“It’s so lit we can start right in with the co-ops.”
“That cuts off even more time.”
“We could be working in weed with the first state dispensaries.”
“It’s so dope. Fuckin’ dope!”
“Yeah, I been readin’ up on plants and weed. Like, a lot.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s lit AF. They have sex.”
“When?”
“Like whenever they want? That would be awesome!”
“No, when they got flowers! Dude, where were you in biology!”
“Kruts was the worst teacher ever!”
“Ever!”
“Weed’s got male plants separate from female plants.”
“I knew that.”
“All plants are like that!”
“Dude, seriously. Did you not even open the textbook?”
“Did you?”
“Yeah. Most flowers have both sexes. On the same flower.”
“So flowers have sex with themselves. What’s the big deal about that?”
“Dude, you’re so basic.”
“Not.”
“Who cares?”
“Because. We wanna know about weed.”
“Can’t we wait ’til college?”
“They’re not gonna teach weed in college!”
“So why are we going then?”
“Dude, to learn about plants.”
“I don’t care about flowers.”
“Where do you think the buds come from?”
“Greg or your mom.”
“No dude, the female flowers!”
“What about the male flowers?”
“They’re useless, bro!”
“So what happens to them?”
“They kill ’em.”
“That’s mean.”
“No, they don’t. They just don’t grow ’em. Mom just grows the mothers. So all the clones are female.”
“Can you clone a father? That would be lit.”
“Why would you want to clone the fathers? They’re useless.”
“Because then it’s equal. And that would be better.”
“Not if they cloned my dad.”
“Mostly they don’t have fathers, just mothers.”
“Seriously then somebody has to kill the fathers sometimes.”
“Dude. You’re seriously basic.”
“Yeah. Savage.”
“You should prob’ly get studying now.”
“Getting baked is better.”
“Can we go look at your mom’s grow room again?”
“Prob’ly.”
“She gonna keep growing her own?”
“Course. Why not?”
“Because you’ll be able to grow it for her!”
“She says she has to know what she’s getting.”
“It’s so fuckin’ lit. Horticulture!”
“My dad hasn’t figured it out yet. He just thinks I’m woke to the environment.”
“Seriously?”
“I told him it was for sustainable farming.”
“That’s awesome!”
“Yeah, that’s so dead!”
Chapter 8
The sun was shining through the window onto Ernie’s new — at least new to him — stainless-steel restaurant-grade fifty-nine-and-a-half-inch gas range with four burners, a grill and a griddle. Ernie was delighted. Things might move slowly around Hullbrooke but people kept their word. Gerry had finally cleared out the old second-floor Gas Bar and Rent-All office. Ernie now had a place where he could set up possibly the best kitchen in Hullbrooke, not to mention he could sleep peacefully in his own bed.
“That is one hell of a stove!” Carl remarked, stepping back to admire their installation work. Then he flipped a switch to try the vent above. Ernie and Gerry had put it in the week before. It began to hum. “Nice unit. Where’d you find it?”
“Diner demolition. Other side of Lyston. You know where they had to reroute twenty-seven?”
“Oh yeah, that was a mess.” Carl was looking at the stove again. “That thing has two ovens doesn’t it?”
“Yes it does.” Ernie grinned. “With five adjustable racks between them.”
It had taken Ernie a while to locate a range he wanted, but it had been worth the wait. He could have purchased a smaller more space-appropriate one earlier but it was more expensive and he was not taken in. Extra computerized features, especially secondhand ones, mostly caused trouble.
“It’s simple, basic and worthy of a fine chef, I might add,” Ernie said, “and they threw in the salamander for nothing.” He tapped the boxy-looking stainless-steel broiler suspended at eye level.
“Lucky you.” Carl picked up a cloth and began polishing the control valves and the oven doors.
Ernie stood back and watched the sheen start to come up but he got impatient. “I think we should just christen this baby and hope we don’t blow the place up.” Carl moved aside and Ernie lit one of the burners for the very first time. They applauded as the flames sprang gently into a perfect circle and Ernie put a kettle on to boil.
