Life According to Lucy
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Cindi Myers
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1
Gardens teach us many lessons, among them humility, hope and the importance of pest control.
WHAT DOES A GIRL have to do to change her luck? Lucy Lake thought as she watched her landlord march past her and deposit her TV by the curb. She’d wanted true love and dated a string of players. She’d wanted a raise and gotten a pink slip. She’d wanted love letters in the mail and instead had gotten an eviction notice. Honestly, how much worse could it get?
“Mr. Kopetsky, it was just a little mix-up at the bank.” She followed her landlord back toward the apartment. Could she help it if she hadn’t kept very good track of her finances? It had been all right when she’d been gainfully employed, but the money she brought in doing temp work since she’d been laid off hadn’t been enough to cover the shopping habit she’d acquired in more flush times.
“Ha!” Kopetsky spat into the oleanders that flanked the walk, narrowly missing the gardener who was planting a flat of marigolds alongside the shrubs. “That check bounced all the way to San Antonio. And it wasn’t the first time either.” He started up the outside stairs toward Lucy’s second floor rooms, pausing to lean over the railing to address the gardener, “Make sure you use that big bark mulch so it don’t blow all the way to Del Rio when the wind comes up. I ain’t payin’ for that stuff to blow away.”
“I’ll take care of it, Mr. K.” The gardener rose, all six feet two inches of him, broad shouldered and bare chested. Even given her distress over her current situation, Lucy couldn’t help gaping at him. Her notoriously fickle libido gave signs of stirring, and the only thought that came into her mind was the old soup slogan: Mmm, mm, good!
“Can I help you with something, ma’am?”
Her libido made a hasty retreat and her shoulders slumped. As too often happened, the Greek God spoiled everything by opening his mouth. Not that his voice wasn’t nice enough—rich and appropriately masculine—but the word “ma’am” was the killer. She was not a ma’am. Her mother was a ma’am. Her grandmother was a ma’am. She, Lucy Lake, was light-years away from ma’am-hood.
“Ma’am?” He did it again, and took a step toward her. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” she snapped, and turned away. Any man who would call her “ma’am” was not anyone she could be interested in, no matter how broad his shoulders.
Kopetsky marched past her with a box of dishes. “I’m just doing my job here,” he said. “Don’t take this personal or anything.”
“Oh, of course I won’t take it personal.” She raised her voice as he walked away from her. “Why would I take having all my belongings dumped by the curb personal?”
She was keenly aware of the gardening god standing there watching this little drama. It was bad enough being evicted without having Mr. Bronzed Muscles looking on. She gave him what she hoped was a quelling look, but he annoyed her further by smiling. A gorgeous, white-toothed grin that might have been sexy if not for the fact that it was completely ill-timed.
Kopetsky hunched his shoulders up around his ears and turned to glare at her. “You’d better call somebody to haul this stuff away before trash pickup in the morning.”
She frowned. If she didn’t get her belongings out of here by nightfall, they’d be picked clean long before the garbage men showed up.
Sighing, she gathered up an armful of clothing and headed toward her car, ignoring the curious looks from her neighbors and passing strangers. Didn’t they have anything better to do than gape at her?
Of course they didn’t. An eviction ranked right up there with the Mosquito Festival and the Art Car Parade in her neighborhood. All three were venerable Houston entertainments, though mosquitoes and Art Cars had to settle for being feted only once a year.
Other women might have burst into tears or made a big scene, but Lucy was almost getting used to this kind of setback. Two months ago, she’d lost probably the best job she’d had to date when the software company she worked for went belly-up. Since then she’d worked a series of temporary jobs and drowned her sorrows with hefty doses of shopping therapy.
Okay, so maybe those trips to the mall were a bad idea, but a girl’s gotta find solace where she can, right? It wasn’t as if she had a man she could depend on. Her last steady boyfriend eloped with a cheerleader over a year ago. Stan said she’d always be a good friend, but she wasn’t his idea of the perfect girlfriend. She told him dumping someone was not the best way to keep a friendship going, but he just smiled and chucked her under the chin. Talk about insulting! She hadn’t been chucked since she was nine.
Since Stan split she’d dated a bull rider, a motorcycle racer, a construction worker, a performance artist and one angst-filled musician, every one of whom seemed to think she was great to be with as long as she didn’t want anything from them—say, a wedding ring.
