Three #2
It took a few strides to get my leg loose again.
I was somewhere between the dog kennels and horse tack when I caught a flash of blond from the next aisle through the shelving.
Curious, I shuffled around the corner and saw the dream girl again.
She was frantically looking around, searching the shelves, and walking too quickly for a store aisle.
Her long legs carried her right to me. I tried to step out of her way but didn’t really succeed.
“Oh,” she stumbled backward moments before we collided. Then as if she was finally really looking at me she added, “Oh! Uncle Craig!”
I had to laugh. “Just Craig is fine.” She’d recoiled at the last moment, neither of us touching. If we had touched, would there have been an arcing spark? That’s crazy thinking, she’s not the person from my dream, I’d never seen her before yesterday. “You okay, Coach?”
“I think so. And it’s Ms. Horner,” she corrected, looking around nervously. Then feeling the formality a bit misplaced added, “Or Rilee.”
Rilee Horner. Miss Rilee Horner. I checked her bare left hand involuntarily. Not missus. A tiny tickle, like the scrape of pine needles on the back of your neck, wriggled through my body, and it didn’t start in my back. Settle down Romeo, it’s just the hardware store.
“You look lost,” I managed.
Glancing away and back to the shelves full of dog food and animal crates, she avoided looking me in the eye. “I think I am. I was looking for patio pots.”
“Like for a plant?”
“Yea, I brought some inside last winter and I want to put them in something new for spring. I saw they were on sale.”
Lukas mentioned something about getting in a shipment of pots. I thought I’d seen them before. “I bet I know where they are. Come on.”
We trotted down the aisle across the rear of the store until it circled to the back door.
There were bins of seeds and pole tools nearby.
I’m not sure I agree with the way Lukas organizes things.
Leading Ms. Horner outside we entered the covered yard.
There was an enclosed greenhouse section to the left, and pallets of pots to the right.
Farther out were bags of fertilizer and soil.
Later in spring the place would be filled with flats of plants, but now it was mostly empty.
Empty except for the pots. Collections of terracotta and glazed pots in a variety of crazy sizes and colors were stacked in rows along the wall.
“Pots,” I said.
“Pots,” she mimicked and laughed. “Thanks! I wouldn’t have known to look out here.”
“It is kind of an odd spot to find.” Her laugh matched her smile, nice and warm. Sunny like where we’d sat–in my dream. I’d never sat anywhere with this woman. Still, I’d like to have bathed in it a little while longer but I noticed the small potted plants near the greenhouse.
“Do you work here?”
I couldn’t look away from those potted plants. There was something odd about them. I took a step closer. “Uh, no. It’s my brother-in-law’s.”
“Mace. Jackie Mace. As in Mace and Maize. I get it. I always thought Mace was like the spice.”
That was weird and I turned back to Ms. Horner. “Spice? That’s weird.” It came out harsher than I meant it. She must have noticed because she folded her arms.
“Mace. It’s like nutmeg. You cook with it. Like corn, which is Maize. Mace and Maize.”
“But it’s a garden store, not a cooking store.” I wish I could blame my back but I was feeling fine, just stupid.
“And it has pots. Which we found. Thank you very much.”
She was annoyed and I wanted to be too, but the edge of her mouth still held the hint of that too-familiar smile.
“Well, glad to help.” No, not familiar. I was just placing my own expectations on the situation.
Like recognizing a turn in the road because you think it should be there, not because you’ve actually been there before.
I didn’t dream of Rilee Horner, I was just imposing my dream on her. That is a monumental difference.
“And I’m going to look through these pots.” Neither of us were looking at each other now.
That should have been my cue to leave but when my eyes tried to look elsewhere they snagged again on the collection of potted plants near the green house. “Uh, sure. Help yourself,” I said, drifting toward the plants. “Glad to help.”
The pots were varied in shape and size, but none were larger than a gallon.
Some were tall, others low and wide, and glazed in various earth tones, but mostly in black.
The pots mostly held conifers, but there were a few leafless tiny trees with trunks the diameter of my thumb.
All of them were tiny trees, a forest in miniature.
Real trees—the kind that scrape the sky and shiver in the wind—have a look.
That look is not a bush. Trees spread their arms out to the sun, and their size causes them to grow in a recognizable way.
