkling with multicolored glitter that billowed out behind her.
“Eeeehh! A conehead!” cried Nan. “And it’s going to run right into the Smiths!”
The Smiths were moving in the slow, deliberate, hunched-over way of the elderly, oblivious to the bicycle kamikaze heading full-tilt directly for them.
“She’ll veer off or slow down before she hits them,” said George. “Won’t she? What the hell is a conehead doing on Sumac? And on a racing bike? What the—?”
“Hey!” Nan yelled. “Look out!”
Lightning shot through the sky like flashbulbs, followed almost instantly by ear-splitting peals of thunder that bounced around the clouds for the next ten seconds. The Smiths pushed on faster as the downpour started. Right behind them, the conehead hunched down low over the handlebars for the final approach toward what could only be a terrible collision with one or both of the Smiths.
Suddenly, the bike veered to the left and jumped the curb, sending it rattling into the street, and its rider sprawling on top of the curb, just above the storm sewer, into which rivulets of rain were already beginning to drain.
“Whoa!” went Nan and George.
The Smiths, scurrying for all their creaky old appendages were worth, had already disappeared around the curve. The conehead got up, apparently unhurt, and leaned over with some effort to pick up the bike and what proved to be a flesh-tone, foot-and-a-half- long rubber cone, which had been jarred off her head, and lay crumpled up on the sidewalk. Now, a bedraggled, stringy-haired woman, her silvery robe pasted onto her ample body by the rain, gazed up at them.
“Good Lord!” Nan gasped. “It’s Pat Veattle!”
George guffawed, and, after a second, Nan laughed, too. Through the curtain of pouring rain, Pat stared at them. Then, she raised an arm and an index finger in their direction. She held that pose for an entire minute. At first, George and Nan thought she was flashing them a V for victory sign or signaling for help. Then, it dawned on them.
“She’s giving us the finger!” Nan cried. “Why, the nerve of that woman!”
Pat Veattle put her prosthetic head back on, then tried to get on her bike. The wind and the rain pushed her down before she could straddle the seat. She tried again with the same result, then gave up. Walking her bike down Sumac, she was eventually swallowed up in the rain. Nan and George dumped the water out of their wineglasses and ran for the front porch.
“What the hell was she doing in that conehead thing?” said George, as they took one last look at the blur of Pat Veattle and her bicycle disappearing around the curve.
“I still want to see her dressed up like an elk, or whatever it was Steve saw her dressed up as when he almost hit her,” Nan said. “The poor woman must be mad.”
The storm quickly lost its intensity, and the purple sky lightened into a steel gray. The rain continued, but at a steady and moderate rate. It finally stopped in the middle of the night.
When the Fremonts woke up the next morning, the sun shone down, and there were one-and-three-quarters inches of water in the rain gauge. The backyard luxuriated in the deep breath of moisture that remained after the rain. Even the front yard was showing signs of life.
“Million-dollar rain,” George said as he and Nan inspected their happy gardens. “No watering necessary for at least three more days.”
23
When Garden Spells Go Bad
“Sarah says the spell isn’t working,” said Marta. She accepted a mug of steaming coffee, as they sat on Dr. Sproot’s patio, their Adirondack chairs positioned to take in the full glory of the coreopsis-salvia-hollyhock blend. “She wanted me to come over and tell you in person.”
“Is that so, Marta? Is that really so? I can tell that with my own eyes. I’ve known for an entire week and a half that her stupid spell isn’t working!”
“Well, at least she undid the spell on your gardens. I’m so glad to see it. They’re glorious!”
/> “Of course they’re glorious!” barked Dr. Sproot. “But that’s only half the job. The other half isn’t happening, and I demand my money back. Otherwise, I’ll have to expose Edith Merton as the witch she is.”
Marta lifted the mug gingerly to her lips, puckered them, and set the mug back down on the glass-topped patio table.
“What? Too hot for your liking, Marta?”
“Yes, just a touch too hot, thanks, Dr. Sproot. I’ll let it cool off a little.”
Dr. Sproot sneered.
“Gee whiz, Marta, I made it especially hot for you, knowing how much you like scalding drinks. C’mon, don’t be a fraidy cat. Take a big swig out of that mug.”
“No, thank you,” said Marta, noticing once again that Dr. Sproot was apparently able to drink hot coffee without any adverse effect.
“I see you are able to drink hot beverages again.”
“Eh?” said Dr. Sproot between slurps.
“I take it your throat is healed and you are able to drink your hot coffee again.”
“Yes, isn’t it lovely,” Dr. Sproot cooed. “It is the best coffee ever grown, and I have to special order it. Apart from gardening it is my only vice. I mean, I mean . . . no . . . no! My throat is not healed. Not healed at all. I still have to make an appointment with a specialist. Yikes! Now that you mention it, this coffee is a little hot.”
Dr. Sproot set her mug back on the patio table, and made a big show of waving at the steam curling up from its contents.
“Wow! I really shouldn’t be drinking this with my throat condition, should I? It’s not nearly as hot as your wretched tea, anyway. Listen, Marta, what are you implying here? I took a big glug of your tea, which was hotter ’n blazes. I’m just sipping this coffee, which is nowhere near as hot anyway. It’s too hot for you, isn’t it?”
“Not really,” said Marta. She picked up her mug, pointing her rigid pinkie straight toward the sky, and downed a long, noisy draft. “It’s just that I wanted to see your reaction when I said it was.”
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