Now, she’d lost her apartment. It hadn’t been much of a place, but the rent was cheap and it did have a nice view of the Transco Tower if you stood on the toilet and craned your head in the right direction.
When was the next disaster going to sneak up and bite her in the butt?
“Where do you want this?” Startled, she looked up to find the gardener standing beside her, holding her television as easily as if it was a cube of foam.
“Uh…just put it in the back seat.” She opened the door and he slid the TV into the car. “Thanks,” she mumbled.
“No problem.” He stepped back and surveyed her car, a bright blue economy model that had seen better days. “You’re not going to get much in there.”
“No kidding.” She slammed the door shut. “I’ll figure out something.”
“I’ve got a truck—”
She didn’t even know this guy. Why was he being so nice? “Look.” She turned to him. “Thanks, but no thanks. I didn’t ask for your help.”
“No, but you need it.”
Great. A know-it-all and a buttinsky. Instead of a gardening god, the man was a gardening geek. Give her a rough-around-the-edges bad boy who knew how to mind his own business any day.
She turned and marched back toward the front of the apartment building. Garden-boy followed. Honestly, some people couldn’t take a hint.
Mr. Kopetsky was depositing a mangy-looking ficus at the curb. “You ought to leave this one for the garbage,” he advised. “It looks dead.”
“It is not dead!” She reached out to steady the little tree and a rain of yellowed leaves fell to the sidewalk.
“Too dry. And probably not getting enough light.” The gardener reached out and felt a brittle leaf. “It’s hard to get the conditions right in these little apartments.”
She rolled her eyes. “Who asked you, okay?”
He held up his hands. “No one. Just trying to help.”
“If I want your help, I’ll ask for it.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“And don’t call me ma’am.”
“What do you want me to call you?”
“Nothing. Go back to playing in the dirt.”
“My, don’t you have a way with words?” Still grinning, he retreated to the marigolds.
She stared at his back, at the muscles that gleamed with sweat and swallowed hard. Maybe she’d been a little harsh. He was probably a nice guy. Too nice. No tattoos or piercings, hair clipped short. He looked like the poster child for clean-cut American.
Exactly the sort of man her mother would have loved. Mom was big on clean-cut and polite—men, she said, who had integrity. “You can count on a man with integrity,” she’d always said.
Thanks to Mom, Lucy knew what it was like to date an Elvis impersonator, a one-eyed pizza delivery driver and a man who made his living as a sewage plant diver—all of whom were up to their nonpierced earlobes in integrity. She knew her mother’s heart was in the right place, but she’d always preferred guys who were a little more exciting than that. Guys who took risks. The kind her mother never approved of. Her motto was: Life Is Too Short to Date Dull Men.
She stared morosely at the ficus. Okay, so maybe it was a tad unwell. Still, she couldn’t bear to get rid of it. Her mother, in one of her many attempts to improve Lucy, had given her this tree.
Mom had also given her a bread maker she’d used once, a sewing machine that had never been out of the box and a complete set of the works of Beethoven. She couldn’t bear to get rid of any of them either. Now that Mom was gone, she cherished everything associated with her, from half-dead plants to impractical appliances.
Mostly what Mom had given her was advice. “Be patient and one day you’ll find the perfect career. One that takes advantage of your unique talents.”
“You mean there are jobs out there for women who can read e-mail and talk on the phone at the same time?” she’d asked.
“Your perfect job is out there somewhere,” Mom said, ignoring Lucy’s lame humor. “And the right man is waiting for you, too. All you have to do is open your eyes and look.”
“If I open my eyes any wider my eyeballs will fall out.” Could she help it if the dark and dangerous men who got her motor running weren’t exactly husband material?
Mom gave her that long-suffering look she’d perfected. “You’ll see I’m right one day. I have experience with these things.”
What experience? Her mom got married when she was twenty, had Lucy when she was twenty-five and worked part-time in the county tax office until she got too sick to do it anymore. Her life didn’t look anything like the one Lucy lived.
She carried another load of clothes and the battered ficus to the car. She liked to think if Mom had beaten the cancer, she’d have listened to her more. But in her more honest moments, she knew that wasn’t true. She wasn’t the kind of person who took advice, good or otherwise.
