No one is looking at me, I don’t think, so I twist Attorney Mason R. Madison’s rosebush branch. It bends, doesn’t snap. I prick my hand in two places, bleed on a yellow rose, the green-brown stem. A dog barks. My hand cramps.
I step away from the bush, off the lawn. The blue air touches my thorn-pricks like a cool hand. My palm tingles. I feel brave.
It takes an hour to drive from Berkeley to Marin; I have time. I wander the sky-lit sidewalks, find a pharmacy—Marin Drug and Candy. The roof is Spanish tile, a thousand terracotta arches, a hundred-thousand dollars. The door: yellow ivy grips a red clay archway, an arch I’d get married under. Mint leaves grow behind the stone seagull. I’m underdressed.
The floor is marble. I buy a box of Band-Aids and gardening shears. And an apron.
I tie the apron on and rip the cardboard off the shears and I am a gardener. My name is—Tammy. This is my job.
I walk back to the rose bush, clip off fifteen roses. Two women with loose skin pass—they both have pearl earrings—and I wave my shears. They don’t smile.
The sky dims, soft as honeydew rot, and the sun creeps behind a house, backlights the greenhouse. The greenhouse hosts a forest of foreign plants, black and twisted before the pale sky-dawn.
I untie my apron. “Justin! You smell like basil,” I say to my face in a flower shop’s dark window. I wish I had a ribbon for the roses. My phone rings.
They were cheap at that store, not to offer a ribbon.
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