Just Can't Forget You: Oakland Hills Short Story 2 (Oakland Hills #3.5)
by Gretchen Galway
1
MELISSA’S MOTHER ALWAYS CALLED HER at work.
She could’ve ignored the call—it was only her third week on the job at the nursery, and she had a reputation to establish—but Mom would call every fifteen minutes in a rising panic until she heard her daughter’s voice. Better to get it over with.
“How’s my favorite mother?” Melissa asked as she picked up.
“Are you all right? You didn’t answer right away.”
Even before Melissa had attempted suicide as a teenager, her mother had worried excessively—and since that little incident a decade ago, she’d been as clingy as a fabric-softener dryer sheet on a fleece sweatshirt.
“Fantastic,” Melissa said. “I’m potting a rare South African perennial. At my new job. Which is where I am right now. Working.” Hopefully her mom would get the hint.
No such luck. “You could be a scientist at Harvard,” she said with a tragic sigh. “Instead, you’re a gardener.”
At seventeen, Melissa had been a stressed-out, suicidal wreck at the top of her class, but at twenty-eight, she was happy and content with her quiet, unimpressive life. Unlike her parents. “Don’t make me feel bad. I just might try to end it all again.”
Her mother made a distressed noise in the back of her throat. “I don’t know how you can joke about that. After what we all went through.”
Melissa had always felt guilty about the attempted suicide—so guilty it woke her up in the middle of the night—but her therapist had given her permission to move on. “How’s Dad?”
While her mother launched into a discussion of her father’s golf game, which was the center of his life since they’d retired to Phoenix, Melissa used her free hand to scoop potting soil into a plastic nursery pot. She loved her new job. Golden Gate Horticulture in El Cerrito, California filled over a city block and was one of the most prestigious, well stocked, and expensive nurseries in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The pay was terrible, of course, but she didn’t have many expenses. She knew she was lucky. One of the greatest gifts of all—the freedom to do what she loved—was hers, and she’d finally learned to appreciate it.
Across the rows of shaded camellias and rhododendrons, she heard the trill of the store phone inside the main building. “Mom, I’ve got to go. I’m at work.”
“But—”
“Love you, love Dad. Bye!” She shoved the phone in her back jeans pocket and jogged into the main building, where the nursery’s owner, Ian Cooper, was ignoring the phone ringing next to him. Her boss was a very shy man who only talked to the plants if he could get away with it.
Out of breath, she picked up the receiver and smiled at Ian. “Golden Gate Hort.”
“Good morning. I’d like some plants.” The man’s low voice had the soothing tones of a late-night radio announcer.
Enchanted by the sound, Melissa froze in the act of wiping peat moss onto her jeans. She realized she was still panting.
“Hello?” the man asked.
“I’m here,” Melissa said. “You want some plants.”
“Yes. You have those, I assume?”
She shook off the spell of his voice. He had a formal way of talking that suggested he was older; many of their customers were retired academics from the University of California in neighboring Berkeley. “Sure do. Lots of them.”
“Excellent. I need someone to put them in my backyard.”
Melissa tried to meet her boss’s eye. “We have two excellent garden designers on staff. Jake, who’s here today, is even a landscape architect, but he’s out to lunch at the moment, so if I could just get your—”
“I’d rather take care of this right now.” The baritone rumbled in her ear. “It’s a small area off the patio. I just want a few plants. I’m tired of looking at dirt. I’m not picky.”
She wished she hadn’t been the one stuck with this call. Her own experience was in propagation, not customer service, especially not with elderly men whose horticultural vocabulary was limited to “plants” and “dirt.”
“They won’t do anything too elaborate if that’s not what you want. They’re trained to—”
“I was thinking about those little white flowers that smell so good,” he said. “A whole bunch of them. Do you have those?”
“We have the largest selection of ornamentals in the Bay Area.” She glanced at her boss again. “Can you be more specific?”
“I’ll try,” he said. “Small white flowers, kind of pointy. The main thing, though, is they smell good. They’re all over the place. I’m sure you know what I mean. ”
“Star jasmine?”
“No idea. Does star jasmine smell good?”
“Very,” she said.
“Then let’s go with that. I’ll be home tomorrow morning. Saturday. Somebody can come by at ten and put it in the ground then.”
She bit her lip, trying not to laugh. “It doesn’t really work that way,” she said. “We’ll need to see the space first, confirm the plant selection, the amount of plants needed. Then we have to assess and amend the soil, address the watering needs, perhaps install a drip-watering system, talk about long-term maintenance—”