Page 32 of The Botanist's Assistant
She opens a window to let out the heat generated by the oven and does her dishes. She is about to get the broom and sweep her floor when she hears a car engine approaching.
If the wind is right, she can sometimes hear the hum of vehicles from the valley below, but this sounds as if it’s coming up her hill.
Except for the propane truck and the few times she had to call in a repair person when a job was too complicated for her—the installation of a new fuse box, a septic tank that needed to be pumped—no one comes up her driveway. She has no relatives to stop by. No Jehovah’s Witnesses orAmazon trucks brave her hill. Not even her mail carrier will attempt it.
Margaret sticks her head out the door into the evening air. The vehicle sounds close. The engine revs, then falls silent, then revs again.
There’s a seasonal spring about two-thirds of the way up the hill that turns the road to mud at certain times of the year, and unless you know to gun the engine and speed through the mire, it’s possible for a car to become trapped.
Margaret puts on her gardening shoes, grabs a headlamp and her shovel. It’s near dark. If someone has mistaken her driveway for another or taken a wrong turn intending to go to the county park that borders her land (it’s happened twice before), they might become stuck. She will redirect the wayward driver toward a spot where they will be able to turn around, and if they are stuck, she will unstick them. She has no wish for visitors, intended or accidental.
Margaret is approaching the driveway’s second hairpin turn where a small boggy pond is home to a burgeoning crop of common horsetail (someday she will get rid of the invasive plant) when she sees, on the road below, a sight that causes her to stop so suddenly her foot slips on a patch of loose dirt and she nearly falls on her behind.
It’s an older-model white van.
Margaret’s vision swims.
She scrambles back uphill a few yards and crouches behind a knobcone pine. Her heartbeat pounds in her ears.
What is the vehicle doing here?
It’s the same question she should have asked thirty-four years ago when her mother told her she needed to keep an eyeon her sister, Grace, who had been grounded for stealing their mom’s credit card to buy a pair of expensive sneakers that,Grace claimed, were owned by every girl in her school except her.
“Don’t let her out of your sight,” her mother had ordered Margaret after Gordie said he’d planned a motorcycle ride with friends that day and wouldn’t be around. “Make her do her chores. I want the carpet vacuumed and the laundry folded before I get home.”
Margaret groaned. She knew she would end up doing Grace’s assignments.
Grace slept in until eleven that day, then proceeded to try to persuade Margaret to let her go to her friend Jennifer’s house down the street. When Margaret said no, Grace huffed away. Doors slammed. Music was turned up loudly.
When Margaret told Grace to shut off the music and do her chores, Grace said she was hungry and wanted to walk to the mini-mart four blocks away. “There’s no food in the house,” she said, which was mostly true.
“There’s peanut butter and bread,” Margaret said.
“I hate you,” Grace said.
“I hate you too,” Margaret said back.
Grace flounced away and the music was turned up high again. All Margaret wanted was to lie on her bed and read the Rachel Carson biography that she’d checked out of the library, but her sister was making that impossible.
“Turn down that music,” Margaret yelled.
“Why don’t you shut up?” Grace shouted.
A few minutes later, Grace was back in the room they shared.
“Can I at least go in the front yard and get a tan?” she asked.
Margaret knew she should say no, but the peace and quiet that Grace’s retreat would provide was too tempting. She didn’t even look up from the page.
“Sure, but don’t go anywhere else. I’ll be watching you.”
“I won’t,” Grace promised.
Neither kept her word.
Margaret continued reading in the bedroom they shared, and when she finally went out to check on Grace, all she found was a rumpled orange beach towel spread out on their patchy lawn.
Great, the little sneak is off with her friends and I’m going to be blamed for it, is what she thought.
