Page 28 of Where You're Planted

She looked a little cornered, maybe rethinking this whole interaction, then said quickly, “I want you to know you will be a capable director. I wouldn’t leave the park in your hands if you weren’t.”

“Greta—”

“You have always understood the needs of this place and the mission here. You’re pragmatic. You’re not afraid of hard work, and you don’t expect recognition for it. You understand progress can be a long, slow march.”

He did understand those things. And helikedthe daily work in this place—the actual, hands-in-dirt work anyway. But he didn’t understand why Greta was jumping the gun on what felt like an important moment—agoodbye—when they had four more days before she’d leave.

“If there’s anything I worry about with you, it’s that you’ll forget an ecosystem doesn’t have to becontrolledto be healthy.It’s not a unidirectional, top-down system. Your job as director will not be to solve every problem yourself. An ecosystem’s strength lies, as I know you know, with its interdependent biodiversity.”

“You came to give me a fourth-grade science lesson?”

“No. I’m simply reminding you that you’re not alone here, as much as you sometimes would like to be, and that’s not a bad thing. And to tell you, without a nosey crowd, that I’m…” She shook her head, her no-nonsense gray ponytail swinging. “Quite proud of you. I don’t think I’ve ever told you that.”

Jack couldn’t help that his shoulders rolled back, preening a little, with the compliment. It was possible he was blushing. “Uh…thanks.”

“Good. Okay. That’s done.” She looked back to her office above the courtyard, apparently uncomfortable with such effusive sentimentality. “For the record, I’d prefer to leave you with money for the expansion rather than wisdom and compliments.”

“I’d prefer that, too,” Jack joked.

“If only the storm had uncovered buried treasure here in the park, or the ancestry kit I got at Christmas revealed a close connection to royalty.”

Jack grunted in agreement, pulling a screwdriver from his back pocket and wedging it experimentally into a gap in the siding. He surprised himself when he blurted, “The Brisket King.”

Greta spun back, eyes sharp. “Excuse me?”

Jack sobered as a sneaking feeling of regret came over him. “Chet Fullton. He’s offering a special recovery fund. The librarians are—” He cut himself off, glancing at Tansy and the others contorting themselves on the lawn.

There was no reason not to tell Greta about Tansy’sapplication. She didn’t havedibson publicly available information, and the library wasn’t the only place around here that was struggling to recover.

Still.

But Greta raised an expectant eyebrow and ordered, “Speak.”

So he did.

And when she told him what he already knew, that he must apply for that grant, he put a little more muscle into levering open the greenhouse siding. He pried it back with his hands, and the humming grew louder as he revealed…

Bees. Hundreds of bees.

—

The bee specialist Jack hadfound—even he wasn’t dumb enough to fuck around with DIY bee removal—was a woman in her fifties named Margie who referred to the queen asbabygirland spent her time, while casually scooping handfuls of bees out of the cluster searching for her, explaining to Jack in gruesome detail that drones die after mating with the queen because when they part, their insides get violently ripped out of their abdomens.

Jack was relieved for the interruption when Ian wandered up. “Shouldn’t y’all be wearing protective suits or something?”

Margie unceremoniously shook the bees off her hand. Some flew around her face. Others crawled around on the box at her side. Jack took a big step back, joining Ian on the path, clocking his furtive glance to the small group of teens gathered around Kai in the courtyard. They were doing some kind of weaving project. He’d checked because last week theproject had involved glitter, which was still stuck in the grout between the pavers.

“You done already?” Jack asked, checking his watch. Ian had been working with the interns to finish digging out the bed and offload rocks in the new friendship garden. Jack had compromised with the commissioner to develop it closer to the park entrance, where more people would see it, saving his gated garden for now.

“Taking a break,” Ian admitted. He looked nervous, glancing between the bees and the Teen Art Club, shifting on his feet. “Thought I’d see if you need me for anything here.”

Jack himself wasn’t much use here, standing around while Margie sweet-talked the bees in a way that seemed weirdly sexual.

He started to say there was nothing to help with when Ian turned his attention to the courtyard again, following Kai’s movements around the group. Jack might have missed it if he hadn’t stood in nearly this same spot just this morning, gawking at Tansy on the lawn. Ian wasn’t here to help him. He was here to catch a glimpse of the commando librarian with the same colorful flair in their ever-changing dyed hair that Tansy expressed with her clothes.

“Some of us are going out later, and I thought I’d invite the librarians,” Ian said, unprompted.

“Sure.”

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