Turn Me Loose (Paradise, Idaho)

by Rosalind James

  Rochelle just looked at him. “No, thanks. Oh. Peaches.” She crossed the street and started filling a paper bag, fighting back a sudden lump that wanted to rise in her throat. He thought she was that easy, that a bunch of flowers would have made the difference. But why wouldn’t he think that?

  If he really likes you, he should at least be feeding you. The voice of experience? Yeah, right. All Travis had had to do was buy her a few shots of tequila. Of course he thought flowers would do it now. But surely, eventually, even a woman as hardheaded as her could learn her lesson.

  FLOWER POWER

  “Plant,” Travis heard. “Not flowers.”

  The voice had come from beside him, and he realized that Rochelle’s sister Stacy was still standing there. He stopped watching Rochelle, although it was tough, because she was wearing a sleeveless white dress with some kind of holes in the fabric. Innocent, summery, and oh so feminine. No cleavage at all, but her legs and arms looked fine, and so did she. And he’d run smack into a brick wall again. He asked, “Pardon?”

  Stacy sighed. “Giving her flowers is too easy. Like, here, have some flowers. I just spent twenty bucks. Yay, me.”

  “Uh . . .” He fought back a smile. “That won’t work?”

  The girl was shorter than Rochelle, but still curvy, although without her sister’s confidence, without the seductive sway to her step and look in her eye that reminded him irresistibly of those old movies with Marilyn Monroe. Like she knew damn well she was sexy, and she also knew that you were wondering if you were man enough to try. Stacy was a dark brunette instead of her sister’s blonde, too, but she had the same blue eyes and high cheekbones.

  She wasn’t Rochelle, but then, so few women were.

  Now, she looked at him pityingly. “It sure won’t work with Rochelle. At least it didn’t look like it to me.”

  “So . . . what would be better? Got any ideas? She’s upset with me, as you’ve guessed.”

  The blue eyes sharpened. Intuition must run in the family, too. “Because you didn’t send her flowers? I thought she wasn’t going out with anybody. You’re kidding. Man. And she was talking to me about that.”

  He passed that one by. “I said she was upset,” he said. “I didn’t say we’d gone out.”

  Stacy obviously wanted to ask more, so he looked at her blandly and prompted, “So not flowers?”

  “She loves flowers,” Stacy said after a moment, abandoning the topic with obvious reluctance. “She loves to grow them. And she’s got that new house.”

  Travis shook his head as if he were removing water from his ears. “I’ve been left back somewhere by the Elks Lodge. I didn’t know she had a new house.”

  “Oh.” Stacy looked surprised, and more interested than ever. “I figured she’d have told you, if you knew her. It’s one of her big topics. I mean, it’s just a rental, but she’s excited about it. The yard was crappy when she moved in, but she’s been working on it all summer. She used to have a really nice garden back when she was married.”

  Travis was still digesting that when Rochelle jerked her head at her sister, and Stacy said, “I have to go.” She looked back over her shoulder as she went and said, “But get her something she can plant. It’ll work better. She likes that steady thing, anyway. That good-guy thing. House and garden, you know?”

  “Wait,” Travis said. “How about giving me the address, so I can deliver it?”

  Stacy hesitated. “She’s had kind of bad luck with guys.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know. That’s the point.”

  An hour later, he pulled his truck to a careful stop to avoid tipping over the pot in the bed. It had taken him a while to find her place, because this wasn’t so much a street as an alley, gravel and all. And Stacy was right about the gardening. The yard of the unprepossessing duplex, its shabby siding painted a glaring turquoise, was edged by a neatly cut hedge. On the left side, the space inside was filled with rosebushes, with a big white birdbath in the center. Not that side, then, because those had been there a while. On the right side, a sizable vegetable patch boasted neat rows of potatoes, onions, tomatoes, and cabbage, as well as the remains of some bolted lettuce and spinach. Around it, the rest of the small space was dotted with young plants and shrubs. That was more like it. That had to be Rochelle’s.

