It could have been a coincidence. By some amazing twist of fate they might both, at different times, have gone to San Diego. They might both have had a photo taken on the same spot. But they hadn’t. It wasn’t a coincidence. I knew it as I looked at the picture. The photos were too similar.
So, what, then? A vacation together. Perhaps my father had had a real estate convention to go to and had taken Marla along as a thank you for her occasional help with Stan. If it had been anyone other than him I might have suspected the photo was evidence of an affair, a dirty weekend away from the eyes of Oakridge. But not with my father. It couldn’t have happened.
Yet as I stared at the photo in the spill of light from the porch behind me I couldn’t help feeling the small cold feet of suspicion patter along some dark and deep-buried corridor within me. Why had neither my father nor Marla ever mentioned taking a trip so far from Oakridge? Surely it should have come up in conversation at some point. Unless there was a reason to hide it.
I could ask Marla, of course. But what if there
So I folded the photo and put it in my wallet and cleaned up the rest of the spilled papers. In bed that night, Marla curled herself against my back, her arms tight around my chest, as though she could not stand to have even an inch of space between us.
Before work the next day Stan and I drove over to Empty Mile. I wanted to compare the soil in the sample the assayer had given me with that around the supposed fence post holes my father and Gareth had dug.
We stopped at the cabin to pick up a spade then headed on down the meadow and into the trees until we came to one of the holes. Stan stood over it and frowned.
“That’s a really neat hole. It’s too thin for a spade.”
“He did it with a fence post digger.”
Stan crouched down and peered into it. “There’s no water.”
He lay on the ground and reached into the hole with his arm.
“I can just touch the bottom.”
He brought up several handfuls of earth and piled them next to the hole-a loose mixture of sand and gravel. I opened the plastic sample bag and took a handful out and dropped it next to the mixture on the ground. There seemed to be no difference between the two.
As I was closing the bag I felt Stan tug my sleeve. I looked up to see him pointing at a small bush a few feet from the hole. It had dull gray-green leaves and I didn’t know what sort it was but on the dusty earth around it there was a scattering of small pink petals; some of them had drifted to the edge of the hole. Stan prodded the sample bag.
“Same flowers, Johnny.”
When we pulled up at the Plantasaurus warehouse later in the morning it looked the same as it always did. The day was fine and the sky was clear and we were all set for a solid day’s work. As we got out of the pickup, though, we saw that the corrugated metal of the sliding door was buckled around the lock and that the door itself was open a couple of inches. We had always been very careful about locking up because of our plant stock and it was immediately obvious to both of us that we had had an intruder. Inside, it was more obvious still.
Our stock of large plants-the weeping figs, dracaenas, yuccas, etc.-had all been perfectly healthy the day before. Now, they were either dead or very rapidly dying and the air in the warehouse smelled strongly of bleach.
When Stan saw the sad ranks of trees he started running on the spot, pumping his arms and making a kind of high whining noise through his nose. I felt an overwhelming tiredness. And anger. But mostly I just wanted to sit down and cover my face and not think about Plantasaurus ever again. I knew I couldn’t do that, though, not while Stan still had such a heavy emotional investment in the business, so I held him and calmed him instead, and then we got down to the task of figuring out what had happened. It wasn’t particularly difficult.
We traced the smell of bleach to the plastic-wrapped cylinders of soil in which each of the affected plants stood.
It was something we’d seen before, of course, the day Jeremy Tripp had so angrily returned the plants we’d installed in his house, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out he was responsible this time too. It was a bad blow. We had Plantagion competing against us, and now we’d lost the stock that should have seen us through to the end of the month. I thought about sitting Stan down and explaining how bad our chances of keeping Plantasaurus going were in the face of such opposition. But before I could muster the nerve, he looked across at me from where he’d been poking at a dead kentia palm and said we’d have to order a new shipment of plants right away. After that, I knew he wasn’t going to listen to anything I might say about winding down the business.
We spent the next couple of hours clearing the dead plants out of the warehouse. At one point I noticed that Stan had disappeared. I found him outside at the rear of the building, lying flat on his back in the dirt. He’d tipped the contents of his moth matchbox onto his face and the insects, dull from so long in the box, moved sluggishly in the depressions beside his nose and over his closed eyelids.
“What are you doing?”
“Recharging.”
I stood there for a moment, but he didn’t open his eyes, so I went back to work and a few minutes later he joined me and we didn’t talk about the moths.
After the cleaning up was done, we began our maintenance visits for that day. At each store or office, after we’d watered, trimmed, and cleaned the displays, we asked if the customers were satisfied with our service. No one had any complaints, and most of them were openly complimentary, but at three of the places they also said they had been approached by a representative of another plant company offering to provide the same level of service at a lower cost. One of the customers had a card the rep had left-tropical palm against a setting sun, the name
We’d signed all our customers to either six- or twelvemonth agreements and none of the three we spoke to that day wanted to pay the fee that early cancellation incurred. But I felt compelled to promise that we’d meet the competing offer when the agreements came up for renewal. Stan nodded seriously as I made this offer and stepped forward and shook their hands as we left.
At the end of the day, back at Empty Mile, Stan went over to see Rosie and I spent a long time sitting on the stoop, wondering what it was I had done that had pissed Jeremy Tripp off so badly.
CHAPTER 24
The next time I saw Gareth was the day before Marla moved into Empty Mile. Stan and I only had half a day’s work and after we’d finished I dropped him at Empty Mile and went back into town alone. Since my return to Oakridge there hadn’t been much of my time that wasn’t fraught with the stresses of trying to understand what was going on with my father, or Gareth, or Marla, or the Empty Mile land. And on this last day before Marla and I began living together I wanted an hour or two to myself, to grab a coffee, to gaze out of a cafe window.
I went to the Mother Lode in Old Town and was doing a pretty good job of not thinking about much when Gareth wandered in. He saw me right away and without bothering to order anything came quickly over and sat down across the table from me.
“Dude, you won’t believe it, we actually had a bunch of council assholes up at the lake today scoping things out. Wanted to discuss how we’d feel about restricted access on Lake Trail while they worked on the road! They still have to do what they call ‘canvassing the community’-some bullshit the eco-liberals stuck in to make sure the tree huggers are happy. But it’s movement, man, it’s movement!”
He clapped his hands and sat back grinning. It was only then that he noticed the stony look I was giving him.
