Page 65 of The Botanist's Assistant
Finally, she is calm enough to return to the lab, where she grabs her purse and thermos, locks the door and heads for her truck.
Once home, she changes her clothes and goes to work leveling the greenhouse pad.
It’s interesting how swinging a pickax into hard soil can soothe a troubled mind.
32
For Want of a Leaf
Tom is not one ofthose picky eaters, as it turns out. He devours his morning meal—half a can of the chopped all-natural chicken—sits by the bowl and looks up at Margaret in an accusatory way. As if she has denied him what is rightfully his: the entirety of the can.
“Too much food isn’t good for you,” Margaret says. “I read up on feline nutrition and the importance of not overfeeding was stressed multiple times.”
Tom gets up and comes over to where she sits at the kitchen table with her oatmeal and rubs the length of his small body against her leg, then turns and does it twice more. He sits and looks coyly up at her.
Suddenly, Margaret understands why some people might spoil their children. She, however, stiffens her resolve. “You will thank me later when your kidneys and heart continue to function well as you grow older,” she tells the cat.
In answer, Tom gets up and heads for the front door. He seems to be saying he will do what cats do and hunt for hisbreakfast if this human insists on denying him food. His tail twitches with what…? Disdain? Determination?
Margaret imagines the innocent vireo warblers, the black phoebes and lesser goldfinches feeding happily on insects in the woods only to be pounced upon by the small but mighty hunter.
“All right. You win, Tom.” Margaret pushes herself up from the table and begins to spoon the rest of the canned food into the cat’s bowl. “But we will talk about this later.”
Is that triumph on the feline’s face?
As Margaret climbs into the pickup to head for work, however, a single word pops into her head: bell. A belled cat is a saved bird. She will stop at the pet store on her way home and get one for the hungry and determined hunter. He will just have to learn to live with his new adornment.
At the lab, Margaret reviews the results of their latest tests. They confirm what Dr. Deaver had found about the compound they are studying but also that other, more common plants, which are less dangerous and easier to grow, contain a much smaller, almost unworkable, amount of the substance. They will need more leaves from the stinging bush to continue their work. How to do this? All the ideas that come to her have their own problems.
Return to Veronica Ann and beg? Dr. Deaver’s widow doesn’t seem like a soft touch. Forge an email to Neville? Margaret has no idea how to do something like that. Find another person to wander into the rainforest and risk months of pain for very little money? Who would do that without some personal reason like Neville had?
For want of a nail, Margaret thinks. Although, in this case, it’s for want of a leaf.
How she wishes she could grow the exotic bush in the new greenhouse, which makes her think of Joe and then of Rachel Sterling, who may have been right that Margaret is living in a state of denial and anger instead of accepting the truth.
She lets out a sigh, which causes Calvin to look up from his samples.
“I’m fine,” she says before he can ask. “Just a little discouraged. I’d hoped for more from our samples.”
And from myself, she adds in her mind.
“I think I might take a walk. It’s almost lunchtime.” Unlike the cat’s, Margaret’s appetite seems to have disappeared.
“I hate to tell you this, Margaret, but walks might not be as helpful as you think. I went for one after work yesterday like you suggested and, somehow, there I was in front of Dominico’s Pizza and, well, I thought I’d stop in for a quick soda, but they were pushing these craft beers and then somehow there was a large pepperoni pizza in front of me and I had to Uber home and you know the worst part?”
Margaret shakes her head.
“All I wanted afterward was a cigarette.”
“Don’t worry,” Margaret assures him. “I’m in no danger of stumbling across a pizza restaurant where I’m going.”
Sunlight bears down on Margaret’s shoulders as she treks through the oak woodland, past the cattail pond and onto a narrow road that leads into the rich farmland for which this area is famous. Rows of lettuce—iceberg and romaine—march into the distance. Farther on, men and women harvest a field ofstrawberries, the dark, hunched shape of their backsresembling ships gliding through a sea of green. She thinks of Jeanne Baret, a Frenchwoman who, in the late 1700s, disguised herself as a man and sailed around the world with her ailing naturalist-lover doing the hard and often dangerous work of collecting plant specimens from around the globe, and of Alice Eastwood, who rushed to save some twelve hundred plant reference specimens as the post-earthquake fires of San Francisco bore down on her.
Once thought of as an avocation suited for women—those delicate of body and mind—botany is anything but. These women did what needed to be done. Margaret makes up her mind.
Margaret pulls open the door of the science building to see Purdy leaning over a file drawer in her desk. She slams it closed when she senses Margaret’s presence.
“Hello, Ms. Finch,” Purdy says formally.
