“Yeah, do you know her?”
I sigh. I hate small towns.
* * *
Back outside, I stand baking in the sun, the wind out of my sails. And I have to admit that I didn’t really have a plan for where to go next in my job hunt. I had rather naively hoped my experience at Stanley Neal would be all the foot in the door I would need and the Blue-Eyed Macaw would hire me on the spot. I let out a groan as my hairline pricks with sweat and a drop starts trickling down the side of my face. I’m hot. My skin is sticky, my purple cotton sundress suddenly unbearably uncomfortable. I want to scream in frustration at the world.
The red letters of the True Value sign at the end of the block catch my eye and I think of my tomatoes and how the leaves have only gotten more yellow (a little on the brown side, to be honest) and have yet to bear one single orb of fruit. And suddenly I’m furious at Jules and her stupid Epsom salt advice that has done nothing to salvage the plants. I turn toward the storefront and all but stomp down the sidewalk to its jangly glass door.
After adjusting from the bright light of outside, my eyes scan the store until I spot Jules’s helmet of gray curls over by a display of hammers. As I march toward her, my anger builds on itself, until I’m sure she’s at fault not only for the tomatoes, but for the lack of any decent jobs in Hope Springs, the loss of all my babies and, quite possibly, global warming.
“Jules.” I snarl her name, and she turns slowly, peering through her glasses at the UPC stuck on the handle of a hammer. She shifts her gaze to me, her eyes watery and wide behind the frames. Her face is a roadmap of deep wrinkles, her neck still jowly, and these trappings of age take the fight out of me as quick as air leaves a popped balloon. I’m deflated.
“Yes,” she says in her throaty voice. “Can I help you?” She clearly doesn’t remember me.
“My tomatoes are dying,” I mumble.
“Oh.” Her face brightens. “Have you tried Epsom salt? We don’t sell it here. You’ll have to go to the Giant.”
I stare at her, mouth slightly open. I sigh. “I’ll try that,” I say. “Thanks.”
She nods and begins humming as she hangs up the hammer she was holding and then ambles away from me, down an aisle, toward the back of the store.
Behind me, I hear the sharp intake of breath and then a low, deep voice: “Bad advice.” Startled, I turn, and find myself inches from an all-too-familiar face.
A strangled-sounding hiccup of surprise emerges from my throat, and I take a step back.
He straightens his spine. “Sorry. It’s Mia, right?” His voice is friendly, warm, but the way he’s looking at me is completely unnerving. Or maybe I’m just completely unnerved, his expression notwithstanding.
I will myself to respond—to say anything—but find I’ve lost all command of the English language. And I realize that these past few weeks, though I had not forgotten about him, I had somehow compartmentalized our interaction, like a museum curator handling a Dalí acquisition. File under surreal.
But now he’s standing right in front of me, a melting clock come to life.
“Oliver,” he says, gesturing to himself. “We met at Dr. Okafor’s? Your husband saved my sister’s life?”
I force myself to recover. “Yeah, yes, of course,” I say, studying his familiar visage. His lopsided smile—a deep parenthetical line appears only on the right side, like a dimple that decided not to stay in one spot. His full, bushy eyebrows, his thin lips, the way after he pulls at the crown of his head, pieces of hair stay sticking straight up. Did I remember these details from my dreams? Or from seeing him in the waiting room? The difficulty in parsing dream and reality makes me heady.
And then I actually hear the sentence he said, as it ricochets around in my brain like a pinball. “Wait—sister?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Caroline?”
“I didn’t . . . I assumed that you were . . .”
He stares at me for a beat. “That we were . . .” His eyes widen. “Oh! No.” He chuckles. “I guess that makes sense, since we were at an OB/GYN together. But no—brotherly support. She’s just kind of . . . freaked out by the whole thing.”
“Oh.”
Though I’ve been gaping at him like he’s a wild tiger that suddenly appeared in the middle of the hardware store, I notice for the first time that he’s holding a plunger. His other hand is stuffed in his pocket. It seems ludicrous—an accessory that doesn’t fit the intensity of the situation—and I have to swallow back a bubble of laughter.
“Plumbing issues?” I say, for lack of anything else.
“Old house. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.” He flicks his eyes in the direction Jules walked and cocks an eyebrow. “Problem with your tomatoes?”
I take a deep breath, trying to calm my still-racing heart, and stare at his ears. They stick out too far from his head, which would be an unfortunate flaw on someone else but on him it adds something—a charming vulnerability. “Yeah. Problem with the whole garden, really. I inherited it when we moved in. And I have no idea what I’m doing. Besides killing it.”
“Well, whatever you do, don’t use the Epsom salt.”
And I remember his first two words to me: Bad advice. Embarrassed to admit it’s too late, I shoot him a questioning look.
“It’s kind of an old wives’ tale—that Epsom salt will boost the magnesium in the soil; but most soil isn’t deficient in magnesium, at least not so much that a regular fertilizer can’t fix it. And Epsom salt can actually do more harm than good—causing leaf scorch. And if you have blossom end rot, it’ll make that worse.”
“Huh.” My mind swirls with the information he’s unloaded, as well as all my emotions: shock and confusion, of course, but also surprise at how easily we seem to have slipped into a somewhat normal conversation. If talking about Epsom salt can be considered normal. “So . . . are you a farmer?”
“Not exactly,” he says slyly. “But I do have a little experience with agriculture.” He runs his familiar hand through his familiar hair. The ends stick up.
“What do yellow spots on the leaves mean?”
He rocks back on his heels and makes a clicking noise with his cheek. “Any number of things, really. Overwatering. Underwatering. Nutrient deficiency. But it could have nothing to do with the soil at all—could be a fungal issue called blight or even a pest problem. Aphids, thrips, spider mites.”
“Yeah, that’s more or less what Google said, too. Was hoping someone might be able to narrow it down.”
“Sorry to disappoint,” he says, but the side of his mouth curls up and the familiarity of it once again takes my breath.