They have a trunk which is the center of the tree, it supports the roots and the canopy, and it can be kind of lonely.
The trunk divides into branches and those branches further divide into live growth.
Foliage grows off that live growth, not the trunk.
While the trunk is the center of the world it’s at the edge of the branches where the tree’s life is occurring.
It’s the edges where the tree contacts the world of sun and water and wind with the delicate exposed parts of itself.
Seedlings and bushes, new plants, are all like toddlers, living through all the parts of themselves.
But these plants were trees, the largest less than eighteen inches high.
Their shapes and growth had trunks and branches and conifer leaves at the end of those branches.
One looked like it had been struck by lightning, another as if it had grown atop a windy mountain.
They were tiny trees, not seedlings. And they shouldn’t be.
A conifer tree would be at least as tall as me when they got to this stage of growth.
They shouldn’t be, but there was a forest of them.
Walking through the forest I took a deep breath, tasting the familiar sharp tang of pine.
The last time I’d stood in a stand of trees like this was minutes before the chain broke.
Well not like this because those had reached to the sky and these were merely hip level, but this small alcove was a mountain ledge settled in the middle of the city.
Actually, in the middle of a store. A perfect distillation of nature, its contradictory wildness and order, touch and stillness, all in a precise package. And dropped right here.
“The bonsai are pretty neat.” Rilee’s voice startled me out of my loss.
“What?”
She cradled an empty blue glazed pot from the shelf in both hands but nodded toward the plants. “Bonsai. These little trees. That’s what they’re called.”
“Yea, they’re neat.” I’m not sure neat was what I meant to say but it was handy. Use the tool you’ve got.
“Well, I think I found what I came for,” she hefted the pot she’d chosen. Her fine fingers wrapped around the bottom and that smile was back on her lips, as if she’d decided to let it grow there again.
“That’s good.”
“Wanna show me out?” she asked. The rush of her words came out like the leading edge of a weather front. Either hot or cold was on the horizon. It was too early to tell, but change was blowing in.
We walked toward the front of the store.
My leg was starting to ache from standing so much, just the constant pressing aching, not the fiery stuff.
I tried to pay attention to my foot. When my leg gets tired it catches on stuff, like the edges of shelves.
I tried to listen to Rilee but splitting my focus was hard.
I only caught every third word or so, “… warm … sunshine … good deal … unexpected.” Maybe it was every fifth word.
There wasn’t a line so we walked right up to the college kid checker with the gold name tag. “You take good care of this one,” I said to the checker who was slowly remembering I had something to do with her boss. “She came in for the sale price.”
“Oh, uh, sure.”
“Thanks again,” Rilee said with that smile. The sun was already down but the passing headlights of a pickup splashed her face and hair. A tiny spark of light caught in her eyes. Why would I dream about someone I’d never met before?
“Any time.” Then I waved them both good bye and made it out to my truck before I leaned against the door and rubbed the cramp out of the back of my thigh.
After a while the spasms eased up and I could climb up into the truck.
A further few minutes later I realized I was just sitting there with the keys in my hand.
My mind slipped from the tiny forest to the sunny woman and back again.
It was like she was shining on the tops of those trees and I was breathing fresh air again.
Ug. What was I doing? Sitting in a parking lot mooning over some woman. Jamming the keys in the starter I roared the truck to life and drove home. Drove back to Kathy’s house. I really needed a place of my own.
The kids were all home and Kathy was at the stove stirring something with a spatula. Jackie yelled at Darren when he made off with something and Cami ran through the kitchen, swiping cookies while Kathy was distracted by Darren. “Dinner will be in thirty,” Kathy shouted into the din.
“Can I help?” I asked.
“I got it, but can you keep Cami out of trouble while Darren sets the table.”
“Sure.”
I found little Cami and a pair of cookies on the couch. In her shoes, I’d have been watching TV but she had a book in her lap.
“I think one of those cookies might be for me,” I grunted, collapsing next to her. The couch was soft, but not too soft, just what I needed. Throwing out the footrest, I raised my leg onto it. Cami held out the smaller of the two cookies which I accepted.
“Whatcha reading?”
“Spiderwick.”
“Spiderwhat?”
Cami sighed like she was a teenager. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Are you thirteen?” The question had to be asked.