311 Days
Rhea watched the morning sun break through the haze. She stood on a deck constructed with uneven planks of decaying pine. The weight capacity was exactly one person and one mug of tea; with even an extra ounce, the ancient deck would ominously creak.
She was bundled in a plaid Isabel Marant wool coat, her favorite coat, despite it hanging on her frame like a lumpy blanket. The sheepskin Prada boots on her feet and giant mug of hot green tea in her hand were thawing the morning chill off her bones.
She took her cellphone out of her coat pocket and stared at it.
Sometimes her phone was a pacifier, a warm, glowing comforter, soothing her nerves when she slid her fingers along its inviting surface.
This morning, however, her phone was a cold metal box, a border-crossing station at the beginning of a treacherous journey.
In order to continue onward, she had to summon the bravery to press the intimidating glass screen.
She had decided to take matters into her own hands.
The days had worn on her, and she’d officially lost hope in the Edible Gardener ever tracking her down, but she decided that was inconsequential.
She was living in the modern twenties, goddammit.
She was not some damsel, too feminine and delicate to make the first move.
Louisca was right; this would show Danny how confident she was.
He would never have to know her heart was pounding and her knees were gelatinous.
She could not bring herself to ask Tiny for his cellphone number, but she easily found the next best thing.
Each taunting beep, symbolizing a ringing phone on the other end of the line, made nausea swell in her stomach.
Three hundred and eleven short days before her eggs fell off a cliff.
The image of splattered yolks on craggy rocks gave her the motivation to stay on the line.
“Edible Gardener,” a woman’s voice said.
“Oh, um, yeah, hi, I was wondering if…Danny Beckett was there?”
Rhea cleared her throat, reminding herself of a twelve-year-old boy asking a father if his daughter could come to the phone.
“Oh, no, not right now, do you wanna leave a message?”
“Um, no, I actually…I want to make an appointment to have…a garden installed.”
“Okay, sure, we can add you to the schedule for a consultation.”
“With Danny?”
“No, Danny doesn’t do the initial consultations.
We would send Patricia. She’s amazing though, you’ll love her.
” Did the woman have a slight tinge of annoyance in her voice?
Was she growing tired of middle-aged women calling to lure Danny to their home?
No, Rhea decided, she was just being paranoid.
Lacking an alternate plan, Rhea found herself telling the woman her address and phone number and agreeing to have a stranger named Patricia come to her house to give her a quote on a garden bed she did not want.
Sure, she wanted an incredible vegetable garden in the future, but it didn’t make any sense to have one now in her tiny cliffside backyard.
And what was she supposed to do with the bountiful crop?
She almost never cooked. She would, of course, require a chef’s kitchen in the future since she was going to cook a lot in the future.
But now, besides nachos and grilled cheese, she had meals delivered or ate out.
She was able to console herself with the hope that although Danny would not come to the initial consultation, he had to stop by at some point, right?
After all, he was the cute face of the company.
After she got off the phone, she took a quick peek at his TikTok and did a casual rewatch of a video that featured Danny himself.
“…But if the idea of just pouring lettuce seeds all over your garden seems crazy, you can make sure they’ll be evenly spread out by mixing your seeds with some coarse sand….”
He rubbed his beautiful hands together over a raised bed, sprinkling sand and seeds. He wore a white T-shirt, slightly stained with soil on the bottom hem. She could not tell what brand of jeans he was wearing, but she could tell they fit him perfectly, and she approved of the dark wash.
His extraordinary eyes crinkled at the camera.
Even when he wasn’t smiling with his mouth, he was always smiling with his eyes.
He looked slightly older than she, but that might have been due to her baby-fat cheeks, which had plagued her in her teens and twenties but were delighting her in her late thirties.
She felt an intense desire to know everything about him. How old was he? Did he have siblings? Where was he from? But above all, she wanted to know what his mouth tasted like….
She sighed, sipped her tea, and stared off across the canyon at Dead Horse Trail, an aptly named parched path that looked as if many horses had slowly dehydrated to death on their dusty journeys. She glanced down at her tiny backyard and spotted a coyote napping in the sun.
“Hi, Steve,” she called, waking the coyote, who seemed to roll its eyes at her.
There was pretty much always a wild coyote in her backyard, but rather than get upset about it, she’d decided to name them all Steve and pretend they were her dog.
She refused to feed them because she did not want to be that crazy Topanga spinster who bucked the rules and fed the wildlife, putting all the neighborhood cats and toddlers in danger, but she did leave water out for them on especially hot days and pick up their poop, thus earning the right to call them Steve.
“I have a crush on someone, Steve,” she said.
Steve could tell where this conversation was going, so he got up, jumped over the fence, and headed out into the vast unknown, deciding anything was better than listening to Rhea Darby talk about her love life.