Chapter 1: Screaming Hydrangeas
The ficus died on a Tuesday, which I took personally, because Tuesday was the day I'd read it the whole first act of Hamlet.
"You had everything," I told it. "Sunlight. Conversation. Shakespeare, for cryin' out loud." I pinched one brown leaf and it came away with a dry little click, like it had been waiting for permission. "Okay. Fine. Go toward the light. Not that light, that's the heat lamp."
Bud, sprawled across the welcome mat, lifted his head and made the noise that is either a yawn or a laugh, depending on how your week is going. Lou didn't bother. Lou had been unimpressed with the whole retail concept since the day we signed the lease.
The shop was called Bud & Lou's Blooms, and the sign over the door had cost more than my first car, which I stole, so maybe that's not a fair comparison. Pink letters, hand-painted, a cartoon hyena sniffing a daisy. It hung over a skinny storefront on a skinny street in Burnside, wedged between a laundromat that never closed and a record shop run by a guy named Ozzie who called me Doc and paid his rent in quarters. Nine weeks of honest business. Nine weeks of my parole officer coming by on Fridays to squint at the carnations like they might be hiding a bazooka.
They weren't. The bazooka was in a storage unit in Blüdhaven, and I had been very, very good about not thinking about it.
Here's the thing nobody tells you about going straight: it's boring in a way that gets into your teeth. Nobody chases you. Nothing explodes unless you leave the kettle on. You wake up, you feed the boys, you unlock a door with a key that belongs to you, and you stand behind a counter waiting for strangers to want something pretty. I had a doctorate in psychiatry, a rap sheet you could wallpaper a bathroom with, and a small business loan co-signed by a nun. I was trying. I was trying so hard my face hurt.
And the plants hated me.
Not all of them. The succulents tolerated me the way cats tolerate a new boyfriend. But the ferns were dropping fronds like they were being paid to, the orchids had gone a color I can only describe as "regret," and the hydrangeas in the front window, my pride, my joy, my big blue pom-poms of optimism, had started drooping in a way that felt aimed.
"I'm doing everything the book says," I told Lou. Lou rolled onto his back. "Water, light, love. Mostly love. Maybe too much water."
The bell over the door jingled.
I put on the smile. I'd been practicing it in the bathroom mirror, the one that says welcome to my perfectly normal shop, I have never once hit a man with a mallet. "Hiya! Welcome to Bud and Lou's, what can I..."
The rest of the sentence went somewhere and didn't come back.
She was wearing a long coat the color of moss after rain, belted at the waist, collar up, and big tortoiseshell sunglasses even though it was overcast and Gotham hadn't seen real sun since the last solar eclipse. Her hair was pinned up and still managed to look like it was on fire. She didn't look at me. She looked past me, at the window display, and her mouth went thin and furious.
"Red," I said.
"What," said Pamela Isley, "did you do to the hydrangeas?"
Fourteen months. Fourteen months since she'd walked out of my old apartment in the Narrows, saying I was trading one cage for another, and I'd yelled that at least this cage came with a dental plan. Fourteen months of not calling. I'd rehearsed this. In the rehearsals she said something like I missed you, and I said something devastatingly cool, and then we both cried a little, tastefully.
In none of the rehearsals had she walked straight past me, dropped to a crouch by the window and put her bare hand into the soil like she was checking a pulse.
"Hello to you too," I said.
"They're drowning." She pulled her hand out. Her fingers came up dark and wet to the second knuckle. "Harleen, they are drowning. This isn't soil, it's soup. Do you water them every day?"
"Twice. They looked thirsty."
"They looked thirsty," she repeated, in the tone of a woman reading a eulogy. She took off the sunglasses. Her eyes were the same impossible green they'd always been, and her skin had that faint emerald undertone that showed up more when she was upset, like a mood ring that could kill you. "That's the root rot talking. They droop because their roots are dying and can't take water up, so you give them more water, so the roots die faster. It's a cycle. You of all people should recognize a cycle."
"Wow. Okay. Did you come all the way to Burnside to diagnose me, or the shrubbery?"
"I'm not here for you." She stood, brushed her knees off with great dignity, and moved on to the orchids. "I'm here for the plants."
"The plants."
"They called me."
I looked at Bud. Bud looked at me. "They called you," I said.
"Not with a phone." She lifted an orchid's limp stem with two fingers and made a small pained sound, like she'd stepped on a tack. "They've been screaming since August. Do you know what it's like trying to sleep in Robinson Park with eleven hydrangeas shrieking across the river? It's like living next to a nightclub."
"Eleven," I said. "You counted."
"They're individuals."
She went through the shop like a health inspector with a grudge. The ferns were next to the radiator ("You're cooking them"). The snake plant was in a pot with no drainage hole ("This is a coffin"). The orchids were in regular potting soil ("They grow on trees, Harley. On bark. Do you see bark? Do you see trees?"). I followed her around with my hands on my hips, getting more offended and also, horribly, more delighted, because she was here, she was standing in my shop insulting my horticulture, and she'd come all this way on the pretext of screaming flowers, which was the most Pamela Isley sentence I had ever heard.