When she got back to the curb, the gardener had disappeared. It figured. A man who was truly interested wouldn’t have given up so easily. In his place, two women in polyester pedal pushers were pawing through her possessions. One of them held up a lamp she’d inherited from her Aunt Edna. “I’ll give you five dollars for this,” she said.
Five dollars for a lamp whose base was carved like a pineapple? “Sold!”
“How much for this box of Tupperware?” The second woman held up a carton of kitchen supplies.
She swallowed. “Uh…five dollars?”
Fifteen minutes later, she’d sold the sofa, two kitchen chairs, a toaster that didn’t work and a blender that did. She had over a hundred dollars in cash and people were still shoving money at her.
Beep! Beep! She looked up and felt sick to her stomach as a familiar blue pickup truck rolled toward her. Talk about bad timing…. The window glided down and her father leaned out. Dad had thick salt-and-pepper hair that he’d worn in a flattop since he was discharged from the Army in 1969. He dressed in bowling shirts and baggy khakis dating from the Nixon presidency, and shiny cowboy boots. Her friends who met him for the first time thought he was hip and fashionable. She didn’t have the heart to tell them he’d been dressing this way for forty years. “Honey, why didn’t you tell me you were having a yard sale?” he asked.
She stuffed the cash in the pocket of her jeans and reluctantly walked over to him. “Uh, it’s not exactly a sale, Dad.”
He stared as two men walked past him with her couch. “You’re selling your sofa?”
She pretended to adjust his side mirror. “Dad, what are you doing here?”
“I thought I might take you out for a decent meal.”
Since her mom had died a year ago, her dad dropped by a couple of times a week to take Lucy to dinner. He said he wanted to make sure she got a good meal every now and then, but she knew it was really because he was lonely.
A woman marched past carrying her old bedside table. “If you’re not having a yard sale, what are you doing?”
She stared at the ground. “I’ve been evicted.”
She braced herself for the storm she was sure was coming. The familiar “at your age you should be more responsible” lecture. But he didn’t say anything.
After a minute, she couldn’t stand it anymore and risked looking at him. He didn’t look angry at all, just tired. Old. An invisible hand squeezed her chest. “Is everything okay, Dad?”
He sighed. “I was going through some of your mother’s things today.”
The hand squeezed tighter. “Oh, Daddy.” She touched his arm, not knowing what to say. How did you comfort someone when they’d lost the person they’d lived with for over thirty years?
He gripped the steering wheel with both hands. “There’s a bunch of stuff in the potting shed—bulbs and plants and all kinds of books and stuff. I figure I ought to do something with it, but I don’t know what.”
Lucy’s mom had been an avid gardener. She’d won Yard of the Month so many times the Garden Society gave her a brass plaque and told her she couldn’t enter again. She’d tried to pass her green thumb along to her daughter, but Lucy was probably the only person in the world who once actually killed a pot of silk flowers.(She forgot and watered them. The stems rusted and they fell over.)
“I thought maybe you’d come over and help me,” Dad said.
“Sure. Sure I will.” She glanced back over her shoulder toward her dwindling pile of possessions. She needed to poll her girlfriends to find out who would let her crash for a few days until she could find a new apartment. And she’d probably have to break down and balance her checkbook to see what she could afford. “Uh, how about one day next week?”
Dad opened the truck door and climbed out. “Come on. I’ll help you get the rest of your stuff. You can move in with me.”
“I don’t know, Dad.” She followed him over to where two women were arguing over her DVD player. “I wouldn’t want to impose.” Besides, there was something so pathetic about a single, unemployed twenty-six-year-old having to move back in with her father, wasn’t there?
“You got somewhere else to go?” Dad elbowed the two women out of the way and picked up the DVD player.
Her shoulders sagged. “No.” She gathered up a box of CDs and followed him to the truck. Unemployed…evicted…back under Dad’s thumb. Yep. Trouble came in threes, all right.
GREG POLHEMUS hung the little brass plaque on the wall behind the cash register and stepped back to admire it. Best of Show, Downtown Art Fair it proclaimed in fancy script. It looked pretty good up there with the other awards and citations he’d collected lately.
“Your father would be so pleased.” Marisel rested her hand on his shoulder and gave him a fond look. The Guatemalan nursery worker mothered everyone at Polhemus Gardens, but especially Greg, despite the fact that he was her boss.
