The second Maryann slid into the bench seat of her truck, the rain started to fall.
A drop hit Hannibal on the eyelid. Another splotched his dress shirt.
The truck roared to life in that way old trucks do, and Maryann illuminated him in the cloudy dimness with her headlights. With a final wave, she arched over her seat and backed carefully out of the drive.
Hannibal watched her go, an invigorating feeling thrumming in his veins. The gardener had that effect. Her excitement and eloquence regarding her chosen profession spoke of a passion, a calling. Her drive infused her every cell, and crackled out like static lightening to tingle over the skin, cause hair to spike in follicles.
Hannibal considered himself shocked.
The raindrops were heavy, their cool impacts like quarters dropped from the heavens. A rumble of drums sounded, hesitant, then growing louder into assertive thunder. He could smell the lightening, like ozone and split molecules that dressed the water droplets like sesame seeds on a plate.
He threw back his head and looked towards the origin, trying to see the actual birth of each bead from the cloud above. He couldn't, though. And he realized belatedly that he was too far from the house to avoid serious drenching.
Briskly, he strode to the shelter of his front porch. Somehow, it felt like a surrender, like a cop-out. Maryann's sturdy rain-shine-snow-or-sleet attitude was contagious.
Over the course of the last two hours, they'd conversed in ordinary business with unique, tangent rabbit-chases.
"Have you ever had a Green Zebra?" Maryann had asked him suddenly, pegging him over her sketchbook.
Hannibal cocked his head. "A what?"
"A Green Zebra tomato," she clarified. She rotated to stand shoulder to shoulder with him, and doodled in the margin of the rough plot sketch. "They're fascinating little buggers. They are about this big, and they mature to a neon yellow-green with dark green stripes." Artfully penciling the curl of the stem and the jagged stripes on the two-dimensional fruit orb, she gave it a satisfied drum riff with her eraser end. "Not acidic, like you'd think. Sweet, with some tones of meyer lemon."
Hannibal was intrigued. "Can you put in some of those?"
She grinned. "Sure thing. How about Cherokee Purples?"
"Another tomato?"
"Yep. Smokey, dark. Improves with cooking."
Hannibal imagined that, with her descriptions, he would be sold on anything she suggested. In the end, there was thirty tomato plants, of ten different varieties.
"Where did you learn to sketch?" he queried.
She gave him a wry smile. "College helped some, what with the designs they made us draw. Ugly, stilted things with stencils and fancy paper. Didn't like 'em much. But mostly, I taught myself."
Her style was rather unique, and somewhat fantasized. She was given to sprinkling sparkle-diamonds and glitter-stars on things as she spoke; the Green Zebra being one of them. Always in motion, like the movement of a bee. "You're not bad," Hannibal said honestly. "Sometime, I'll have to show you my own work. Though it may fall into the 'stilted' category."
Maryann's lips quirked. "I'd still like that. Just because I can't draw formal doesn't mean I dislike other people's art. That's not what art is."
On his front porch, Hannibal regarded the space that would be his garden in a week's time. The memory of her hurried but impassioned pencil strokes dancing over the symbol-ridden sketch was easily brought to life behind his closed eyes.
"I'll have the contract and final drawing submitted for your approval in two days," she'd promised as he walked her to her truck.
Hannibal had extended a hand, for the cultural protocol as much as for the thrill of her metacarpals' press against his thumb. "Looking forward to doing business, Miss Shule."
"Good day, Doctor Lector," she'd smiled. "I can't wait to grow good things for you."
Nor I, the doctor thought, disappearing into the shelter of his house. Peeling off his shirt made him think of peeling an onion.
Maryann's key snarled in the lock, as usual. The delay was enough for her hair and shoulders to get utterly drenched by the rain. Opening the door took some wrestling, but she was granted entry. The five-room house was sized right for her: kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, livingroom, and a spare room that was hybrid storage/office/art studio. Sitting in the middle of five acres, about half of which she'd planted as something, it was a sixty-year-old ranch style brick house a chipped, sanded-down quality about it.
As she toed off her shoes, her two cats glared at her from their carpet-covered cave in the corner of her living room. One cave stacked on top of the other, and in the darkness of her vacant, storm-shadowed home, it looked like a nefarious tree from Snow White's frightening forest interlude.
