“Hi, honey.” Mother looks up from the tray of oil on which she’s carefully layering the flowers.
“Hi.” My voice goes high. I try not to think as I head to my desk, but forget about the fist-size indentation in the hardwood floor. It’s been there since before I was born but I never tripped on it until today.
“Mim!”
I catch myself before I fall. Bottles rattle at my jig. “I’m fine, I’m fine.”
“We should’ve fixed that years ago.”
Cool and easy. Conversational. “Why didn’t you?”
“Your grandmother thought it would remind us not to play on chairs.”
“Chairs?”
“It’s a long story.” Mother sighs and pulls off her reading glasses. “So . . .”
I freeze. She knows. Here it comes.
“I’ve decided not to interpret Rule One so strictly, given the circumstances.” She points at me with the glasses, and for a moment, I’m vaguely aware that the eye of Medusa has somehow passed over me.
“But I meant what I said about you being overscheduled,” she goes on. “You’ll have to drop algebra if your work starts to slip.”
Too late for that. “Thanks, Mother.” I force myself to think happy thoughts of penguins frolicking in the snow.
“You notice any reactions in Ms. DiCarlo?”
“Not yet.” Sunlight dapples the floor through the skylight. I haven’t lied yet but my sweat glands are preparing to launch an attack. “The recipes are a mess. I’m going to move them onto the computer.”
She beams at me. “Great. I’ve been wanting you to do that for years.”
“I’ll start right now.”
Mother returns to her enfleurage. With tiny flicks of her wrist, she picks out the bruised flowers, something she could do blindfolded. Mother’s nose is like two of mine. She once woke me up at four in the morning to help her cut out a root on her favorite oak that had caught disease. She smelled the rot in her sleep.
I park at my desk in the alcove and switch on the computer. Opening the drawer, I pull out the index cards containing the formulas to our elixirs and straighten them into piles, like a card dealer. Then I shuffle through the first pile, hunting down the card from the one time Mother made a PUF. The cards are a jumbled mess, some from the eighties when Mother and Aunt Bryony were teenagers themselves, and others from just last month. There’s nothing indicating a PUF in the first deck. I move on to the second then third and fourth, flipping cards, scanning ingredients.
Mother clears her throat. I look up to see her twirling a gardenia between her fingers. “Do you need to do that so loudly?”
My shoulders have risen to my ears, and I relax them. “Sorry.”
I finish the fifth deck and still, no sign of a PUF.
Well, I could ask Mother. But lightly, tread lightly. “All done. They’re all there, except . . . didn’t you make a PUF once? I don’t see that one in here.”
Mother stands and stretches. The antique floorboards creak as she crosses to the far wall where the rare-plant terrariums gleam like cake stands. “Mark my words, this won’t wait for December.” She steps to one side. Long, smooth leaves drape from the center stalk of the orchid, Layla’s Sacrifice, where a single white bud has begun to grow, its universally delicious jammy scent seeping through even the glass. The green sepals wrap the base of the bud as tight as a mother holding a swaddled baby. “I predict Thanksgiving.”
“That early?” I lift my eyebrows and attempt to look interested. Why isn’t she answering my question?
“Maybe we’ll have time to replant the succulents like I wanted this Christmas.”
When the once-a-year midnight bloomer opens, usually in December, the scent is so complex it can substitute for many elixirs, which saves us a ton of work. Though we never actually use the holidays to relax; love never takes a vacation. We do things like replanting cactus, which is as much fun as rolling around on tacks. I go with the flow. “Sure.”
She poises one hand on the glass knob. “Ready for liftoff?”
“Yes.” I hold my breath.
She lifts off the lid and sprays the plant. Even holding my breath, the jam scent assails me. Slowly, I let out my air. Only the initial release knocks me out. I broke a baby tooth learning that.
Now I’ll have to bring it up again. When I’m breathing normally, I ask, “So about that PUF . . .”
“Why do you want to know about that?” She looks up sharply.
I quickly reign in my curiosity. Happy penguins. A note of defensiveness, like sour strawberries, wades from her direction. “No reason. Just didn’t want to miss a card.”
Spritz, spritz, goes her water sprayer. “Don’t bother. I threw it out.”
“What?” Stress fumes dribble out from me, but Mother doesn’t notice. She seems to have drawn into herself, spraying Layla’s Sacrifice at every angle even though she’s gone over it twice already. “Why?”
“She refused to take it. No use keeping a record of something that was never used.”