Much like the kid who’d tried to sneak in, Kristi was a smooth talker. She assured the woman that should anyone be found responsible, they would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
“For what,” I muttered. “Herbicide?” Kristi glared in my direction. Her eyes traveled to the name on my badge but all the while she kept the same smile, the smile facial expression.
Either another emergency call had come in or Kristi had perfected the artful exit. She tilted her head and nodded to an unseen speaker, fluttering her eyelids—the only sign that the caller was delivering bad news.
“Oh, dear. I’ll be right there,” she said. “Seems someone has borrowed a baseball bat from the Bambi-no booth and decapitated a gnome. I must fly. And you, Rolanda, need to get back to your post. Those fanatical protesters could be pouring in right now, ready to do more damage. Let’s get Otis to clean this up.” The two women exchanged forced smiles before Kristi turned on her heels and clacked away.
“Otis works at night,” Rolanda said, under her breath and out of earshot. “She doesn’t even know who’s on duty at her own event.”
“Bambi-no?”
“Another one of you lunatic vendors. The man’s dressed like Babe Ruth. What the hell that has to do with gardening I don’t know.” I nodded sympathetically.
I trailed Rolanda back to her post, still holding the gatecrasher’s bag. I could tell she was disappointed in herself for abandoning her station, so I waited for an appropriate moment to give her the boy’s bag. At the door I saw that my exhibitor’s directory had been placed on Rolanda’s chair. The Happy Valley kid was long gone, presumably inside the hallowed halls without the all-important exhibitor’s badge. Whoever it was he needed to reach, he’d do it without my help.
“You see why I can’t let unauthorized people in?” Rolanda said. “People like you think I’m a martinet, checking papers like I’m the border patrol, but the rules are the rules. The minute anything goes wrong, you got hysterical people like the Fish Lady and Ms. Reynolds screaming conspiracy.”
I silently agreed and moved to hand her the bag.
“I don’t want that thing,” she said, pushing my hand away. “What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Isn’t there a lost and found?”
“It doesn’t open officially until the show does. Just hold on to it. You’ll probably see the little peckerwood before I do, wandering around, stealing stuff. My job is to stand here for eight hours with one forty-five minute lunch break and two informal bathroom breaks, so that’s what I’m going to do. You tell your friend if I see him again, I’ll bounce him out on his Happy Valley butt.”
“If he comes back looking for the bag, my booth number is eleven forty-two.”
“Wait—let me write that down. Don’t you think I can find you if I need to?”
I said nothing, but retrieved my directory and headed to the curtained thirty-by-ten plot that would be my home until the show closed.
Another shriek split the air, but this time I didn’t bite. Given the high-strung nature of the flower show participants, it could have been a slug or a leaf miner. I had the luxury of ignoring it and going for coffee, but Rolanda didn’t.
Now what? she muttered.
Five
After the bigger shows in Philly and Boston, the Big Apple Flower Show was the Northeast’s oldest and most prestigious, sponsored by a consortium of local garden clubs. I’d only been once before and not as an exhibitor. I’m a gardener. It’s been three years since I hung out my shingle in Springfield, Connecticut: Dirty Business Garden Solutions. Quite a change from my former job producing videos for a boutique production company in lower Manhattan—just as much dirt but of a different sort. At least that’s how I started. More recently, only some of the solutions have been garden related. I’ve developed a reputation as something of a problem solver.
I wouldn’t have been at the Big Apple show if it hadn’t been for Babe Chinnery and an eccentric artist named Primo Dunstan. Babe owned the Paradise Diner, where I spent more time and ate more carbs than I should since moving from New York to Connecticut.
Primo was her pal. And he was a character. No one referred to him as strange or antisocial, although he was certainly both, and no one spoke of him as the town hermit either, although he lived alone in the house his parents had left him surrounded by two acres full of scrap iron, broken lawn furniture, and machine and auto parts that made his yard look like the innards of an old television set or that stretch of New Jersey highway that resembles a giant computer motherboard.
Primo had startled some young girls on their way to school one morning and there’d been an ugly rumor until one of the girls recanted. After that, he rarely ventured out except to ride his bicycle around town, filling two hand-wrought wire baskets with interesting junk he obtained foraging through garbage. That was how he’d met Babe, behind her diner.
The good ladies of Springfield worried about Primo and were pondering their humanitarian course of action when one day he showed up at the diner with a five-foot-long iron dragonfly he’d hoped to barter for food.
Babe was appreciative and happily fixed Primo lunch while he and Babe’s boyfriend, Neil, soldered the oversized darning needle onto the diner’s neon marquee. The next day, she got a slew of offers for the unusual sculpture but turned them all down. Instead, she encouraged Dunstan to bring in smaller works she’d display and sell in the diner. That’s how Babe’s makeshift gallery was created. That was when Primo’s status was elevated from weirdo to a “character,” code for a weirdo with money or an artistic bent.
Since then, Primo’s found-materials sculptures had gotten modest press, giving him a reprieve from the do- gooders who wanted to fix whatever it was they thought was wrong with him—his hair, his clothing, and his social life or lack of one. Some said he had Asperger’s, but Babe insisted he had just never gotten around to cultivating his social skills. She was the one who had the bright idea Primo should exhibit at the flower show with me managing the booth, since he was far too shy to do it himself. Like I said—I’m a sucker.
Six
When Babe wasn’t finding work for me, she was trying to fix me up. The jury was still out on her latest matchmaking effort: Hank Mossdale, a stable owner in Springfield. We had met over a mountain of manure he’d generously offered on Freecycle, an online bulletin board where people found takers for their unwanted stuff. I was the only nibble. Hank and I had shared a few diner meals but no actual dates until Babe donned her matchmaker hat and suggested he drive to New York on Monday, to help me deliver Primo’s unsold items to a library in Ridgewood, where she had arranged for a private showing the following week. Surprisingly, Hank said yes.
During the flower show, I would crash at Lucy Cavanaugh’s apartment. She was my oldest friend and one of my last real connections to my life in New York. I had no serious regrets about leaving the big city, just the occasional twinge when Lucy jetted off to some exotic place and I found myself shoveling compost or dining alone with my seed catalogs.
This time Lucy was somewhere in Central America for work. She was delighted to let me use her place and anything in her closets, since in her fashionista math it would bring down the cost per wear of any clothes I borrowed. Always happy to be of service, I arrived a few days early.
My booth neighbors at the flower show were David Heller, one half of a Brooklyn Heights couple who made light fixtures with botanical motifs, and Nikki Bingham, a chatty antiques dealer from upstate New York. Nikki and her much-mentioned but never-seen husband specialized in vintage and reproduction garden furniture.
Both she and David subscribed to the notion that food is love, and it was abundantly clear that every morning and afternoon would be punctuated with a platter of rich, breadlike substances in which we would all be encouraged to partake lest we be considered antisocial. She came over and held open a white cardboard box, and the smell of cinnamon filled my booth.
“Crumb cakes,” she said. “I made them myself.”
“I had a big breakfast,” I fibbed. I set down my things and pitched the gatecrasher’s bag in my booth under a standard trade-show rental, a six-foot table tastefully stapled with royal blue plastic. “Maybe later.”