The gardener greeted the two pairs of eyes solemnly. "Jinx. Juju."
Two furred heads, one black and one white, peeked from the cave.
"Don't look at me in that tone of voice," she chided, dumping her purse on the foyer table. "I met a client today. That means more anchovies for you two."
Jinx's black lips curled back in a fanged yawn, and he leisurely stepped out of his cave. Juju hurried to follow, her white paws padding silently.
The gardener shook her head at their antics and dallied in the bathroom, washing her hands and toweling her hair dry.
Maryann had a very special relationship with her cats. They lived as passive-aggressive roommates, mostly avoiding each other, but reliant all the same. Maryann liked the cats due to their quietness, ease of care, and aloof attitudes. She'd probably go nuts if she were completely alone. They didn't exactly like her, but 'like' was a relative term with cats, anyway. Their tolerance - a more appropriate description - spoke volumes. Both animals had been neglected in their previous home, and the shelter had disclosed that fully. But it had not mattered to Maryann.
"Today is six months, you guys," she said as she paced to the bedroom to turn on her computer. Hearing a clap of thunder, she unplugged it and carried it to the kitchen. "I've had you for a half a year now," she continued, scooping catfood from the tall container in the pantry. Setting the bowls a good distance apart, the animals slunk to their food and began to crunch.
"Maybe today's the day...?" she ventured a hand towards Jinx's back.
The cat looked up balefully and hissed.
"Fine," sighed Maryann. "One day, mister. Your time draws nigh."
Juju yielded similar results, but added a paw swipe for good measure.
"Missed again," snipped Maryann, hands on her hips. "But you're on my list, missy."
The computer chimed that it had awoken, and Maryann swayed into her seat with a tired sigh. Pulling up her standard, pretyped contract, she filled in the pertinent blanks and amended a few paragraphs.
Although the idea of the job was standard, the client was far above her usual strata. Usually, the elderly and infirm acquired her services, and they planted the boring stuff: red round tomatoes, zucchini squash, and sweet potatoes.
"Sure, those have their place," Maryann addressed the cats as they walked by. "But a whole quarter-acre of the stuff?"
So, Hannibal was a delightful surprise. One, in that he did not snap-judge her by her dress and looks; two, that he was amenable to her services and interested to boot; and three, that he was just as adventurous as she. Culinarily speaking, anyway.
"Six types of squash," Maryann murmured, checking her notes. "Ten types of tomatoes. Four potatoes." It was incredibly gratifying to be able to talk the doctor into so much variety, without the slightest hint of impatience or disinterest on his part.
"Have you ever heard of a Purple Viking?" Maryann had asked Hannibal, warming to the trend of opening his world.
"These varietal names are rather pretentious," the doctor had chuckled. "No, I have not."
"Picture a nice, large, white-fleshed potato," she had started to draw it. "Now, add some purple skin and - get this - pink swirls."
"Bizarre," he'd marveled, but with intrigue.
"I dunno about you, but I make a habit of eating tie-dyed foods on principle."
His smile had been odd, but not uncomfortably so. More like he was thinking behind some mental curtain. "I think I shall start."
Coming out of her reverie with a foolish grin, Maryann returned to scowling at the contract. This part was the easy aspect of the ordeal, but for her, the most tedious. Finally, after two hours, she proofed the document and sent it to the printer in the office. As the hum sounded on the other side of the wall signaling the device's obedience, Maryann stretched with a luxurious arch of the back.
The motion made her stomach growl.
"Salad sounds good," she mused, head in the fridge. A furry sensation twining around her ankles made her startle. Juju was winding her sinuous white body around Maryann's calf, and Jinx was letting out "Mrow!" cries of clear begging from under the microwave.
"Oh, sure," scoffed the gardener. "Now you touch me." Relenting, she pulled out a tin of tuna and two spoons. The cats ate with fervent patience from the spoons, and Maryann had to smile lovingly at them. "One day, you guys."
The preliminary drawing took three hours of labor over a 24"x30" sketchpad, but the time passed in a hazy of creativity. As Maryann laid the bones of the plot and marked the compass, she found her thoughts turning to the angular, genteel Dr. Hannibal Lector once more.
