Life According to Lucy

She carried another load of clothes and the battered ficus to the car. She liked to think if Mom had beaten the cancer, she’d have listened to her more. But in her more honest moments, she knew that wasn’t true. She wasn’t the kind of person who took advice, good or otherwise.

When she got back to the curb, the gardener had disappeared. It figured. A man who was truly interested wouldn’t have given up so easily. In his place, two women in polyester pedal pushers were pawing through her possessions. One of them held up a lamp she’d inherited from her Aunt Edna. “I’ll give you five dollars for this,” she said.

Five dollars for a lamp whose base was carved like a pineapple? “Sold!”

“How much for this box of Tupperware?” The second woman held up a carton of kitchen supplies.

She swallowed. “Uh…five dollars?”

Fifteen minutes later, she’d sold the sofa, two kitchen chairs, a toaster that didn’t work and a blender that did. She had over a hundred dollars in cash and people were still shoving money at her.

Beep! Beep! She looked up and felt sick to her stomach as a familiar blue pickup truck rolled toward her. Talk about bad timing…. The window glided down and her father leaned out. Dad had thick salt-and-pepper hair that he’d worn in a flattop since he was discharged from the Army in 1969. He dressed in bowling shirts and baggy khakis dating from the Nixon presidency, and shiny cowboy boots. Her friends who met him for the first time thought he was hip and fashionable. She didn’t have the heart to tell them he’d been dressing this way for forty years. “Honey, why didn’t you tell me you were having a yard sale?” he asked.

She stuffed the cash in the pocket of her jeans and reluctantly walked over to him. “Uh, it’s not exactly a sale, Dad.”

He stared as two men walked past him with her couch. “You’re selling your sofa?”

She pretended to adjust his side mirror. “Dad, what are you doing here?”

“I thought I might take you out for a decent meal.”

Since her mom had died a year ago, her dad dropped by a couple of times a week to take Lucy to dinner. He said he wanted to make sure she got a good meal every now and then, but she knew it was really because he was lonely.

A woman marched past carrying her old bedside table. “If you’re not having a yard sale, what are you doing?”

She stared at the ground. “I’ve been evicted.”

She braced herself for the storm she was sure was coming. The familiar “at your age you should be more responsible” lecture. But he didn’t say anything.

After a minute, she couldn’t stand it anymore and risked looking at him. He didn’t look angry at all, just tired. Old. An invisible hand squeezed her chest. “Is everything okay, Dad?”

He sighed. “I was going through some of your mother’s things today.”

The hand squeezed tighter. “Oh, Daddy.” She touched his arm, not knowing what to say. How did you comfort someone when they’d lost the person they’d lived with for over thirty years?

He gripped the steering wheel with both hands. “There’s a bunch of stuff in the potting shed—bulbs and plants and all kinds of books and stuff. I figure I ought to do something with it, but I don’t know what.”

Lucy’s mom had been an avid gardener. She’d won Yard of the Month so many times the Garden Society gave her a brass plaque and told her she couldn’t enter again. She’d tried to pass her green thumb along to her daughter, but Lucy was probably the only person in the world who once actually killed a pot of silk flowers.(She forgot and watered them. The stems rusted and they fell over.)

“I thought maybe you’d come over and help me,” Dad said.

“Sure. Sure I will.” She glanced back over her shoulder toward her dwindling pile of possessions. She needed to poll her girlfriends to find out who would let her crash for a few days until she could find a new apartment. And she’d probably have to break down and balance her checkbook to see what she could afford. “Uh, how about one day next week?”

Dad opened the truck door and climbed out. “Come on. I’ll help you get the rest of your stuff. You can move in with me.”

“I don’t know, Dad.” She followed him over to where two women were arguing over her DVD player. “I wouldn’t want to impose.” Besides, there was something so pathetic about a single, unemployed twenty-six-year-old having to move back in with her father, wasn’t there?

“You got somewhere else to go?” Dad elbowed the two women out of the way and picked up the DVD player.

