Page 10 of The Botanist's Assistant
He holds out his palms so Margaret can see the slight tremble of his fingers although they seem no different today than they are every other day. Another reason science may not be his calling.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” Margaret says, “eight thirty a.m. sharp.”
“For what?”
“For the extractions, of course. We can’t let Dr. Deaver’s research die with him.”
Even as she says it, however, Margaret is afraid that’s exactly what might happen.
Calvin frowns. “Wait, are you my boss now?”
Margaret considers. “Since I manage the lab and you’re the only person here to manage right now, I suppose I am. For the moment. And, as the manager, I don’t want to have to dock your pay because you didn’t show up, which means we won’t use up our salary budget, and you know what happens then.”
It’s one of those illogical tenets of college bureaucracy that if even one dollar is left in a particular budget at the end of the fiscal year, that dollar will be subtracted from the next year’s allocation, which is why there is always a flurry of pipette and printer-paper orderings during the last week of June.
“You mean my salary will get cut just because I’m too upset to work? Do you know how much rent I pay?” Calvin’s voice rises an octave. “This can’t be happening. Why does everything always go wrong?” He slaps at his pockets. “Darn it. Where are my cigarettes? I must have left them outside. And how am I supposed to concentrate, let alone work, with all this hanging over my head?” He points a finger toward Margaret. “You’re not helping, you know.”
Any other time, Margaret might have tried to soothe him, but she is too unsettled herself.
“If we don’t do the work, Calvin, not only will we not have jobs, but what happens years from now when a cancer patient runs out of options and ours would have been the only cure? Would we say to them: Sorry about your pain and upcoming death but we were too upset to work to create a medicine that would help you?”
That stops Calvin. Margaret is always calm, even whenZhang exploded that beaker, sending shards of glass flying across the room like a barrage of tiny arrows.
He blinks, considering her, then slings his messenger bag across his chest. “All right. You win, Big, um, Margaret. I’ll be here tomorrow. That is if I can get any sleep tonight, which I doubt.”
At the door, he pauses. “Oh, and the dean said to tell you he wants to see you Tuesday at ten a.m.”
Margaret doesn’t know if Calvin meant to be cruel by leaving that announcement hanging in the air, but a summons from the dean is never good.
8
Among the Flowers
On Sundays, lots of peoplego to the beach or to church or plant themselves on couches to watch sports on TV. Not Margaret. Sunday is her garden day, and if the weather is even remotely cooperative, Margaret is outside among her plants. She weeds and waters. She fertilizes and feeds. She praises plants that are doing particularly well and tends to those infected by aphids and other pests. Depending on the season, she may plant or prune or deadhead. Last year, she built a retaining wall using rocks from her four-acre property.
Unlike the rest of her ordered and plain life, Margaret’s garden is a riot of colors, textures and scents. Dainty violets line a winding path of stepping stones next to a row of silvery dusty miller. Gaudy gladiolas lord it over black-eyed Susans while lilies erupt in clumps and deer grass sways in the breeze. Vines climb, roses bloom, cacti prick.
Margaret inherited the cottage and her garden from her great-aunt Hazel and has not changed it—only added to it—partly as tribute to the independent old woman but also as away to exercise the creative right side of her brain, which, as a researcher, gets little workout.
“I believe in whole-grain bread and whole-brain science,” Dr. Deaver said once, which made Margaret realize that, basically, she was the human equivalent of supermarket white bread and vow to do better.
Usually, her garden relaxes and soothes her. Today, however, the weight of Dr. Deaver’s demise, the fact that his work might be lost and the clues that suggest he didn’t die a natural death make her feel as if she’s spent the whole day moving through mud.
By five fifteen, she is so tired she can hardly drag her trusty three-pronged cultivator through the soil. She shoves herself to her feet, puts away her tools and gloves, and trudges inside to clean up. Usually, her showers last three minutes but today she pushes it to four. The water feels good drumming against her back, and she stands there letting it run down her frame until she realizes the waste she is causing and quickly twists the faucet handles closed.
She dries off, wipes steam from the mirror, then rubs the towel vigorously through her wavy brown hair, which she notices is so streaked with gray now that she can’t justify calling it brown anymore. She’ll need to change her driver’s license when it comes up for renewal next year.
Margaret accepted her plainness years ago: her too-long face, her too-widely-set eyes, her oversized nose. What she has a hard time accepting is the way society reacts to imperfections like hers with suggestions of surgeries and injections and lasers. As if it were a horrible disease that needed to be curedbefore it infected someone else. Why doesn’t a person’s inside count?
According to her mother, Margaret got her looks and height from her father, who had been a football star in high school. (Margaret was conceived during senior prom but became fatherless at age six when the semitruck her father was driving lost its brakes on a mountain pass and he died in a bonfire of motor oil and auto parts.)
Margaret turns away from the mirror. Her mother never had a chance to go gray, dying from inoperable stomach cancer at the age of forty-two. It was a horrible death, made more devastating by the fact that Margaret was the only one left of her family to care for her. Now it will be Dr. Deaver whose hair will never gray, nor will he see his latest and possibly most important discovery be celebrated far and wide.
Margaret puts on her house clothes—charcoal sweatpants, a men’s Pendleton shirt size large and lambs-wool-lined slippers ($2.99 at the thrift store). She keeps three sets of clothes—her work outfits, her gardening apparel and her house clothes—plus a brown sweater and a green down jacket for when it gets cold. Anything more feels like an excess.
She heads for the kitchen.
Late afternoon light sifts through the front windows of her cottage, casting shadows over the faded but plump sofa, her padded footstool, her mystery book and reading lamp on the end table. The cabin is small and made of rough wood, 750 square feet at most. She got the cottage nine years ago after her great-aunt died and bequeathed her the former homesteader’s cabin due to having no other heirs.