In Ernie’s first career he’d worked his way up to commis chef. He’d been a diligent student under the tutelage of Jacinthe and the usually inebriated Masu, whose pedigrees included the finer culinary schools of France and Japan, respectively. Life was full of promise and good food until Joachim Gomez-Richtenbach II (or III depending on the reviewer), famed head chef, grabbed him by the arm one day and held a knife to his throat while screaming at him. Then he threw Ernie out, telling him to go flip burgers because he’d make sure Ernie never worked in a good kitchen again. It wasn’t anything Ernie did. If the man’s wife took a shine to him, could he help it? But the situation cost him dearly and almost broke his youthful heart, though it didn’t diminish his enthusiasm for the métier. In fact it improved it. Cooking for a living was hectic and highly stressful in hot kitchens and hierarchies. It created Joachims and Masus. Ernie knew he’d learn to hate it in time. Not doing it for a living was a way to keep his love alive.
As the kettle slowly came to a whistle, he ground the coffee and measured the amounts out into his yard-sale French press. The press was at least twenty years old and had an art deco look to it with engraved metal legs. The lady who sold it to him said she thought it was stupid and pretentious. Her mother had used it. Ernie didn’t say anything, just paid the five bucks, and she told him to take the damn grinder too.
After Ernie had made the coffee and they’d cut up the spice cake Carl’s wife had sent over, they sat around reviewing and assessing the current local gossip. Not a single topic of any importance was touched on, but Ernie was close to rapturous. The months of living rough, occasionally foraging in dumpsters and then relying on deli food and dining out of his station wagon on whatever he could buy that wouldn’t rot in the sunbaked car had practically rendered him a walking skeleton. Now he could roast, griddle, sauté, simmer, steam, broil and bake his way into renewed vigor. He was going to eat better than he ever had in his life.
Ernie supposed he was a modern revisionist now. His dreams were well amended. He’d had it with striving, go-getting and the all-American nightmare. Nothing had recovered for him after the housing crisis. He’d limped along and eventually lost each of his jobs, including the one in real estate. The bank foreclosed on the condo and then Lenore made off with the leftovers. He managed to hang on to his debt and Lenore’s medical bills for her varicose treatments. And then he lost those too. Bankruptcy has its special price.
What surprised him most was the change in his mood over the last eighteen months.
The heartrending losses, one after another, had broken him. And when he was feeling most sorry for himself, he saw his downfall culminating in Lenore’s departure. He embodied failure and had become repulsive to her. “It’s grief,” his sister-in-law had said. “There are stages and you just have to go through them. You know, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.”
Ernie figured she
was right except it was never his way to stick to the prescribed agenda. His stages went more like this: Stage one: No more pussy. At least not with Lenore and that was really depressing. Stage two: Plain broke. And that made him angry, though it ensured Lenore would stay away. Stage three: Ongoing depreciation. He’d have to maintain poverty until the divorce was finalized otherwise she’d clean him out again. But he could accept that. Stage four: Redundancy. If she found some other poor schmuck he’d be off the hook altogether. That was a pretty good bargain! Stage five: A classic epiphany, though Ernie knew some of his old hotshot business buddies would think he was in denial.
His epiphany happened right after he’d spent the night in a cell for vagrancy and one of the cops who thought he was veteran gave him forty bucks to go get himself a good breakfast. As Ernie dug into his home fries and chugged back his coffee that morning, he realized the freedom he experienced at having nothing of value according to Lenore or the rest of society was actually okay. In fact it was better than okay. At times, like right then, staring out the window at a couple bickering on the street and realizing he no longer had a single crippling responsibility or commitment, it was exhilarating. So he was never going back to the idiot he used to be. His new lifestyle was no ruse. It was fucking A! So Ernie resolved to thrive somehow on as little as possible.