"I babbled like an idiot, I'm afraid," she told the drawing, a pang of belated embarrassment panging her. She felt so unrefined around him, like a serf to a noble. All she had going for her was a love of plants and a self-deprecating manner. He had everything: money, more education than she could ever wish for, manners, looks, and a delicious accent.
"Mmm, accent," she imitated Homer Simpson, making herself feel better. "Can you put in some of those?" he'd asked, sluicing through the words like a Nordic river. She'd do anything Hannibal said in that accent...
Maryann's pencil led broke, and with it, her concentration. Putting down the offending tool, she glanced at the clock.
A shower with rose soap and a pair of cotton men's sleep pants later, she was bedded down in the quiet darkness of her bedroom. Staring up at the slightly unbalanced ceiling fan, she wondered if he'd noticed her nerves. He was so handsome, and he'd kept looking at her like some rare and beautiful bird, as though she was a once in a lifetime sighting through a pair of binoculars on some distant hillside.
Sighing, she turned over grudgingly. He was a client. She was performing a service for money. No matter how many appraising looks she got, that was the line drawn in stone.
I just hope this doesn't go south on me, she thought as she drifted off. But her dreams acknowledged the beauty of Hannibal's accent, replaying them like a broken record in her dreams.
The next morning, after frowning away the disjointed dreams into her tea mug, Maryann stepped onto her back porch to bask in the pale gold of the dawn. Her gardens sprawled before her like a living labyrinth, a green castle beckoning her to read fiction and pick flowers.
But she had no time to linger as she traversed the twisted, mulched paths with familiarity. There was a device in her hand that looked like a canister with a tapered, angled spout and an accordion mounted on the back. Mug in hand, Maryann rounded the final corner and came upon a treeline dotted with white and yellow columnar boxes at thirty foot intervals. The boxes had a swarm of crawling specks at the narrow slit acting as the door, and a few rocketing little specks all around. The thrum of their buzzing was a soothing sound, as the bees were just waking up.
"Good morning, pretties!" she called. Placing her mug in the grass, she pulled a lighter from her pajama pocket. Lighting the twist of woodchips and lavender stems in the canister, she lidded the device and gave the accordion a few pumps. Smoke rose from the spout.
"How is the Zeus hive doing today?" she queried, stepping towards the first box. This clan was of a particularly aggressive nature, hence the smoker, but they gave oodles of honey every year. The queen also proliferated quite readily, so Zeus seemed an apt name.
Dusting the swarm on the door thoroughly, Maryann grasped the handle of the middle tray and slowly pulled it straight up. It was heavy with bees and comb, and the queen was in the lower corner, surrounded by courtesans and lovers. The blue dot on her abdomen helped Maryann find her.
Puffing more smoke all over the hive, Maryann replaced the healthy tray and checked the other four in the hive. "Jeez, Zeus," she marveled. "You're humping everything that moves. I'll have to split the hive again next year."
And so it went down the treeline. Six hives, all busy and active: Artemis, Aphrodite, Hermes, Hera, and Hecate. Masterfully, Maryann checked the remaining hives without the smoker, greeting them softly, looking in the corners for parasitic insects and mold.
She loved the bees. Their activity, their mannerisms, their honey, their protectiveness of the hive. Handling them made her go to a state of calm that no yoga class ever could. It was as though by putting herself at risk of being stung, she accepted the possibility and managed it. It was a bite-sized danger, one that she could compartmentalize and control.
But, as she walked away from the hives and back up the path, she had a niggling feeling that entertaining fond emotion for her newest client was hardly a bite-sized danger.
Author's Note: Holy cow, you guys. I did not expect that much love from just one chapter! But hey, if it floats your boat, I'll give you more, gladly.
FYI, I do not leave stories unfinished. I make take a week off RARELY, but they will always have completion. It's a character flaw, the need for closure. But in this hobby of writing, it suits a purpose.
Holly L. Jensen, Petronille, DementorsKiss95, ROSELOVE, Guest 22, AppoloniaAstria, The Onceler's Unless, glustora, Guest, YinYangSisters, and Megii of Mysteri OusStranger: thank you for your overwhelming adulation. Your reviews make my heart soar.