  The smell of warm bark mulch drifted into his nostrils, familiar as home, as he hauled the giant bush out of the back of the truck and headed up the walk on the right. He shifted it to one arm and rang the bell, then waited, his heart beating harder than he cared to acknowledge.

  The inner door opened at last, and Rochelle was staring at him through the screen door, and through his own screen of huge white blooms.

  She seemed to have lost her voice for the moment, so he spoke first. “The flower idea didn’t work, so I’m going for plan B. Point me to a shovel and a spot, and I’ll plant it for you.”

  “I said no. No means no.”

  Danger zone, and no mistake. He thought fast. “Did you? I thought you just said you weren’t a fringe benefit. How about if I let you know I heard that, and you let me set this thing down? I was regretting my choice before I got two blocks, by the way. It’s a long way to my place from that booth, and I hadn’t brought the truck. Plus, I wanted to impress you, so I got the biggest one. Typical guy.”

  “This is where we don’t talk about whether size matters.” She was still on the other side of the screen, but he thought she might have been smiling a bit.

  “Hey,” he said, “I’m ready and willing to have that conversation.” This was more like it. “Meanwhile . . . shovel? Spot? Otherwise, best case, I’m going to be putting it out on the sidewalk in front of my place and hoping somebody takes it. Carol will kill me if I plant anything in her garden. Woman’s got an obsessive streak a mile wide. You should hear her on the subject of nail holes. And anyway, I don’t need a hydrangea.”

  “You know what it is?”

  “My mom has them. She likes them. I took a chance. So, what? Rip it out of the pot and stuff it in my garbage?”

  “No!” The word came out too forcefully, and he smiled. He’d known that would do it. Would have worked on his mom, too. She felt the same way seeing plants drooping and dying as some people would have about a thirsty pet.

  “It’s like they’re crying for help,” she’d say, and he could tell Rochelle felt the same.

  “Wait a second,” Rochelle said. “How’d you find out where I lived?”

  “I asked somebody.”

  He thought that was a pretty crafty evasion, but all she said was, “Wait.”

  He stood there for close to five minutes, and Rochelle didn’t come out. He finally set the pot down just as a screen door slammed to his left and a vision emerged.

  A lady in her seventies, probably, wearing a brightly printed flowered muumuu, the sun nearly striking sparks off her poofy platinum hair. A pageboy, he thought that was called. Not a hairstyle you saw a lot of these days. A little white dog with a curly coat and legs about four inches long pattered along after her.

  Mrs. Next-Door came down the steps, her gait spritely, unwound her hose, turned the water on, and smiled at him. Her red lipstick matched her huge red-flowered earrings, and he smiled back. She was that kind of person.

  “Morning,” she said, directing the water beneath a rosebush. “Beautiful day.” The little dog skittered away from the water in alarm as if it had been a fire hose, which made Travis smile some more.

  “It is,” Travis said. “Looks like your roses are doing well.”

  “Not too bad. They keep telling me it’s too hot, and I keep telling them that there’s plenty of time to be cold after you’re dead. Roses sometimes need a little tough love.”

  He laughed. “That so?”

  “Roses are babies. Kinda like a handsome man that way. You put up with their nonsense because you enjoy looking at them so much.”

  Her flip-flop sandals each had a big red flower in the center, he noticed. Matching h
er earrings. And her lipstick.

  He was trying to figure out an answer to that, and deciding that Rochelle might not be coming out and trying to decide what to do about that, when she walked around from the back of the house carrying a shovel. She must have done a lightning change, because she was in cutoffs, a T-shirt, and work boots.

  He got distracted. His mind went, “Legs,” and everything else went on vacation for a moment.

  Rochelle looked around, walked over to a spot in the corner of the yard, and stomped the shovel down hard into the dirt. That was distracting too, because she was facing away from him.

  He said, “Nice talking to you” to the neighbor, grabbed his pot, and was over with Rochelle in a few strides. It wasn’t a very big yard.