And it was looking good. Hullbrooke, the place of his birth, just might be his own personal specially tailored El Dorado. The evidence was piling up. In his very living quarters he had a regifted Murmuring Life Fountain, which trickled ceaselessly with optimism and frugality.
As for the nitty-gritty practicalities of living on next to nothing? His rent was minimal because he was the watchman at Gerry’s Gas Bar and Rent-All. He just had to live there, keep an eye on things and pay utility costs. Gerry wasn’t fussy. And now, along with tending to the Cranston terraces, he had himself a ten- to fifteen-hour-a-week late-afternoon gig, mostly sweeping up floors or wrestling with a Shop-Vac at the old trucking warehouse. He showed up when the carpenters, electricians and other tradesmen knocked off work. The guys saluted, high-fived or nodded in male-bonding custom as he came through the door. He was everybody’s friend. What could be better?
“A tidy workspace is a happy workspace,” Lazlo, the boss, said in a gravelly voice, blinking his rheumy eyes. Lazlo reminded Ernie of Gladys the toad. “The lads are supposed to clean up after themselves, ya know. But there’s always a mess somewheres. They start griping about each other. And there’s the washroom and snack area. They’re worse than children.”
Ernie didn’t mind any of it. He was surfing a ripple of good fortune and observing the daily progress manifesting in front of him. It was interesting too. Offices were being built and they were upscale and designer-funky. More like Hudson Yards than Hullbrooke. Lazlo told Ernie there’d be plenty more work if he wanted, especially if they got the go-ahead from the state for medical pot. Ernie didn’t want more work, but minimal employment extending well into the future was pleasant enough to consider. He could make plans. Hallelujah!
After Carl left and the late-autumn sun continued to sparkle on Ernie’s stove, he looked around to assess his own progress. He just had the one big room, freshly painted. Along the side wall, about midway between the stove and the tiny washroom with its beat-up stall shower, was a large cabinet Ernie had found at the local dump. Its doors were broken and bashed so he took them off. Now it was a better-than-average shelving unit. He kept just about everything he owned in it, apart from the kitchen stuff. Near the stove he’d put up a rack for hanging pots he’d been collecting from thrift shops, yard sales and the dump. And he’d found a dehydrator and a meat smoker requiring the most minimal of repairs. He’d fixed them himself in a single afternoon, making only one trip to a hardware store for a cord and a couple of casters. What some people threw away!
Just below the window closest to the stove was a utility sink he would replace with a counter top, cupboards and a kitchen sink as funds and opportunity permitted. There was an old side-by-side fridge courtesy of Gerry. Mrs. Cranston had given him a freezer she decided was too big now for just her and her husband, and Ernie had built shelves above it. Rounding out the kitchen area were a table and two chairs.
Ernie’s bedroom was a recently covered piece of foam on the floor closer to the washroom. The fountain trickling beside the bed was from Gerry’s wife, whose sister had given it to her, and she couldn’t stand it. It was the water-spewing fish she hated. If you took out the cost of the stove, Ernie had furnished his new abode for less than a hundred and fifty bucks and it was the foam he slept on that cost him the most. Go figure.
There were windows all around the room. One of them opened out onto the roof over the old car bays left from when the place had been a full garage. He already had the meat smoker set up out there, and along with his cooking Ernie was taking up rooftop farming come spring. The building was solid enough to hold three or more feet of snow in the winter, so Gerry was all for it as long as Ernie shared a few vegetables.
And speaking of sharing, or rather bartering, because that’s what it really was, word soon got out to the Hullbrooke hunters and anglers that for a few fish or cuts of meat there was a guy back in town who would make you mouthwatering jerky, smoked meat and gourmet wild-game sausages to melt your heart. And now that he had a stove, there’d be meat pies and fish cakes. Ernie was pretty sure he would never eat poorly again.
