outside the front door. And I’m sure there’s some law against having an attached firing range, but the local sheriff hadn’t yet seen fit to enforce any regulations and in fact he was knocking back a Bud by the jukebox when I threaded past the sweating drummer and stepped inside.
“Jessie!” Hank boomed, standing to bear hug the air out of me. What little breath I had left at the end got hijacked by his aftershave. “About time you came home.”
“It’s good to be back,” I said.
He slammed his beer bottle down on the worn oak table and looked at me, his gray eyes warm with affection. “It’s good to see you again, little girl.”
I set my brown paper bag, containing a glad-to-see-you present for Scooter, on the floor. “I haven’t been gone that long.”
“Been over six weeks.” A frown’s shadow crossed his tanned forehead but disappeared almost immediately. “What’d you do to your hair?”
I guiltily ran a hand through it. “Long and red didn’t suit me. Shorter and brown’s better for my line of work.”
“Didn’t suit you, my ass.”
“I’d shave it all off if I had the nerve.”
Hank grinned. He knew I wouldn’t, but it’d give him something to rib me about later.
“Scooter around?” I asked.
“Don’t you go nowhere. I’ll fetch him.” He stalked his broad frame up to the bar where Marian, the homely blond barkeep, did her best not to pass out from lust. The fact Hank was pushing fifty didn’t seem to bother her twenty-something hormones. But, as Scooter liked to say, every pot has a lid.
What he meant was, every pot except the ones he used in the back to cook up his four-alarm chili. Hell, if he had more than a ladle and six spoons in the kitchen I’d be surprised. He’d probably worn his trademark black-iron pot down to tinfoil thickness by now.
And he wouldn’t let me replace the damn thing with a new one. A stickler about borrowing, he’d nearly had a heart attack when I’d told him I was going to get a student loan to pay for school. Hank and I had a tough row to hoe when we talked him out of selling the Slapdash to pay for my education. Hell, it wouldn’t have covered much more than tuition and books for the first two years, anyway. The money I’d made working for von Brutten let me pay off the entire loan in a year and two months.
Hank cracked the kitchen door and shouted, “Scooter! Your lady friend’s home!”
Looking around at the clean, well-worn tables, the gleaming bar, the glittering beer mugs, and the black-and-white photos of who knows whom on the walls, I felt the first thrill of seeing him again. This place was so like him—beat-up and characterful and comforting—where you could go and feel at ease and let the world slip by outside.
Being with Scooter always felt safe. When I first came to live with him after my parents died, he made me feel like I belonged here. Even though he didn’t have kids of his own, Scooter somehow knew how to guide me through my parents’ deaths in that car accident. It felt like he’d always be here, always just through the kitchen door, no matter what else was going on in my life.
I guess I was about nine when he blindfolded me and took me into the middle of a neighbor’s cornfield. He set me down between two rows and told me to count to a thousand, then take off my blindfold and come home. Maybe I counted to a thousand or maybe not, but I remember pulling off that navy-blue bandanna, squinting into the bright noon sky, surrounded by the smell of hot corn leaves going dry with summer sun, and thinking, “I better go that way.” Thirty minutes later, I was back at the Slapdash, not knowing how I’d known where I was or where I ought to head. I was just glad Scooter was waiting for me on the front porch with a glass of cold grape Kool-Aid and a hug. He’d patted my head and chuckled, then bragged about how sharp and capable I was to all his friends that night as they sat around the gleaming mahogany bar.
Now, beside the bar, Hank swung the kitchen door wider and Scooter barreled through, shoving his walker out in front of him like a battering ram. Two shuffling steps, shove. Two shuffling steps, shove. I noticed immediately the hair sticking out from under the baseball cap had silvered a lot. His face, a dull gray under a surface flush of either excitement or freshly chopped jalapeños, broke into the broad, toothy grin I remembered from the day I came to live with him. I’d been seven then and the teeth had been real.
When he cleared the door, I went to him and hugged him over the walker, feeling his loose-skinned old-man shoulders through his plaid cotton shirt. Two-day stubble scratched my ear and his arms tightened shakily around my back as he said, “Well, well. How ’bout that.” He smelled like garlic and mothballs and spearmint. If I could bottle that scent I’d remember him forever.
“Hello, old man,” I said.
“’Bout time you came back. I thought you’d done forgot me.” He winked one watery hazel eye to show me he didn’t mean it. “Marian! Bring my girl a beer.”
“What’ll you have?” she called.
“Saint Arnold.”
“You want a mug?”
“Nah.”
Scooter gestured to a table close to the kitchen. “You tell me where you’ve been this time.” He let Hank guide him into a wide-backed chair sporting a seat cushion. So Scooter had finally broken down and set himself up a receiving table. Hank settled in at Scooter’s right hand.
“I’ll do better than just tell you.” I set the brown paper bag on the chair next to me and took out Phalaenopsis donerii, a delicate beauty whose petals gleamed a pure, bright yellow. The lip—the insect pollinator’s landing platform—resembled a leopard’s skin, dark brown and golden. “Fresh from Micronesia,” I said. “She’s small, but she’s fertile. I made sure of that before I turned her siblings over to the boss.”
Scooter’s liver-spotted hand stopped trembling as he touched the plant’s shiny leaves. Just like some stutterers can sing flawlessly, so his hands became steady as a rock around an orchid.
“Wide leaves. Understory t’rrestrial,” he murmured, turning the pot gently. “Monopodial. Better not keep your feet wet, lovely girl.” His fingers lightly traced her lines. “What pests?”
“The usual. And spider mites on the underleaves.”
“Pollinator?”
“The male leopard moth. She blooms for two weeks before the female moths hatch.”
“So the gents make love to her until their lady friends show up.” He shook his head. “Somethin’ else, ain’t it?”
“Timing is everything,” I admitted.
“This is the prettiest since my Laelia anceps. My first orchid.” His voice softened. “Long time ago now.”
“What about the Draculas I brought you last year? Or the Brassia verrucosa the year before that?” I’d nearly broken my neck for the blood-red Brassia.
“There ain’t nuthin’ like the first.” He seemed to want to say more, but didn’t. His eyes sharpened when he tore his gaze from his orchid to look at me. “Couldn’t catch me a couple
