29. Allison
ALLISON
He comes across the yard in his good camel coat and his Italian shoes, skidding on the frozen ruts, with his suitcase still in the trunk of a car that’s supposed to be at Teterboro.
I want to put my arms around him. There isn’t time. I pull a spare headlamp out of my coat pocket and hold it out.
“You came,” I say. It’s a stupid thing to say.
“You asked.” He takes the headlamp and turns it over in his hands. “What do I do?”
“Tonight you work for Luis and me. When one of us tells you to do something, you do it, and you ask why later.”
“Okay.” He pulls the strap over his head, and the light comes on right in my eyes. “Tell me what to carry.”
So I tell him. Propagation three still has heat. It’s got its own gas heater, a new one I put in after the old one quit on me in January, and it’s the only warm room on the property. Everything tender goes in there. Everything that won’t fit, we protect where it is.
“How do I know what’s tender?”
“You don’t. I do.” I point as we go, and I don’t have to think about any of it. “Pansies and snapdragons can take a frost, so they stay. The kale and the lettuce stay. Basil dies if you look at it wrong. Tomatoes, peppers, geraniums, impatiens, anything with a soft green stem, those are first.”
He nods like he’s memorizing it, and I realize he is.
Luis’s nephew Danny comes up the road in a truck with one headlight out, wearing his uncle’s old snow pants, with Ray right behind him.
Carla from the retail house shows up in pajama pants under a ski jacket with a box of gas-station doughnuts, and she takes one look at Gavin and his shoes and says, “Oh, honey.”
We load the carts. The first one sinks into a frozen rut halfway across the yard and won’t move, so after that we carry flats by hand, back and forth across the gravel in the wind.
Gavin picks up his first flat by the two short ends. It folds in the middle like a taco and dumps a row of petunias onto his shoes.
“Hand flat underneath,” Carla tells him, and shows him. “Like a pizza. Hold it against your chest.”
After that he carries them right, stacked against his chest with his chin on the top one, long after his breath’s gone ragged.
The wind comes off the hill hard enough to push me sideways.
Every time we open the door to propagation three, warm wet air rolls out at us, and then the door slams, and we’re back out in the cold.
We fill the benches, then the floor under them, then the aisle, until you have to walk sideways through tomatoes to get to the back.
The glass in there streams with water. Gavin wipes a clear spot with his sleeve and looks out at the other houses glowing across the yard, and I see him understand how many more there are.
We can’t move the hanging baskets. There are hundreds of them in house one, hanging from the roof beams in long rows, all the Mother’s Day baskets, and there’s nowhere left to put them. So we make house one smaller instead.
Danny and Gavin carry a roll of heavy clear plastic out of the storage shed between them. We hang a wall of it from the beams to close off the back half, so the heaters only have to warm the front, where the baskets hang thickest.
Gavin goes up the ladder with a fistful of zip ties. He pulls his first sheet as tight as he can get it, and it catches on a bolt and rips right down the middle.
“Loose!” I yell up at him. “Let it hang. It has to move when the air moves, or it tears.”
He comes down and cuts another sheet and does it loose. When it’s done, the front half of the house is a room made of plastic, cloudy and rustling, with all the baskets inside it and the cold on the other side.
Then we run every space heater I own, from the shed and my desk and my apartment, and Carla drives home for more. Extension cords snake across the floor. I know which outlets share a circuit because I’ve been tripping them since I was a kid.
The breakers trip anyway, and half the house goes dark, and I reset it, and a little later it happens again. The next time, Gavin’s standing at the panel with his black notebook open and his headlamp on the page.
“Which heater’s on which switch?” he asks. “Tell me once.”
I tell him once. He writes it down. After that, every time the lights go out, he’s at the panel before I am. That’s what he’s good at, keeping a hundred small things straight in his head so nobody else has to. I’ve watched him do it for a company for years. I’ve never watched him do it for me.
House two is the worst. It’s the oldest glass on the property, and the cold comes straight through it. The tomatoes are on the benches along the far wall, and the peppers, and the restaurant basil on bench six under the roof vent.
We pull out the white frost cloth and float it over the benches so it tents above the plants and holds in whatever warmth is coming off the soil. Gavin drapes one corner right over a space heater, and I yank it off so hard he jumps.
“That’ll catch fire,” I tell him. “Keep it off anything hot.”
“Sorry.”
Then I send Danny for the hoses and tell everybody to water the benches, and the floor, all of it.
Gavin stares at me with a hose in his hand. “You’re watering them? It’s nineteen degrees.”
“Wet soil holds heat,” I say. “It soaks it up all day and gives it back all night. Dry soil freezes first. My dad taught me that when I was nine.”
He waters. The floor steams a little in the headlamp beams. The air gets heavy and wet, and the glass fogs over from the inside, and then, around the edges of each pane, the fog starts to freeze. It grows in white feathers across the glass. It’s beautiful, and I hate every inch of it.
