Page 51 of The Botanist's Assistant
“Are you sure?” she asks. The cat lets out a raspy meow in reply.
“Well, all right,” she says, “but I’d appreciate it if you’d get back by six fifteen so I don’t have to holler into the woods every time I get home.”
She watches the feline jump from the porch and head for the forest. “And don’t kill any birds,” she calls after it.
As she leaves the house, she waters the two begonia stems she planted in small pots last night. No reason to let them go to waste.
At work, she finds it hard to concentrate. Her mind keeps veering to what she learned yesterday and what next steps are needed. When Calvin comes in, she tells him he might as well work on his own project since she needs to finish the grant application.
By eleven, when Calvin still hasn’t left for a cigarette break, she becomes concerned. She thinks of Veronica AnnDeaverand her blue pill. Is Calvin high or has he swallowed too many Xanax?
“Are you feeling all right, Calvin?” she asks.
“I am,” he says. “In fact, I’ve turned over a new leaf.” He waits a beat. “Get it? This is a botany lab? A new leaf?” The corner of his mouth twitches up in a crooked grin.
When and how did Calvin acquire a sense of humor? She’s never seen even a hint of it before.
“That’s quite funny,” she says. She doesn’t want to discourage this new and slightly improved version of the postdoc, although the thought of enduring horrible puns day after day isn’t appealing either. “And how have you turned over a new leaf?”
She also decides not to tell him the phrase has nothing to do with plants but, rather, is a reference to book pages, which were once called leaves.
Calvin pulls up the sleeve of his T-shirt. “Nicotine patch. I decided to quit.”
“Good for you.”
“It was those pancakes and eggs yesterday, which made me realize I was basically living on coffee, cigarettes and Xanax with the occasional junk food thrown in, plus the thought of another day with those dogs.” He shudders. “Yesterday one of them peed on my shoe.”
Margaret glances down. He is, indeed, wearing a different pair of shoes: brown flip-flops, which are even worse than the stained sneakers.
“And also, the way you reacted to what the dean and Dr. Blackstone are doing to you was pretty remarkable. Kind of aJoan of Arc move, if you know what I mean. I thought,If shecan do it, so can I. Who knows. I might start my own business like Zhang. I’ve been thinking: flavored organic sunflower seeds.”
Margaret herself has never seen the pleasure in crunching nut shells to get at the tiny bit of meat inside, but she wouldn’t deny the experience to anyone else.
“Quitting cigarettes is a good first step.”
“Yeah, and just think of all the money I’ll save. In fact, I’m going to the café for lunch. It’s Tofu Thursday.”
Margaret watches him leave, his hair still wild but a slight bounce in his step. He’s right about Joan of Arc. She can feel the flames of deceit, betrayal and danger licking at her heels.
She calls Joe.
“Sure, I’ll do it,” he says after listening for a few minutes. “It’s probably better to go somewhere private. Why don’t you come down to the house and have lunch? My housemate is at work. We can have the whole place to ourselves.”
Margaret can’t remember the last time anyone invited her to their house for a meal. A sudden wave of something washes over her. Not shyness. Margaret is never shy. Not nerves. It’s more a warm feeling of anticipation. Like when she was a little kid, and her father (her real father) said he was going to take her to dinner. He plopped her into the passenger seat of his shiny blue semi (minus the long trailer, of course) and they rumbled off, her feeling like a queen as she looked down on everyone they passed on the road. They ended up at McDonald’s, where her father bought her a cheeseburger and chocolate milkshake, which to her five-year-old mind was almost a banquet.
“I only have an hour,” she tells Joe.
“I’ve already got something on the stove and my place is five minutes from campus.”
“I also brought a lunch.”
“Can it keep?”
Margaret ponders the hard-boiled eggs and cheese sitting in the breakroom refrigerator. Maybe embracing the unexpected also means doing the unexpected.
“I’ll be there,” she says.
Joe is right and the drive to his house takes exactly five minutes. It’s a small stucco house in a neighborhood of other small stucco houses. The lawn is slightly overgrown and weedy with dandelions, but there are roses and a pretty wisteria and Margaret decides she likes this little enclave more than the fancy neighborhood where neighbors quibble about the length of their grass and how many pets you can have.