  “Oh, no,” he said, setting the plant down carefully and grabbing hold of the shovel. “That’s part two of my big gesture.”

  She wrestled with him a moment, and he enjoyed it. He got a nice flash of a much better wrestling match, and then she let go of the handle and wrecked his fantasy. “You won’t know how to do it, though,” she said.

  I know how to do it. He didn’t say that, of course. “Same depth as the pot,” he said. “Three times the diameter.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I could tell you I’m an expert gardener, but you’d find out I was lying. I looked it up.”

  She glanced at his feet. “When you changed into your boots.”

  “Yep.”

  Now, she was looking past him. “You have work boots. And you have a pickup. And none of it’s new. I thought you were from San Francisco.”

  He jammed the shovel into the dirt with his boot. “Everybody comes from somewhere. Even people who’ve been living in San Francisco.”

  “Huh. I’m trying not to ask you where. And the ground’s hard. Sorry.”

  “Baked like concrete,” he agreed, putting some extra stomp into it. “Because it’s been so hot. That’s all right. I’m used to hot, and I’m used to hard.”

  “I thought San Francisco was foggy.”

  “It is.” He kept digging. “But the Imperial Valley’s hotter than anyplace but the surface of the sun. At least a hundred degrees from June through September. That’s why I’m not there. That, and there isn’t too much software development going on down there.”

  “That where your folks are? And all right, I’m asking. Where is it?”

  “My mom is.” This wasn’t the conversation he wanted to have. “She’s living in Brawley. Very Southern California, very inland. Never mind. You’ll never have heard of it. Your yard’s looking good,” he continued, changing the subject.

  “Not good enough. It needs trees, but I’m not doing trees. Stupid to do all this when it isn’t really mine, but I can’t help it.”

  “Not stupid,” he said. “Not if it makes you feel settled. Why not trees?”

  She shrugged. “When I plant a tree, you’ll know I’ve hung it up.”

  He shot a quick look at her. “Hung up what?”

  “Never mind.”

  He’d gotten his hole dug now, and he tipped the plant gently and eased it out of the pot, then set it into the hole and started to backfill.

  “You do know how,” Rochelle said. “I’ll get the hose.”

  He filled the hole halfway with dirt, then waited until she came back to water it down before he went on. As they were waiting for the water to soak in, he said, “Not really supposed to plant them in the heat, so you’ll have to keep it well watered.”

  “You actually did look it up.”

  “I’m an engineer. Occupational hazard.” He finished the backfilling, tamped the dirt down, and, once she’d finished soaking the area, took the hose from her and cleaned off the shovel, giving the caked soil a shove with his boot to loosen it.

  He handed the shovel back to her and said, “There you go.”

  She stood there and sighed. “I’m trying so hard not to find it attractive that you know how to do man things.”

  He had to laugh out loud. No choice. “Digging a hole’s a pretty low bar. You got any shelves you need put up, maybe a fence, and we’ll be talking.”

  “I know how to put up shelves. But you can build a fence?”

  “Some say so.” She was close enough that he could smell the faint floral scent of her perfume, and he wanted to touch her so badly.

  “Well,” she said, and visibly shook it off, lifting the shovel. “Too bad I don’t need a fence.”

  “Could you use dinner?”

  She didn’t answer for a moment, and he tried to pretend he didn’t care one way or the other.

  “No,” she finally said. “Thanks, but no. You’re here for a semester. The plant was a nice thought, though. Thanks.” And she took her shovel and the pot the hydrangea had come in and disappeared around the side of the house.

  MAGPIE HARVEST

  The following Saturday, Cal Jackson made the wide turn in the combine that would finish off the lentil field, then headed down along the gap between the buttes towards the next one. He was only a few days away from the end of harvest, and he was ready for it to be done. This year, he had other priorities, and fourteen hours a day cutting was feeling like six hours too long.