Luis yells up the boiler room stairs for somebody to hold the button.
Gavin goes, and I follow him down with the big flashlight. Luis is on his knees on the concrete with soot on his face. He shows Gavin the red button for the pilot and tells him to hold it down and not let go until he says so, no matter what.
Gavin kneels on the wet floor in his good pants and holds it. The pilot catches, small and blue. Luis watches it without blinking. Then it flickers out.
“Again,” Luis says.
It goes out again, and again after that.
Gavin’s thumb goes white from pressing. He doesn’t complain.
Finally Luis sits back on his heels and says a part is shot, the little piece that tells the burner the pilot’s lit, and he goes out to his truck and comes back with the one off the old heater we pulled out of propagation three in January. Luis never throws anything away.
He puts it on with fingers so cold he drops the nut in the dark and has to feel for it. Gavin holds the button. The pilot catches, and it holds, and the burner goes with a whump that I feel in my chest, and all three of us stay very still and don’t say a word.
It holds.
“It won’t heat everything,” Luis says. “It’ll help.”
Sometime past the middle of the night, I find Gavin in house two at the south end, standing over the basil.
The frost cloth has slid off bench six where the vent leaks. Before I can open my mouth, he’s already dragged it back over the trays and weighed the corner down with a bag of perlite. He moves on to the next bench without looking up.
I have to stop and put my hand on the cold edge of the bench for a second.
His shoes are finished. They’re soaked through and caked in potting mix, and one seam has split along the side.
He’s stopped walking like he can feel his feet.
I go out to the shed and come back with my dad’s old rubber barn boots.
They’re a size too small, and he puts them on anyway, and he looks so ridiculous in them with his camel coat that Danny takes a picture.
When he pulls his hands out of his pockets to take the boots, they’re white and stiff, and he can’t close his fingers all the way.
“Gavin. Where are your gloves?”
“In London, I think.”
I take his hands. They’re so cold they don’t feel like skin, and I don’t think, I just open my coat and my sweater and put them flat against my stomach, on the bare skin. He hisses. I hiss louder.
“You’re freezing.”
“You said ask why later.”
We stand there in the dark end of house two with his hands on my stomach and the frost growing on the glass all around us. I can feel his fingers start to hurt as they warm, because he flinches.
“The article said this place was tasteful,” he says.
“I remember.”
“And I told you Luis could run it while you were in London.”
“I heard that,” Luis says from the doorway, where he’s come up for coffee.
Gavin laughs, and it comes out cracked and tired. Then his face goes serious. “I knew what you did. I could have told anybody at a party. I didn’t know one bad night could take the whole year.”
“Any night can,” I say. “Every winter. That’s the job.”
“How do you stand it?”
“I love it.” It comes out simple, and it’s true. “And I don’t usually do it alone.”
He looks at me in the light of the headlamp. His eyes are red from the cold and the wind and no sleep.
“I almost didn’t call you,” I tell him. “I had your name up. I thought if I asked you and you said you couldn’t, I’d never ask anybody for anything again as long as I lived.”
“You asked anyway.”
“I needed you. I wanted it to be you.”
He doesn’t say anything. He leans down and puts his forehead against mine, and we stay like that, with his hands warming up against my skin and the space heaters roaring down the aisle, until Carla yells that the breaker’s gone again.
We lose some things. The geranium baskets hanging high in house two, up by the glass where it’s coldest, go black at the tips and then all the way through, and there isn’t room for them anywhere.
I make the call to let them go, and it hurts.
The tomatoes at the far end of house two, the ones at the end where the frost cloth ran out, go dark and limp. So do some of the peppers.
Most things we save. The Easter lilies make it, and the Mother’s Day baskets in house one, and the annuals for the town beds crammed into propagation three with their leaves steaming. The basil under the frost cloth makes it. My crew’s paychecks through the summer make it.
The sky starts going gray, then pink, and the light comes up through the frost on the glass so every feather of it glows. The sun hits the roof of house one, and I can feel the difference right away. The air under the glass starts warming on its own.
Luis comes up the boiler room stairs gray with soot and says the left one is still holding. Danny’s asleep sitting up on an overturned bucket.
Gavin’s standing by the potting bench in my dad’s boots with his hair full of perlite, the little white bits from the potting mix. He takes his phone out of his coat for the first time all night. It’s buzzed in his pocket all night, and he hasn’t touched it.
I watch him read. The news hits him hard. His mouth goes tight and pale at the corners, and for a second he looks like a man watching his house burn from across the street.
“The old man walked,” he says quietly. “Deb just sent it. Without them, the London base can’t stay open. It’s going to close.”
“The people who moved over there?”
He swallows. “Most of them lose their jobs.”
I don’t know what to say. I’m not sorry he came, and I won’t pretend to be. I’m still so sad for him that my throat hurts.
He looks at the screen a moment longer. Then he puts the phone back in his pocket, and he looks up at me with the dawn coming pink through the glass behind him.
“Have you eaten anything?”