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She carried another load of clothes and the battered ficus to the car. She liked to think if Mom had beaten the cancer, she’d have listened to her more. But in her more honest moments, she knew that wasn’t true. She wasn’t the kind of person who took advice, good or otherwise.
When she got back to the curb, the gardener had disappeared. It figured. A man who was truly interested wouldn’t have given up so easily. In his place, two women in polyester pedal pushers were pawing through her possessions. One of them held up a lamp she’d inherited from her Aunt Edna. “I’ll give you five dollars for this,” she said.
Five dollars for a lamp whose base was carved like a pineapple? “Sold!”
“How much for this box of Tupperware?” The second woman held up a carton of kitchen supplies.
She swallowed. “Uh…five dollars?”
Fifteen minutes later, she’d sold the sofa, two kitchen chairs, a toaster that didn’t work and a blender that did. She had over a hundred dollars in cash and people were still shoving money at her.
Beep! Beep! She looked up and felt sick to her stomach as a familiar blue pickup truck rolled toward her. Talk about bad timing…. The window glided down and her father leaned out. Dad had thick salt-and-pepper hair that he’d worn in a flattop since he was discharged from the Army in 1969. He dressed in bowling shirts and baggy khakis dating from the Nixon presidency, and shiny cowboy boots. Her friends who met him for the first time thought he was hip and fashionable. She didn’t have the heart to tell them he’d been dressing this way for forty years. “Honey, why didn’t you tell me you were having a yard sale?” he asked.
She stuffed the cash in the pocket of her jeans and reluctantly walked over to him. “Uh, it’s not exactly a sale, Dad.”
He stared as two men walked past him with her couch. “You’re selling your sofa?”
She pretended to adjust his side mirror. “Dad, what are you doing here?”
“I thought I might take you out for a decent meal.”
Since her mom had died a year ago, her dad dropped by a couple of times a week to take Lucy to dinner. He said he wanted to make sure she got a good meal every now and then, but she knew it was really because he was lonely.
A woman marched past carrying her old bedside table. “If you’re not having a yard sale, what are you doing?”
She stared at the ground. “I’ve been evicted.”
She braced herself for the storm she was sure was coming. The familiar “at your age you should be more responsible” lecture. But he didn’t say anything.
After a minute, she couldn’t stand it anymore and risked looking at him. He didn’t look angry at all, just tired. Old. An invisible hand squeezed her chest. “Is everything okay, Dad?”
He sighed. “I was going through some of your mother’s things today.”
The hand squeezed tighter. “Oh, Daddy.” She touched his arm, not knowing what to say. How did you comfort someone when they’d lost the person they’d lived with for over thirty years?
He gripped the steering wheel with both hands. “There’s a bunch of stuff in the potting shed—bulbs and plants and all kinds of books and stuff. I figure I ought to do something with it, but I don’t know what.”
Lucy’s mom had been an avid gardener. She’d won Yard of the Month so many times the Garden Society gave her a brass plaque and told her she couldn’t enter again. She’d tried to pass her green thumb along to her daughter, but Lucy was probably the only person in the world who once actually killed a pot of silk flowers.(She forgot and watered them. The stems rusted and they fell over.)
“I thought maybe you’d come over and help me,” Dad said.
“Sure. Sure I will.” She glanced back over her shoulder toward her dwindling pile of possessions. She needed to poll her girlfriends to find out who would let her crash for a few days until she could find a new apartment. And she’d probably have to break down and balance her checkbook to see what she could afford. “Uh, how about one day next week?”
Dad opened the truck door and climbed out. “Come on. I’ll help you get the rest of your stuff. You can move in with me.”
“I don’t know, Dad.” She followed him over to where two women were arguing over her DVD player. “I wouldn’t want to impose.” Besides, there was something so pathetic about a single, unemployed twenty-six-year-old having to move back in with her father, wasn’t there?
“You got somewhere else to go?” Dad elbowed the two women out of the way and picked up the DVD player.
Her shoulders sagged. “No.” She gathered up a box of CDs and followed him to the truck. Unemployed…evicted…back under Dad’s thumb. Yep. Trouble came in threes, all right.
GREG POLHEMUS hung the little brass plaque on the wall behind the cash register and stepped back to admire it. Best of Show, Downtown Art Fair it proclaimed in fancy script. It looked pretty good up there with the other awards and citations he’d collected lately.
“Your father would be so pleased.” Marisel rested her hand on his shoulder and gave him a fond look. The Guatemalan nursery worker mothered everyone at Polhemus Gardens, but especially Greg, despite the fact that he was her boss.
“Oh, he’d probably gripe about me wasting time at an art fair when we have so much work piling up.” He smiled, picturing his father in scolding mode. He’d frown and shake a finger at Greg, but his eyes would be dancing with laughter. Greg had never thought he’d miss his father’s litany of complaints, but now that the old man was gone, he found himself wishing he’d paid a little more attention to what he’d had to say.
“He would gripe, but he’d still be proud.” Marisel impaled a stack of order slips on the spindle by the register. “It’s after six o’clock on a Friday night. What are you still doing here?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?” He picked up a sheaf of invoices. “I’m working.”
