Viridian brought her hands together, indicating that we were done talking about Oscar for the moment, and I realized I was feeling exactly like the hen-women, wanting to be protective of her for expending good will on the likes of Oscar.

“Anyway,” she said, “you’ll have to come back some time, both of you. I’ll have a garden party, we can admire all the beautiful flowers Carla planted. Would you come?”

“You bet,” Aaron said, all enthusiasm, and I said, “Sure, we’d love to.” She took a step back inside for a pen and paper and wrote down my cell phone number, though it was one of those times when everyone was riding on a tide of cresting good feeling, and I figured that when the tide receded, we’d just as likely never see her again.

We turned to start down the stairs. “You know what I’m going to tell him? Oscar?” Viridian said. “There’s an active warrant out for his arrest.”

She laughed and waved to us and went back inside and so maybe she wasn’t Glinda the Good Witch, or at least, not entirely that.

Work

That next week, Rick got on my case when he shouldn’t have, and we both ended up sorry. At least I wanted to think that Rick was sorry, somewhere below that layer of macho assholeness he wore like a skin. I was sorry, then I was not sorry, and then sorry all over again. None of it had to happen.

It was all so stupid. I delivered the wrong order to a customer, something that was truly not my fault. Rick’s mouth-breathing sister-in-law wrote up the tickets while she was glued to her phone screen. And she couldn’t tell a cypress from a carrot. It wasn’t the first time she’d made a mistake.

So I’d picked up a big blue yucca at the wholesaler. Blue yucca is a total pain to handle, since the leaves are spines and can slice you up. One of the crew guys, Ruben, was with me and the two of us wrestled the thing into the back of my truck and drove to the address in Novato. Rick had taken a picture of the site and staked it, so at least we got that part right. Ruben and I unloaded the yucca, trying to keep the swearing to a minimum. We half-rolled, half-walked it over to the planting site, then shoveled out a
crater-sized hole, got the root ball out of its burlap wrapper—I’m making it sound too easy—and shimmied the yucca into the hole. Did I mention it was hot? It was hot.