As he was surveying his humble kingdom, it occurred to him that he had an address now, so he could register for medical weed. It could have been his stressed-out achiever days or Lenore or his unpleasant brush with the head chef years ago, or more likely sleeping in the rusty Volvo, but something had left him with neck pain. Hallelujah one more time! He could grow his own weed, and if the factory got going, there’d be seeds, clones and expertise at hand, not to mention a fallback supplier. There was no end of possibilities.
Chapter 9
Petra stood at the kitchen door looking through the window at the garden she’d built. With the shrubs still all wrapped in burlap for the winter, it looked like her backyard was populated with strange people. Little people who’d never get on with things, who would stagnate. Petra was getting tired of the freelance work. Four chapters in a high-school biology text didn’t exactly cut it for stimulation. The editor kept telling her to shorten her sentences. Dumbing down for students was a nationwide preoccupation. Petra pulled her sweater closer around her and shivered.
Her own dumbing down was becoming apparent too. What happened to that research she’d been so passionate about twenty-five years ago? The evolutionary physiology of angiosperms, Darwin’s neglected child. Why had she stopped caring about plants? The peculiar ones. The ones of no corporate interest. Did dropping the ball on her own path of inquiry stem from some evolutionary pressure? Was her curiosity maladapted, doomed from the outset? Questions, questions, questions. If she was honest about it she’d have to admit all research ever gave anyone was more questions. She’d have liked a few more answers.
Right now she particularly needed answers about her computer. It was behaving oddly. She’d have to take it to some technical savant, she just didn’t know where to find one. Any other time she’d hop in the car and make the three-hour drive into the city. It was always a welcome break. But Petra’s mom hadn’t been feeling well and a visit to the doctor revealed Doreen had pneumonia. In fact the doctor had her mom stay overnight in the hospital so they could run a series of tests first thing in the morning. She was on the mend now, but it had been difficult and even scary.
Petra mulled the notion that maybe she was a less-than-good daughter. She should have insisted her mother get medical help sooner in spite of her protestations and reproaches. “Just a little sniffle. You’re making a big deal out of nothing again.” Doreen could take care of herself thank you very much. Only she couldn’t. Not now. Not so much. And Petra had opted for the long-term care plan, hadn’t she? She was the long-term care. She watched the sno
w fall and the little burlap people in the backyard shifted and shuddered.
Petra had noted her mother’s doctor was dark haired yet had penetrating blue eyes. This was fascinating, if only for the genetics. It occurred to her she could call him up under some pretext, some concern about her mother, and then just ask him out on a date. He wasn’t wearing a ring. She’d checked. It could liven things up a little. He might even be a good conversationalist. As long as he wasn’t a good drinker. She didn’t have a clue where anyone would go on a date in Hullbrooke. She’d heard Chelsea’s was a local gong show, but maybe he’d find it fun. Or maybe they could make the trek to Lyston.
The next day she called up the doctor’s office about her mother’s medication.
“Oh yes, he’s available for this sort of thing after office hours before he heads up to the hospital in Lyston,” the receptionist told her. “That’s usually about three o’clock. Would tomorrow work?”
“Perfect,” said Petra. She was about to thank her and hang up.
“Oh wait. I forgot . . . he told me this morning too . . .” The receptionist gave a little chuckle. “His little girl is in a dance recital — such a cutie! His wife is picking him up at two forty-five.”
“I see,” said Petra.
“I’m just going to put you in for one o’clock instead. We had a cancellation and he’s very understanding about these things.”
“Thanks.” Petra turned her phone off and threw it on the table.
#
“I could have told you he was married,” Doreen said that evening. “Why didn’t you just ask me about him?”
Petra was standing in the doorway to her mother’s bedroom with her arms crossed. “I didn’t think I needed to. He wasn’t wearing a ring.” She found the whole incident almost amusing now.
“Lots of married men don’t.” Her mother was sitting up finishing a cup of tea, with her cat curled up at the end of the bed. “You want me to have my friends here set you up on a date?”
The Buds Are Calling Page 6