She shook her head. “You need to hire someone to help you with all this paperwork. You can’t do everything.”
He laughed. “Are you trying to fill my father’s shoes in the griping department? You’re going to need more practice.”
She frowned. “A handsome young man like you should be out enjoying himself. Dancing. Seeing the girls.”
When had meeting women stopped being easy? He didn’t want to go hang out at bars by himself, and the buddies he used to hang with were either married and raising families or still living like frat boys, sharing apartments and living on beer and fast food. He was stuck somewhere in between, with a house of his own and a business to run, but no family to share it with.
He thought of the woman he’d met today outside the apartment, the one being evicted. Most of the women he knew would have dissolved into tears at the very thought of such public humiliation, but this one had been reading the riot act to crusty old Leon Kopetsky. Then she’d lashed out at him like a cobra.
He should have known better than to step into something that wasn’t his business, but she’d looked so alone, standing there with all her possessions piling up around her. He’d wanted to do something to help. It didn’t even matter that she didn’t want his help. There wasn’t any real heat behind her anger, only wounded pride. Too bad he didn’t have the chance to get to know her better.
He could ask Kopetsky her name, but what good would that do? It wasn’t like he had time to spend trying to track down his mystery woman.
“You should go out, meet someone nice,” Marisel prodded.
“I see plenty of women,” he said. “I was digging a new rose bed for the Lawson sisters just this morning. And Margery Rice calls me at least once a week to come over and see her.”
Marisel made a face. “The Lawson sisters are old enough to be your grandmothers and Margery Rice should be ashamed of herself, a married woman flirting like that.”
“Oh, I don’t take her seriously.” He paged through the invoices. Margery Rice was a very well-built forty-year-old who had let it be known he could leave his shoes under her bed any time, but he didn’t have any intention of taking her up on her offer. Still, it had been a while since a woman had warmed his sheets. Marisel was right; he needed to make more of an effort to find someone.
“I promise I’ll get out and circulate,” he said. “After the art show is over and I win the bid for Allen Industries.”
“If those people have any sense you’ll win the bid. But your father tried for years to get them as customers and he never could.” She shook her head. “That shows right there they aren’t too smart.”
He nodded. Yes, his father had gone after Allen Industries for years. But this year, Greg was determined to get the job. “There’s no way they can turn me down. The plan I outlined for them is exactly what they’re looking for, and no one will beat the price.”
“And then what? You’ll spend all your time making sure the job is done perfectly instead of getting out and having any kind of life.” She wagged her finger at him in a fair imitation of the old man. “You’re too young to be a hermit.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He bit the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing. At six-two, he towered more than a foot over Marisel, but she looked for all the world as if at any moment she’d lay him over her knee and tan his hide.
“You laugh, but don’t you know the woman for you isn’t going to fall out of the sky?”
“I was thinking I might find her hiding behind a rose bush one day.”
“Why would you think a loco thing like that?”
“Pop always said you could find all the best things in life in gardens.”
She made a clucking sound with her tongue. “I don’t think he meant women.”
“You never know. He might have.” The way things were going, Greg figured he had as much chance finding a woman in a garden as he did anywhere else. And he spent more time in gardens. He opened a drawer and shoved the invoices inside. “Come on. I’ll drop you off on my way home.”
She pulled her sweater close around her. “You don’t have to go to any trouble for me. I can take the bus.”
He slipped his arm around her shoulders. “Come on. If you see any likely looking women on the way, you can point them out to me.”
She swatted at him. “You are a bad boy, Greg Polhemus.”
“Yes, ma’am. I work at it.”
He laughed as she began muttering under her breath in Spanish and led the way to the car. When he’d caught up on some of his jobs, he would make more of an effort to date. That house of his needed a family in it and he was tired of sleeping alone.
2
To dig is to discover.
LUCY COULDN’T BELIEVE she was moving back into her old bedroom at her age. She was supposed to be a strong, independent young woman. So what was she doing letting Dad rush to her rescue? She stared at the antique white bed and dresser her mother had picked out when Lucy turned ten. Her DVD player sat on the dresser next to the ballerina jewelry box Mom had given her for her thirteenth birthday. The bookcase in the corner held her collection of Sweet Valley High books and troll dolls.
She half expected her high-school best friend, Janet Hightower, to call and ask her for her notes from history, and had she seen that rad new guy in chemistry class?
She sighed and sank down onto the bed. Somehow, when she’d been planning her future, she’d thought she’d have been past all this by now. In fact, if the diary she’d kept when she was twelve had been accurate, she’d be living in a fifteen-room mansion in River Oaks with two perfect children, a millionaire husband who worshiped the ground she walked on and gave her diamonds “just because” and a silver Porsche in the driveway.
Which just goes to show that at twelve, she hadn’t known squat about real life.
