“Why don’t you start on your puzzle,” she said darkly, heading for the basement again.
“Maybe later.” By now I felt the right to sulk. Even if I had been in the wrong about not retreiving the money from that shirt, I didn’t think I was the only one, and I was not going to let myself be sent to the permanent dunce corner, which the card table with Mount Rushmore in a thousand pieces amounted to. It occurred to me that, with this woman as mad at me as a spitting cat, it would really help to have someone on my side, or at least another target to draw her fire. “Where’d Herman go?” I wondered, hoping he might show up any moment to get me off the hook.
No such luck. Gone to “work,” where else, she forgot about the basement long enough to circle back and huff, the quotation marks speaking loudest. When I asked what his job was, she sorted me out on that in a hurry.
“Job?” She drew the word out mockingly as she clattered stray breakfast dishes into the sink in passing. “That will be the day. The old pooter”—that bit of Gram’s language out of her startled me—“is out in that greenhouse of his again.” My mention of him did change matters, though, because at the cellar stairs she whipped around to me, with a different look in her doll eyes.
“You can go help him, dearie, wouldn’t that be nice?” she suggested, suspiciously sweet all of a sudden. “Make yourself useful as well as ornamental.” Gesturing around as if chores were swarmng at her and I was in the way, she exclaimed that life was simply too, too busy. “After I deal with the laundry, I have to get ready.” She didn’t bother to say for what, and from the set of her chins, I could tell she did not want to hear anything more out of me but footsteps as I hustled my fanny to that greenhouse.
“Maybe I’ll go say hi,” I mumbled, and trooped out to the backyard, where the odd shed of glass gleamed in the sun. Already at that time of the morning, the Wisconsin air felt heavy to me, as if it could be squeezed out like a sponge, and I plucked at my one wearable shirt of the moment and unbuttoned my sleeves and rolled them back onto my forearms for a bit of ventilation as I crossed the lawn, Herman’s big footprints ahead of me fading with the last of the dew.
I had been curious about the mystifying structure when the DeSoto’s headlights reflected off it the night before, which now seemed a lifetime ago. Halfway hidden in a corner of the hedge at the rear of the yard, the greenhouse, as I now knew it, seemed like it ought to be transparent but somehow could not actually be seen through, whatever the trick of its construction was.
It did not reveal much more about itself in broad daylight as I approached past a neatly marked-out vegetable patch, the small glass panels that were the walls and roof of the shed frame splotchy as if needing a good washing. Funny way to grow things, the soot smears or whatever they were blocking out full light that way, I thought. Weird old Wisconsin, one more time.
“Knock knock,” I called in, not knowing how to do otherwise when everything was breakable.
“Hallo” issued from I didn’t know where in the low jungle of plants, until Herman leaned into sight amid the greenery, where he was perched on a low stool while spooning something into a potted tomato as if feeding a baby. “Come, come,” he encouraged me in, “meet everybody.”
There certainly was a crowd of plants when I ducked in, all right, and according to their names written on markers like Popsicle sticks in the clay pots, several kinds you could not grow in Montana in a hundred years, green peppers and honeydew melons and such. I also spotted, at the other end of edibility, a miniature field of cabbage seedlings, sauerkraut makings.
Properly impressed with his green thumb, I stood back and watched Herman fuss over his crop, pot by leafy pot. Pausing to tap the ash off a smelly cigar that undoubtedly would not have been allowed into the house, he made a face that had nothing to do with the haze of smoke that had me blinking to keep my eyes from watering. “You have escaped with your scalp, yah? I heard the Kate on the warpath again.”
“Yeah, well, she’s sort of pee oh’d at me,” I owned up to, making plain that the feeling was mutual.
Herman listened with sympathy, as best I could tell behind his heavy glasses and the reeking cigar, while I spilled out the story of the torn shirt and the fatally safety-pinned bills. He tut-tutted over that, saying throwing money in the garbage was not good at all. But he didn’t lend me any encouragement as to how I was supposed to get through the summer flat broke.
“The purse is the Kate’s department,” he said with a resigned puff of smoke. Reflecting further, he expressed effectively: “She is tight as a wad.”