Then she got to the ficus.
She went very quiet. She knelt beside the pot and laid her palm against the trunk, and her shoulders dropped.
"Hamlet," I said. "I read it Hamlet. Maybe it was the wrong choice. Too much death. I should've gone with a comedy."
"Shh."
Something happened under her hand. I'd seen her do it a hundred times and it never stopped making the hair on my arms stand up. The bark darkened, like water soaking into paper. A brown leaf at the top uncurled, and there was green underneath, actual green, spreading out from the stem in a slow blush. Two more leaves followed. Then a tiny new one, pale as a lime, pushing out of a node that had been dead as a doornail ten seconds ago.
"That's cheating," I said, and my voice came out funny.
"That's triage." She took her hand away. Her fingertips were trembling, just slightly. She tucked them into her coat pocket like she didn't want me to see. "It still needs to come away from the door. Every time that bell rings it gets a blast of cold air. It's been in shock since September."
"Couldn't you have, I dunno, sent a postcard? 'Dear Harley, move the ficus, love, Pam'?"
She didn't answer, and she didn't look at me, and I knew that silence. I'd sat across from it on a lot of hard Arkham benches. It meant she'd thought about sending the postcard. Probably more than once. Probably she'd gotten as far as the love and torn it up.
The bell jingled again, and we both turned.
A man came in sideways, the way men do when they're about to buy flowers they don't think they've earned. Forties, cheap suit, a wedding ring he kept turning with his thumb. He saw Ivy and hesitated. Then he saw me, and I watched him decide I was the more normal of the two options, which was a first for me in any room.
"Hi," he said. "Do you have, uh. Roses? Red ones? A dozen?"
"Oh, no," Ivy murmured.
"What'd you do?" I asked him.
He blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"A dozen red roses on a Tuesday afternoon. You did something. It's fine, I'm not judging, I used to work in mental health. Forgot a birthday? Said something at Thanksgiving? Bought a boat?"
"I." He looked at the ceiling. "I said her sister was the funny one."
"Ooh." I winced. "Okay. Okay, so roses would be a mistake."
"Roses are always a mistake," said Ivy, from the orchids. "They've been bred into the floral equivalent of a show dog. No scent, no hardiness, a lifespan of five days. You'd be giving your wife a bouquet that says I'm sorry, and also, here is something that will rot on your kitchen table by Sunday."
The man looked at her with real fear. I stepped between them, which felt familiar.
"What my colleague means," I said, "is that you want something that lasts. Something that says I'm in this for the long haul and I am capable of growth." I swept a hand toward the back shelves, which were mostly dead. "We have... some options."
Ivy sighed through her nose, went to the back, and came out with a potted gardenia I had been certain was a lost cause. It had glossy dark leaves and three cream-white blooms that definitely had not been there this morning, and the smell hit the room like a warm hand on the back of the neck.
"Keep it in bright indirect light," she told him. "Water when the top inch is dry. Not before. Tell your wife the sister is fine, but she's the one you married."
He paid in cash. He tipped. He left holding the pot against his chest like it was a baby bird, and I turned to Ivy with both arms out.
"You," I said, "are a natural at customer service."
"I wanted to strangle him."
"That's what customer service is! That's the whole job!"
She almost laughed. I saw it get as far as her mouth before she caught it and put it away somewhere safe. She looked around the shop, at the drowned hydrangeas and the cooked ferns and the orchids in their wrong soil, and then, for the first time since she'd walked in, she looked at me. Properly. My bleached pigtails, pink and blue at the tips. My apron that said WHAT'S UP, BUTTERCUP in letters I'd ironed on myself. The healed scar on my chin that I'd stopped covering with makeup around week six.
"You look tired," she said.
"I look like a small business owner. It's the same thing."
"Are you happy?"
I wasn't ready for that one. I opened my mouth and a joke didn't come out, which was alarming. "I'm trying," I said finally. "That's new for me. Trying."
She nodded slowly. Then she picked up her sunglasses, put them back on, and became unreadable again.
"Tomorrow," she said. "Eight o'clock. Don't water anything."
"I open at nine."
"Then I'll have an hour of peace before you start talking." She paused at the door, fingers on the handle. "Move the ficus."
The bell jingled. She was gone. I stood in the middle of the shop for a full minute, listening to the hydrangeas not screaming, and then I moved the ficus.
It was only when I went to flip the sign to CLOSED that I saw the card tucked into the door frame at eye height, where you'd put it if you wanted to be sure it got found. Thick cream stock, embossed, a little black bird in the corner wearing a top hat.
THE ICEBERG LOUNGE, it said. MR. O. COBBLEPOT LOOKS FORWARD TO DISCUSSING YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD'S INSURANCE NEEDS.
I knew that kind of insurance. I'd sold that kind of insurance, once upon a time, with a baseball bat and a winning smile. My stomach dropped through the floor.
Then I turned it over.
On the back, in green ink, in handwriting I'd know anywhere, slanted and sharp as a thorn, somebody had written three words.
I'll handle it.
Which, if you knew Pamela Isley the way I did, was the scariest thing anyone had said to me in fourteen months.