She ran her hand along the end of the bed. When she bent over and pressed her nose up against the quilt, she could smell the faint scent of White Shoulders. Her mother’s favorite perfume. What was Mom up to now? Was she a young woman again, swooping around Heaven and flirting with all the men? Was she in some star-dusted greenhouse developing a new strain of tulip? Was she looking down wondering how the heck her daughter had managed to screw up her life—again?
“I’m going to get it together, Mom,” she said, in case Mom was listening. “I’m working on it.”
Mom laughed. Okay, it was only her imagination, but she knew if Mom was here, she would laugh. After gardening, Mom’s second favorite hobby was her daughter. “I’m going to find you the perfect man, don’t you worry,” she’d say.
Lucy groaned, remembering. Her mom’s idea of Mr. Perfect and hers hadn’t quite meshed. Lucy wanted men who flirted with danger. Bad boys who made her pulse race and her heart pound. Her oh-so-conventional childhood had made her long for darkly handsome rebels.
“Lucy! Where are you?”
“Back here, Dad.”
Her father appeared in the doorway, the ailing ficus in his arms. “I think this is the last of it,” he said.
“Thanks, Dad.” She stood and set the ficus by the window, then stepped back to survey her home-away-from-home. Except for the tree and the DVD player, it looked like she’d never left.
“So where are you working these days?” Her father took her place on the end of the bed.
“Um, I’m still doing temp work until I can find something more permanent.” She began unpacking her suitcase.
Dad made a noise that could have been a grunt. “I didn’t send you to college so you could do temp work.”
She gave herself credit for not rolling her eyes. “I’m an English major, Dad. Houston is full of English majors waiting tables and tending bar. There just aren’t that many jobs that call for quoting Emily Dickinson and analyzing Thomas Wolfe.”
“You ought to let me talk to the guys down at the hiring hall. They could get you into an apprenticeship program.” Dad was an electrician. “There are lots of single guys down at the hall,” he said. “You might meet somebody nice.”
“I don’t want to meet somebody nice.” She deposited an armful of T-shirts in the dresser and reached for the next stack.
“You want to meet somebody rotten?”
She smiled and shook her head. “I don’t want to meet anybody.” Not anyone her father would introduce her to. His idea of Mr. Right was probably even more straitlaced than her mom’s.
He leaned forward, worry lines etched on his forehead. “Honey, is there something you’re not telling me?”
“What do you mean?” She moved over and unzipped her garment bag.
“You say you don’t want to meet men. That doesn’t mean you want to meet women, do you?”
She dropped an armload of dresses. “No! Jeez, Dad!”
“I mean, not that I would care or anything. Not that I understand that sort of thing, but—”
“Daddy, I am not a lesbian.” She blushed. This was not the sort of conversation she ever pictured herself having with her father. She slid back the closet door and the scent of White Shoulders engulfed her. She blinked at the familiar houndstooth jacket in front of her. “What are Mom’s clothes doing in my closet?”
The bed creaked as he stood and came to stand behind her. “She started keeping some of her things in here after you moved out.” He cleared his throat. “Guess I haven’t gotten around to cleaning them out yet. I can move them into the attic if you want.”
He reached for the jacket, but she stopped him. “No, that’s okay.” She shoved the jacket and the clothes behind it to one side and hung her things on the rod. “There’s still room for mine. It’ll be okay.”
She looked at her cropped, red leather jacket next to her mom’s old houndstooth. Mom had never liked that jacket much, but now Lucy thought the two of them looked right at home together.
“Let me call the hall.” Daddy interrupted her reverie. “At least you could get a decent job out of it.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to be an electrician.”
“Why not? It’s good, honest work. Kept a roof over your head and food in your mouth for plenty of years.”
She turned away and rolled her eyes. Looked like she was in for lecture number seven on Dad’s top ten hits. So much for thinking the rent here was free. She’d forgotten about the listening tax.
She made a show of looking at her watch. “Gosh, look at the time.” She smiled brightly. “What should we have for dinner?”
“Don’t worry about me. I’m going out.” He turned toward the door. “I’d better get a move on or I’ll be late.”
She followed him down the hall. Her first night home and he was going out? “I thought we were going to go through the potting shed tonight.”
“You do it, hon. I’m going out.” He disappeared into the bathroom at the end of the hall.
Out? Her dad? She shrugged and wandered into the kitchen. The refrigerator held a quart of milk, a wedge of green cheese, half a package of sliced ham that was drying out around the edges, a jar of pickles, a twelve-pack of Bud and three Diet Sprites. The cabinets yielded some crackers, a can of tomato soup, a box of Lucky Charms and a jar of peanut butter. Lucky Charms? She hadn’t eaten those since junior high.
She was digging into a big bowl of sugar-frosted oats and marshmallows when Dad came out of the bathroom. A cloud of Brut preceded him down the hall. She let out a whistle when he appeared. He’d traded in the khakis and bowling shirt for starched jeans and a striped western shirt with pearl snaps and gold stitching around the yoke. Light bounced off the glossy surface of his boots. “So what do you think?” he asked.
“I haven’t seen you this dressed up since Aunt Edna’s third wedding.” Comprehension slowly stole over her sugar-charged brain. “You’re going out,” she gasped.
