Greenhouse Glow

The car didn't want to start. That figured. Bill's 1957 Bel Air had been sulking all week, and now it had to be pushed up a ramp into a university greenhouse at eight in the morning.

"Put your back into it, Carlos," Bill said. He was forty-two, gray coming in at the temples, and he never shut up.

"I'm a firefighter, not a forklift," I said. I'm forty-four, by the way. Nineteen years on the job. My shoulders felt every one of those years as the car crept over the threshold.

The greenhouse was huge. Glass and steel, arched like a cathedral, filled with ferns and vines and flowers I couldn't name. Somebody had built a catwalk that wound through all of it, painted green, strung with lights. It was for a botanical fashion show. Plants as clothing. Bill's shop had been hired to provide a vintage car as a centerpiece prop, and Bill had volunteered me to help set it up.

I looked around. Tropical humidity. My glasses fogged instantly. I took them off, wiped them, put them back on. Great venue for a guy with glasses.

Then I saw her.

Penny. Up a ladder, adjusting a spotlight, one hand on the rig, the other shading her eyes. She was forty-three now. I hadn't seen her in fifteen years, and the last time had been a phone call where we both agreed, very politely, that we should stop calling. Two years together, starting when we were twenty-seven, back when we both worked a summer festival. She is also a dryad, her mother's side, a tree spirit in a radio host's body, and I was the one man at that festival who got told the truth. She ages like an oak, which is to say slowly and with opinions. She sold tickets. I ran a dunk tank. It ended fine. It ended so fine it never really ended at all, if that makes sense.

She looked down. She saw me.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," she said. Loud. The whole greenhouse heard it.

"Good morning to you too," I said.

She climbed down the ladder. Slow, deliberate, like she was giving me time to leave if I wanted to. I didn't leave. She hit the floor, wiped her palms on her jeans, and looked me over.

"Carlos Mitchel. Firefighter, I heard. Someone at the station mentioned it months ago and I didn't believe them."

"It's true. I fight fires. You do radio."

"Six to ten, weekday mornings. Penny in the Morning." She said it flat, like she was tired of the joke that usually followed. "What are you doing here? Do you know what it does to me, a greenhouse? Half the ferns in here have been leaning my way since eight."

"Bill dragged me. The car." I pointed. The Bel Air sat there gleaming, covered in road dust from the push. "It's a prop or something."

"The centerpiece," Bill said, coming up behind us with a clipboard. "It goes at the bend of the catwalk, right under the big palm. Penny, tell them about the segment."

"There's a segment called 'Chrome and Chlorophyll,'" she said. "Model rides in on the car. Very dramatic. Lots of fog." She looked at me. "You always did like fog machines."

"You remember that?"

"I remember everything, unfortunately."

Bill looked between us. He'd known me since we were twenty-five, working the same garage, and he knows my whole history, so his eyebrows did a little dance. He said nothing, which was smart of him, and then a woman came jogging down the catwalk at speed, which was not smart of her but was apparently necessary.

"Is the sound system fixed? Please tell me the sound system is fixed." She was thirty-eight, short, with a lanyard and a headset and the general air of a woman who had not slept. "Hi. Kath. I'm running this circus. Are you the car people?"

"I'm the car person," Bill said. "He's the car pusher."

"Great, wonderful. So here's the situation." Kath pulled a paper off her clipboard and looked at it. Then she looked again. Then she flipped the clipboard over. Then she went a color I'd only seen on people I was pulling out of wrecks. "The map is gone."

"What map?" Penny asked.

"The map of the greenhouse. Hand-drawn. I made it myself, every vent, every outlet, every prop mark, every ladder position. It's taped to the sound desk. Or it was taped to the sound desk. Now it's not."

"Could someone have moved it?" I asked.

"That's what I thought! I looked. It's not under the desk, it's not in the drawer, it's not in the trash. And the sound desk is also dead, which might be related because the techs were in and out of that drawer all week, one of them might have scooped it up by accident with a cable spool, I don't know, I'm speculating." She rubbed her forehead. "The show is tomorrow. Today is the only full dress rehearsal. I need that map."

"Deep breath," Penny said. "We'll find it. This place isn't that big."

"It is seven thousand square feet of glass jungle with props hidden behind every fern," Kath said. "It is exactly that big."

Kath jogged off to yell at someone, and Bill went to park the car properly, and I was left standing there with Penny. The spotlight she'd been fixing threw a warm circle down on the catwalk. Vines hung everywhere. Somewhere a speaker crackled and died, testing itself.

"So," she said. "Fifteen years."

"About that. Math checks out."

"You look good. Firefighting agrees with you." She squinted at me. "You still do the thing where you clean your glasses every four minutes."

"It's humid in here. That's not a character flaw."

"It's a whole personality," she said, and grinned, and I felt something in my chest that I did not care to examine. She climbed back up her ladder. I told myself to go help Bill. I stayed and held the ladder, because I am a professional ladder holder.

That was when Bill came back around the car, and he was wearing his shop jacket, the one with the vintage flame embroidery on the shoulder, and Penny looked down at him and said, "Bill, that jacket is fantastic. The stitching on that flame is gorgeous. Who did that?"

"A lady at the flea market," Bill said, pleased. "Ten bucks."

"Ten bucks! It looks custom. You have great taste in jackets."