“Oh, he’d probably gripe about me wasting time at an art fair when we have so much work piling up.” He smiled, picturing his father in scolding mode. He’d frown and shake a finger at Greg, but his eyes would be dancing with laughter. Greg had never thought he’d miss his father’s litany of complaints, but now that the old man was gone, he found himself wishing he’d paid a little more attention to what he’d had to say.
“He would gripe, but he’d still be proud.” Marisel impaled a stack of order slips on the spindle by the register. “It’s after six o’clock on a Friday night. What are you still doing here?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?” He picked up a sheaf of invoices. “I’m working.”
She shook her head. “You need to hire someone to help you with all this paperwork. You can’t do everything.”
He laughed. “Are you trying to fill my father’s shoes in the griping department? You’re going to need more practice.”
She frowned. “A handsome young man like you should be out enjoying himself. Dancing. Seeing the girls.”
When had meeting women stopped being easy? He didn’t want to go hang out at bars by himself, and the buddies he used to hang with were either married and raising families or still living like frat boys, sharing apartments and living on beer and fast food. He was stuck somewhere in between, with a house of his own and a business to run, but no family to share it with.
He thought of the woman he’d met today outside the apartment, the one being evicted. Most of the women he knew would have dissolved into tears at the very thought of such public humiliation, but this one had been reading the riot act to crusty old Leon Kopetsky. Then she’d lashed out at him like a cobra.
He should have known better than to step into something that wasn’t his business, but she’d looked so alone, standing there with all her possessions piling up around her. He’d wanted to do something to help. It didn’t even matter that she didn’t want his help. There wasn’t any real heat behind her anger, only wounded pride. Too bad he didn’t have the chance to get to know her better.
He could ask Kopetsky her name, but what good would that do? It wasn’t like he had time to spend trying to track down his mystery woman.
“You should go out, meet someone nice,” Marisel prodded.
“I see plenty of women,” he said. “I was digging a new rose bed for the Lawson sisters just this morning. And Margery Rice calls me at least once a week to come over and see her.”
Marisel made a face. “The Lawson sisters are old enough to be your grandmothers and Margery Rice should be ashamed of herself, a married woman flirting like that.”
“Oh, I don’t take her seriously.” He paged through the invoices. Margery Rice was a very well-built forty-year-old who had let it be known he could leave his shoes under her bed any time, but he didn’t have any intention of taking her up on her offer. Still, it had been a while since a woman had warmed his sheets. Marisel was right; he needed to make more of an effort to find someone.
“I promise I’ll get out and circulate,” he said. “After the art show is over and I win the bid for Allen Industries.”
“If those people have any sense you’ll win the bid. But your father tried for years to get them as customers and he never could.” She shook her head. “That shows right there they aren’t too smart.”
He nodded. Yes, his father had gone after Allen Industries for years. But this year, Greg was determined to get the job. “There’s no way they can turn me down. The plan I outlined for them is exactly what they’re looking for, and no one will beat the price.”
“And then what? You’ll spend all your time making sure the job is done perfectly instead of getting out and having any kind of life.” She wagged her finger at him in a fair imitation of the old man. “You’re too young to be a hermit.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He bit the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing. At six-two, he towered more than a foot over Marisel, but she looked for all the world as if at any moment she’d lay him over her knee and tan his hide.
“You laugh, but don’t you know the woman for you isn’t going to fall out of the sky?”
“I was thinking I might find her hiding behind a rose bush one day.”
“Why would you think a loco thing like that?”
“Pop always said you could find all the best things in life in gardens.”
She made a clucking sound with her tongue. “I don’t think he meant women.”
“You never know. He might have.” The way things were going, Greg figured he had as much chance finding a woman in a garden as he did anywhere else. And he spent more time in gardens. He opened a drawer and shoved the invoices inside. “Come on. I’ll drop you off on my way home.”
She pulled her sweater close around her. “You don’t have to go to any trouble for me. I can take the bus.”
He slipped his arm around her shoulders. “Come on. If you see any likely looking women on the way, you can point them out to me.”
She swatted at him. “You are a bad boy, Greg Polhemus.”
“Yes, ma’am. I work at it.”
He laughed as she began muttering under her breath in Spanish and led the way to the car. When he’d caught up on some of his jobs, he would make more of an effort to date. That house of his needed a family in it and he was tired of sleeping alone.
