Chapter 2: Insurance
By the second week, the hydrangeas had forgiven me and the regulars had started calling her "the plant lady," which she hated, and "your girlfriend," which she hated more, or pretended to.
She came at eight every morning. She never knocked. I'd given her a key on day three, mostly as a joke, sliding it across the counter on a keychain shaped like a strawberry, and she'd looked at it like it might bite her and then pocketed it so fast I almost missed it. Now I'd come down the back stairs from my apartment at quarter to nine, hair in a towel, and she'd already be there in the dim shop with her coat over the stool and her sleeves pushed up, talking to the ferns in a low voice I wasn't supposed to hear.
"You're doing better," she'd be saying. "Yes, you are. Don't listen to her. She means well."
"I can hear you," I'd say.
"You were meant to."
She taught me things. Not in a nice way. Pam's teaching style was the botanical equivalent of throwing someone in the deep end and shouting about their form. Finger in the soil, Harleen, up to the knuckle. If it's dry, water. If it's damp, step away. Bottom watering for the African violets, they hate wet leaves. The calatheas fold up at night, that's not dying, that's sleeping, stop calling me at eleven p.m. to report that they're dying.
"You said I could call."
"I said you could call in an emergency."
"It looked like an emergency! They were all closed up like little praying hands, I thought they were asking God for help!"
She'd hung up on me that night. Then, four minutes later, she'd texted a photo of a calathea in her greenhouse, folded up for the night under a grow lamp, with the caption: Sleeping. Like you should be. And I had lain in bed grinning at my phone like an idiot until Lou climbed on my legs and cut off circulation.
What she would not do was tell me what I'll handle it meant.
"Red," I said, on the eleventh morning. I'd found her in the back room, repotting a monstera into something that wasn't a coffee can. "We gotta talk about the card."
"What card?" She didn't look up. Her hands moved in the soil like they were playing piano.
"The fancy one with the little bird in a top hat. The one you wrote on in your super-spooky villain handwriting."
"I don't have villain handwriting."
"You dot your i's with leaves."
"Once."
"Pammy." I leaned against the doorframe. "I'm on parole. You know what that means? It means if one of Oswald's guys shows up dead in a hedge outside my shop, I don't get a trial, I get a bus. Back to Arkham. Do not pass go. They'll give my lease to a vape store."
That got her attention. She sat back on her heels and gave me a long, flat look over the monstera leaves.
"I haven't killed anyone in two years."
"I know. I'm proud of you. I'm gonna make you a sticker chart. But you also haven't been told no by a guy in a penguin suit in two years, and I remember what happened to the last guy who tried to put a parking lot on top of a wetland."
"He's fine."
"He lives in a tree, Pam."
"He seems happy there." She went back to the roots, teasing them apart with her fingertips. "His men came back on Thursday. Two of them. They stood outside your window at closing time and talked about how flammable dried flowers are."
My hands went cold. "Thursday? I was here Thursday."
"You were upstairs singing Cyndi Lauper to the boys in the bath."
"That is a private ritual."
"The whole block knows that ritual." She pressed soil down around the monstera's base. "I followed them as far as the bridge. I had a conversation with them. Nobody was hurt."
"Define hurt."
"One of them may now have a mild, temporary aversion to standing still on pavement." She finally looked up, and her mouth had that dry curve I'd missed so much it sometimes kept me up at night. "The sidewalk on Garrison Street has some new cracks. Very aggressive dandelions. He'll get over it."
I should have been mad. I opened my mouth to be mad. What came out was a laugh, the big ugly honking one that I'd spent my whole life trying to make sound cute and never managed. She looked away fast, but I'd seen it, the way her face softened when I did that, like a flower turning toward a window.
They came back on a Saturday afternoon. Busiest day of the week, if you can call six customers busy. Mrs. Abernathy was choosing a fern for her late husband's grave and telling me in great detail why every fern was wrong. Ozzie from next door was buying a single sunflower, which he did every Saturday and never explained. Ivy was out back, unloading a crate of ceramic pots that she'd decided I needed, because apparently the ones I'd bought were "insulting."
The bell jingled and the room got smaller.
There were three of them this time. Big guys. The kind of big that's mostly coat. The one in front had a pinky ring and a face like a closed fist, and the one at the back was carrying a baseball bat in the casual, swinging way that's meant to look like you forgot you were holding it. I knew that walk. I invented that walk.
"Miss Quinn," said Pinky Ring. "Mr. Cobblepot's real disappointed. He sent a card. You didn't call."
"I've been swamped," I said. My voice came out bright and easy. Behind me, Mrs. Abernathy had gone very still, clutching her fern. Ozzie had stepped in front of her without seeming to think about it, and I liked him a lot for that. "You know how it is. Small business. Never a minute."
"Sure. That's why Mr. Cobblepot wants to help. Neighborhood's changing. Lotta risk. Fires. Broken windows." The guy with the bat let it tap against my counter, just gently, right beside the gardenia display. "For a reasonable monthly fee, he makes sure none of that happens to you."
Here's the thing about being me. There's a version of this where I've already moved. Where the bat's in my hands before he finishes the sentence, and Pinky Ring is on the floor wondering where his front teeth went, and I'm doing a cartwheel over the counter just for the theater of it. My body knew that version. My body wanted it so bad my palms itched. I could feel the old grin pulling at the corners of my mouth, the one that used to make grown men call their mothers.