And that was it. That was the moment. Ten seconds of a compliment about a jacket and my whole morning went sideways. She dated Bill for about a month years ago, while I was out of the picture, and I knew it was over and fine and ancient history, and I still stood there holding a ladder like a fool, jealous of a ten dollar jacket.

She caught my expression. She was always good at catching my expressions.

"What?" she said.

"Nothing. Nice jacket, Bill," I said.

Bill looked at me. Bill looked at Penny. Bill, who is not a subtle man but is occasionally a wise one, said, "I'm gonna go check on the fog machine," and left.

"You're doing the face," Penny said from the ladder.

"There's no face!"

"There's a whole face. You're doing the face you did at the festival when the mascot stole your parking spot."

"He took my spot, Penny. I had my blinker on."

She laughed. It was the same laugh. Fifteen years and it was the same laugh, and I hated how glad I was to hear it.

Down at the far end, Kath was shouting into a dead headset. A student dropped a bundle of palm fronds. The speaker crackled again, played half a second of disco, and shut off.

Penny looked down at me. "So. You busy today? Because Kath's about to start a search party for that map and you look like someone who's good at finding things."

"I find cats in trees mostly."

"Close enough. Get up here and hold this light steady while I aim it."

I held the light. I aimed nothing at my own head, which was already a mess. Somewhere in that drawer full of cables, a hand-drawn map was waiting to ruin everybody's afternoon, and I had a bad feeling I was going to be part of the search crew.

The next hour was chaos with a soundtrack. Kath ran the rehearsal as a drill sergeant with a clipboard would, and the clipboard was failing her. The fog machine puked one sad puff and quit. A model named Melina, who was twenty-six and very patient, walked the catwalk four times while Kath muttered numbers into her dead headset like it was a rosary.

I ended up back with the Bel Air, which was parked in its spot now, front bumper aimed at the start of the catwalk so the model could ride in on the hood during "Chrome and Chlorophyll." The car was doing its sulk. The engine turned over and over and caught nothing.

"Don't take it personally," I told it. "Old cars are like old men. Cold mornings and grudges."

"That's a terrible theory," said a voice behind me, "and I want you to know I'm filing it away."

Penny stood there with two coffees. She held one out.

"Where'd that come from? There's no coffee place within a mile of this greenhouse."

"There's an urn backstage the size of a hot water heater. It's terrible. Drink it anyway." She looked at the car. "Still bad?"

"Still bad. Bill thinks it's the fuel pump. Bill thinks everything is the fuel pump." I took the coffee. It was, as promised, terrible. "So. Question. Why are you here, Carlos? Really."

"What do you mean, really. Bill called me. The car needed a hand. I'm a volunteer at the shop, I do this."

"You do this," she said.

"I do this."

"Bill's shop has three mechanics on staff and you, and the three mechanics are all under that tent with the donuts, so I guess it's you." She sipped her coffee and looked at me over the rim. "You drove forty minutes. Bill told me. I asked."

"You asked Bill about me?"

"Bill brought you up. There's a difference, and the difference is I didn't ask." She leaned against the fender, careful of the paint. "Fine. You're here for the car. The car is here for the show. Everyone is here for a reason that has nothing to do with anybody."

"That's right."

"Okay," she said, and didn't sound like she believed one word, which was fair, because I didn't either.

I popped the hood again and did the thing where you look at an engine like it's telling you secrets. It was not telling me secrets. It was a carburetor from 1957 and it hated me. Penny watched me for a while, and then she said, quietly, "You cleaned your glasses twice while I was talking."

"Humidity."

"Sure."

The morning kept going. Kath got half a rehearsal in before the sound system died for good, and the models started drifting around the ferns like a herd of confused, well-dressed cattle. Somebody's prop ivy fell off the catwalk railing. The disco speaker came back to life for three seconds, played a full chorus of something with a lot of tambourine, and died again, and Kath made a sound I will not repeat in print.

Then, around ten, Kath climbed onto a milk crate near the sound desk and clapped her hands over her head.

"Okay. Everybody. Listen up." Her voice carried through all that glass. "Update on the map. Good news and bad news."

Nobody stopped moving, so she said it louder.

"The good news is the map is not lost."

There was actual cheering. Two models clapped. I put down my wrench.

"The bad news is..." Kath took a breath. "The bad news is it was used as a prop placeholder."

Silence. Even the disco speaker stayed dead out of respect.

"Used how?" Bill asked, from under the tent.

"Two weeks ago. I handed it to props, I said hold my place, I need a stiff backing for the costume sketches, and they took me literally. It's the backing board. There are forty costume sketches drawn and pinned to my map of this greenhouse, and the whole stack is somewhere in the wardrobe crates, and nobody, nobody, wrote down which crate."

"Why would you use the only map as a backing board?" one of the techs asked.

"Because I needed a backing board and it was in my hand. This is why we don't have nice things."

More cheering would have been inappropriate, so everybody went back to pretending to work while glancing at the crates.

Penny came over to the car, coffee in hand, grinning like this was the best radio segment she'd ever heard.

"Forty sketches," she said. "Pinned. To your map. With pins."

"Through it. Presumably through every vent and outlet and prop mark." I closed the Bel Air's hood. "That's Kath's own drawing, too. She made it herself. She mentioned that four or five times."

"Six," Penny said. "I counted."

"So we're looking for a stack of paper in a pile of crates in seven thousand square feet of jungle."

"Basically. Are you volunteering? You look