  He’d been seeing the magpies for a while now. Every time he made a turn around the field, he spotted them in the same place. The black-and-white wings diving, then rising again, a continuous whirlwind. There was something dead in the ditch for sure. Something big, judging by the number of birds. A deer, probably.

  He glanced at the birds now, rising into the air as they were disturbed by the vibration from the big combine’s wheels. When they cleared the area, he caught sight of something in the weeds, something that was the wrong color. Something blue where there shouldn’t have been blue. Blue . . . cloth. Denim.

  He hesitated a moment, one hand on the wheel, the other on the gear lever. Probably nothing. The stirring in some ancient part of his consciousness wouldn’t let it go, though, and instead of driving on, he put his foot on the brake and turned the key.

  The minute his head was outside the door and his foot on the step, the stench filled his nostrils. A deer, he tried to tell himself again as he walked around the back of the hulking machine. No need to look. But he knew it wasn’t true.

  The weeds were thick in the long ditch that ran between the buttes. There was nothing visible but that one scrap of denim fabric. He forced his feet to keep moving forward, and was almost on top of it before he could see what lay under the weeds.

  When he did see, he rocked to a stop.

  The magpies had done their job. The shirt had once been pink, you could tell by the tiny cap sleeves, but was mostly a rusty brown now. A color he knew too well after a life as a professional athlete.

  Something long and dark streaming along the ground between the weeds.

  Hair. Long hair.

  The cold had seeped all the way through to his bones. His legs were frozen. He wanted nothing more than to be gone from here, but he couldn’t move. All at once, he turned from the waist and was violently sick into the weeds. Gasping and choking on the stink, on the thought.

  Then he was leaving the combine behind and pounding down the dirt road to where he’d left his rig. Running hard in the smothering heat, even though there was no amount of speed that could help the thing in the ditch.

  Running fast, his boots raising a cloud of dust. Running back into cell-phone range. Back to call the sheriff.

  WATER AND CHOCOLATE

  About the only thing good Travis could say about his first week of teaching was that nobody had actually fallen asleep or burst into tears of frustration, at least not right there in front of him. He’d thought it would be a piece of cake to teach computer-game design and virtual environments, but he’d realized pretty quickly that knowing the material and teaching it were two different things, even with a syllabus and lecture notes.

  Which was why he’d been in the office on Saturday, trying to figure it out before his T
uesday class. Well, that and it was cooler in the office than in his non-air-conditioned apartment. The temperature had fallen some over the past week, but the mercury had started climbing again the day before, and it was supposed to reach ninety-eight today.

  Now, though, he’d done the best he could do on next week’s lesson plans, and he was thinking he’d check out a reservoir he’d heard about north of town. Swimming outdoors would feel about as good as anything could. Anything he was likely to get, anyway, since he still hadn’t solved the problem of Rochelle, and somehow, he couldn’t let it go.

  It was seeing her around that was messing him up. Every time he’d worked himself up to thinking, All right, forget that and find somebody else. It’s been too long, and you’re here for four months, he’d pass her in the hallway or have to deliver some paperwork—some paperwork he could have put in the interoffice mail—and she’d be looking at him with her cool eyes and sassy mouth, all that body and all those memories, and he’d be right back at square one. He hadn’t been hung up on a woman in a long time, but it sure looked like he was hung up on this one. Just another thing that had changed, and wasn’t that inconvenient.

  He locked his office door, and was headed for the stairs when he heard the ding of the elevator. He glanced over to see the doors opening, and just like that, he was pivoting and stepping inside.

  Because there was Rochelle, in a flippy yellow skirt and a soft, stretchy shirt. Not something his feet were ever going to be carrying him away from. Rochelle, holding a cardboard box that looked heavy.

  She glanced at him, then looked away. Bad start.

  “Here,” he said, reaching for the box. “Let me. Taking this to the car?”

  “No. Basement storage.” She let go, though.

  “Oh.” He realized that he hadn’t hit the “1” button, shifted the box into one hand, and did it. The elevator hesitated, then continued down with a sickening lurch.