One punch. That was all it would take. One punch and a witness, and I'd be back in a cell with a window the size of a cereal box.
So I folded my hands on the counter instead, the way I used to fold them on a clipboard, and I tipped my head and I looked at Pinky Ring the way I'd looked at a hundred men across a little table in a little room.
"Can I ask you something?" I said. "Do you like this job?"
He blinked. "What?"
"It's a real question. You get up in the morning, you put on the coat, you go threaten florists. That's the gig. Is it fulfilling? Do you feel seen? 'Cause I gotta tell ya, I did this for years, and the dental's terrible and nobody ever says thank you."
"Lady, I don't..."
"And you." I turned to the guy with the bat. "You've tapped that thing on my counter three times now. That's a self-soothing behavior. I'm not saying it's a problem. I'm just saying, when's the last time somebody asked how you're doing?"
The bat stopped. The guy holding it looked down at it like it had betrayed him.
That's when the temperature in the room changed.
I didn't hear her come in from the back. I never did. I just felt it, the way you feel a storm in your knees. Every plant in the shop leaned. All of them. The ferns, the orchids, the eleven forgiven hydrangeas, the snake plant in its new pot with an actual drainage hole. They turned on their stems like sunflowers finding the sun, and every one of them pointed at the three men in coats.
Pamela Isley stood in the doorway to the back room with soil on her forearms and a ceramic pot in one hand. Her skin had gone a deep, dangerous green, from the collar of her blouse up to her hairline, and her eyes were doing that thing where the whites seem to go a little gold.
"Gentlemen," she said, very softly.
The vines came out of the hanging baskets. I'd forgotten I had pothos up there. Long trailing strands of it, the kind you buy for nine bucks at the hardware store, and they uncoiled from the ceiling slow and lazy, like they had all the time in the world. One wound around the baseball bat and plucked it out of the guy's hand like picking a daisy. Another settled across Pinky Ring's shoulders like a scarf. Just resting. Tightening, a little. Then a little more.
His face went the color of skim milk.
"Red," I said.
She didn't look at me. "They threatened your shop."
"I know."
"They threatened you."
"I know, Pammy." I came around the counter. Slowly. My heart was going like a drum solo. "Hey. Look at me. Not them, me."
It took a second. Then her eyes slid over to mine, and they were furious and frightened and old in a way she almost never let anyone see.
"Mrs. Abernathy's here," I said quietly. "And Ozzie. And it's Saturday, and the sign says open, and I'm on parole. This is my place. Okay? I need you to let me handle it."
The vine around Pinky Ring's shoulders twitched.
I watched her fight it. I watched her want to, the same way I'd wanted to, and I watched her decide. It was one of the bravest things I've ever seen, and I've seen her walk into a burning chemical plant to save a moss.
The vine loosened. It slid off his shoulders and retreated up into the basket, coiling back into place like nothing had happened. The pothos holding the bat set it down on my counter, gently, next to the gardenias.
"Thank you," I said to her. Then, to the three of them, in my brightest shop voice: "So! I'm thinking no to the insurance. But you can't leave empty-handed."
I went to the cold case and pulled out the ugliest arrangement I'd made all week, a lopsided spray of yellow carnations, dyed-blue baby's breath and one aggressively orange lily that I'd been planning to throw out. I wrapped it in pink tissue and tied it with a bow.
"For Mr. Cobblepot," I said, putting it in Pinky Ring's arms. "With my regards. Tell him Harley says the lily represents growth."
They left fast. Ozzie started clapping. Mrs. Abernathy bought two ferns.
Later, after closing, Ivy and I sat on the floor of the back room with our backs against the cool wall, passing a bottle of cheap rosé between us and not saying much. Bud had his head in her lap. He'd never done that with anyone but me. She was scratching behind his ears absently, like she'd been doing it for years.
"I left because I couldn't watch," she said, out of nowhere. "When you took the deal. I couldn't watch you walk into a cage and call it freedom."
"It's not a cage." I took the bottle from her. Our fingers touched on the glass, and neither of us moved first. "It's a door. It just looks like a cage from the outside, 'cause you gotta walk through bars to get to it."
She was quiet a long time. Then she reached over and took my hand, turned it palm up and pressed something into it. A seed. Small and dark and ridged, like a tiny walnut.
"What's this?"
"Plant it and find out."
"Pam, if this turns into a man-eating..."
"It won't." Her thumb stayed on my wrist, right over the pulse, for one second longer than it needed to. "It's for you. It only grows for you."
I closed my hand around it. I didn't trust my voice, so I didn't use it.
The knock came at seven the next morning. Not the bell, a knock, hard and official, and when I opened the door in my bathrobe there was a woman on my step in a leather jacket with a GCPD badge on her belt and a face I knew from the papers. Renee Montoya. Major Crimes.
"Morning, Dr. Quinzel," she said. "Somebody filled the Iceberg Lounge with poison oak last night. Floor to ceiling. Cobblepot's in the hospital, itching." She looked past me, into the shop, at the hydrangeas glowing healthy and blue in the window. "I need to know where Pamela Isley was between midnight and three."
And behind me, I heard the back door click quietly shut.