Her shoulders sagged. “No.” She gathered up a box of CDs and followed him to the truck. Unemployed…evicted…back under Dad’s thumb. Yep. Trouble came in threes, all right.

GREG POLHEMUS hung the little brass plaque on the wall behind the cash register and stepped back to admire it. Best of Show, Downtown Art Fair it proclaimed in fancy script. It looked pretty good up there with the other awards and citations he’d collected lately.

“Your father would be so pleased.” Marisel rested her hand on his shoulder and gave him a fond look. The Guatemalan nursery worker mothered everyone at Polhemus Gardens, but especially Greg, despite the fact that he was her boss.

“Oh, he’d probably gripe about me wasting time at an art fair when we have so much work piling up.” He smiled, picturing his father in scolding mode. He’d frown and shake a finger at Greg, but his eyes would be dancing with laughter. Greg had never thought he’d miss his father’s litany of complaints, but now that the old man was gone, he found himself wishing he’d paid a little more attention to what he’d had to say.

“He would gripe, but he’d still be proud.” Marisel impaled a stack of order slips on the spindle by the register. “It’s after six o’clock on a Friday night. What are you still doing here?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?” He picked up a sheaf of invoices. “I’m working.”

She shook her head. “You need to hire someone to help you with all this paperwork. You can’t do everything.”

He laughed. “Are you trying to fill my father’s shoes in the griping department? You’re going to need more practice.”

She frowned. “A handsome young man like you should be out enjoying himself. Dancing. Seeing the girls.”

When had meeting women stopped being easy? He didn’t want to go hang out at bars by himself, and the buddies he used to hang with were either married and raising families or still living like frat boys, sharing apartments and living on beer and fast food. He was stuck somewhere in between, with a house of his own and a business to run, but no family to share it with.

He thought of the woman he’d met today outside the apartment, the one being evicted. Most of the women he knew would have dissolved into tears at the very thought of such public humiliation, but this one had been reading the riot act to crusty old Leon Kopetsky. Then she’d lashed out at him like a cobra.

He should have known better than to step into something that wasn’t his business, but she’d looked so alone, standing there with all her possessions piling up around her. He’d wanted to do something to help. It didn’t even matter that she didn’t want his help. There wasn’t any real heat behind her anger, only wounded pride. Too bad he didn’t have the chance to get to know her better.

He could ask Kopetsky her name, but what good would that do? It wasn’t like he had time to spend trying to track down his mystery woman.

“You should go out, meet someone nice,” Marisel prodded.

“I see plenty of women,” he said. “I was digging a new rose bed for the Lawson sisters just this morning. And Margery Rice calls me at least once a week to come over and see her.”

Marisel made a face. “The Lawson sisters are old enough to be your grandmothers and Margery Rice should be ashamed of herself, a married woman flirting like that.”

“Oh, I don’t take her seriously.” He paged through the invoices. Margery Rice was a very well-built forty-year-old who had let it be known he could leave his shoes under her bed any time, but he didn’t have any intention of taking her up on her offer. Still, it had been a while since a woman had warmed his sheets. Marisel was right; he needed to make more of an effort to find someone.

“I promise I’ll get out and circulate,” he said. “After the art show is over and I win the bid for Allen Industries.”

“If those people have any sense you’ll win the bid. But your father tried for years to get them as customers and he never could.” She shook her head. “That shows right there they aren’t too smart.”

He nodded. Yes, his father had gone after Allen Industries for years. But this year, Greg was determined to get the job. “There’s no way they can turn me down. The plan I outlined for them is exactly what they’re looking for, and no one will beat the price.”

“And then what? You’ll spend all your time making sure the job is done perfectly instead of getting out and having any kind of life.” She wagged her finger at him in a fair imitation of the old man. “You’re too young to be a hermit.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He bit the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing. At six-two, he towered more than a foot over Marisel, but she looked for all the world as if at any moment she’d lay him over her knee and tan his hide.

“You laugh, but don’t you know the woman for you isn’t going to fall out of the sky?”

“I was thinking I might find her hiding behind a rose bush one day.”

“Why would you think a loco thing like that?”