Mulch and Misadventures

*This story came from thinking about how the best conversations happen when you're not trying too hard, just sharing space and bad jokes. If you're reading this, thanks for spending an evening with Dorian and Gabriella, I hope they made you smile.*

Dorian Armstrong was twenty-eight years old and had been single for two years. He did the math sometimes when he was bored, which was most evenings, and the math never got better. His last real thing had been a grad student named Naomi, a six-month fling when he was twenty-six that ended the way these things end. She got a postdoc in another state and he helped her pack boxes and they both agreed it had been fun and neither of them cried about it.

After that he dated around. He went on maybe a date a month, sometimes two if he was feeling optimistic. There was the accountant who talked about her cat for ninety minutes. There was the woman who showed up to dinner already angry about a parking spot. There was the nurse who was nice enough but who he ran out of things to say to by the second beer. None of it was bad exactly. It just all felt like filling out a form.

So most weeknights he sat on his couch after work, still smelling faintly of dirt and fertilizer no matter how long he scrubbed, and scrolled through the dating app with his thumb doing the work his brain refused to do.

It was a Tuesday in October when he stopped scrolling.

Her profile was third from the top of the stack. Gabriella, thirty. Adjunct art history professor. The photos were normal, which already set her apart. No fish, no group shots where you had to guess. Just her at what looked like a farmers market, holding a bag of peppers and laughing at something off camera. And her in front of a white wall, arms crossed, giving the camera a look that said she knew her photo was being taken and was tolerating it.

But it was the bio that made him put his beer down.

"Loves bad puns, overgrown gardens, and explaining Baroque painting to people who didn't ask. Ask me about the time I killed a cactus in two weeks."

Dorian read it twice. Then he sat up straighter on the couch, because his job was literally gardens, and his entire personal philosophy was basically bad puns delivered with a straight face.

He typed out a message, deleted it, typed it again, and sent it before he could polish it into something worse.

"Hi Gabriella. I'm Dorian. I do landscaping for a living, so I feel like we should talk about whether you'd like to mulch through life together or if that's the worst opening line you've gotten this week. Be honest. I can take it. I've had shrubs say meaner things to me."

He set the phone face down on the couch and picked up the remote. He gave it ten minutes before he flipped it back over. There was a notification.

She had sent a photo. It was a pothos plant on a windowsill, and it was enormous, vining off the pot and halfway down the curtain, leaves big and dark and slightly too many of them.

"That's Beatrice," the message said. "She's two years old and I have fed her so much fertilizer she's basically a hedge now. Also your opening line was terrible and I laughed at it, which means you get one more message before I decide if you're worth my Tuesday."

"Beatrice is a strong name for a plant that could eat a small dog," he wrote back. "And fair. Let me redeem myself. What's the cactus story? The bio promises a tragedy and I feel like I'm owed one."

"Okay so. I was twenty-nine. I bought a cactus at a plant sale because the art department was having a fundraiser and I felt guilty walking past it. The woman at the table told me it needed almost nothing. Almost nothing. Do you know what I heard?"

"What?"

"I heard 'water it a lot with love.' I drowned that thing in two weeks. It was the most cared for cactus in the history of the species. It died of kindness."

"That happens to people too," Dorian wrote. "I've seen it. Clients who water their boxwoods every single day and then call me asking why they're yellow."

"Don't get me started on boxwoods. My landlord has six of them and they look like they've been through a war."

"Over or under watered?"

"Under, but also he cuts them with kitchen scissors, which I didn't know was a thing you could do to a shrub until I watched him do it."

Dorian was grinning at his phone like an idiot and he knew it. He looked at the clock. An hour had gone by. The beer was warm and he hadn't noticed.

"Okay," he wrote. "I have to ask, since you teach art history. When you look at a garden, do you judge it like a painting or like a crime scene?"

"Yes," she wrote.

He laughed out loud, alone, on his couch. His neighbor through the wall probably heard it.

"That's the correct answer," he typed. "For the record, I also judge gardens like both. Mostly crime scenes. You should see some of the yards I get called into. One guy has a fountain shaped like a swan and he painted the swan. Brown. Painted a swan brown on purpose."

"Stop. Why?"

"He said white looked cheap."

"Your job sounds like it gives you stories and trauma in equal measure."

"It does. Mostly mulch and trauma. The stories are a bonus."

There was a pause. Three little dots appeared and disappeared twice, which he took to mean she was writing something and rewriting it. Then it came through.

"Full disclosure, I've been chatting with people on this app for about two months and most conversations die around message six when they find out I'm an adjunct and I say things like 'yes' when asked a both-or question. You're at message eleven and I'm still having fun. This is unusual. I want to acknowledge that."

"I'm at message eleven too and I was about to say something similar, which now feels less smooth because you said it first."

"You weren't going to say it. You were going to keep making plant puns until I surrendered."

"That was plan B, yeah."

"So what's plan A?"

"Plan A was ask you to get a drink sometime and hope you said yes before the puns ran out."

The dots appeared again. Then stopped. Then appeared and stayed.

"There's a bar near campus called The Amber Mug," she wrote. "It's quiet on weeknights and the owner plays old jazz records that are scratchy in a way I find comforting. Thursday evening? I should say upfront that I teach until five and I will smell like a lecture hall."

"Thursday works. I'll be the guy who smells like mulch. We'll cancel each other out."

"Six thirty. If you show up and it's awful, we can each finish one drink and leave with dignity."

"Deal. And if it's good?"

"Then we'll figure that out Thursday."

He put the phone down and sat there for a minute, smiling at nothing, which was not a thing he did. Then he got up and texted his buddy Marco, who he split crew labor with in the summers.

"Got a date Thursday. Art history professor. She killed a cactus with love and named her pothos Beatrice."

Marco wrote back in under a minute.

"Sounds out of your league. Wear a shirt without holes."

"It's my nice flannel."

"That's not a real category. Borrow a shirt."

Dorian ignored that advice, mostly. He did spend part of Wednesday afternoon, between jobs, standing in the truck mirror trying to decide if his nice flannel was actually nice. It had no holes. It had a stain near the cuff from tree sap that wouldn't come out with anything, but it had character, or he told himself so.

Thursday he got to The Amber Mug at 6:22. The place was exactly what her message promised. Small, dim, wooden floors worn smooth in a path from the door to the bar. There was a record player behind the counter and an old jazz album crackling through speakers that looked older than the building. The owner, a big guy with gray in his beard, was wiping glasses and nodding along to the music like he knew it personally.

There was one woman at the corner table with a book and a glass of red wine. She looked up when the door opened, and Dorian knew before she said anything, because she had the same look from the photo against the white wall, the one that said she was tolerating being looked at.

"Dorian?" she said. "You're early."

"You're earlier."

"I got out of lecture fast. Come sit. I took the good table by the window."

He walked over and sat across from her. Up close she was prettier than her photos, which he noted was not a thing that usually happened. Her hair was dark and pushed behind her ears like she'd done it once that morning and not again.

"Can I say something?" she asked.

"Sure."

"You don't look like your profile picture at all. Yours is clearly four years old. You've got a whole beard situation now."

"That's fair. The beard showed up two winters ago and just decided to stay. I gave up fighting it. Can I get you another glass of wine before we start roasting each other?"

"Please. And it's merlot, if the guy asks. He'll pretend to hold views about it. He doesn't. Steven just likes saying merlot."

The owner glanced over at them from behind the bar like he'd heard his name, and Dorian decided right then that he liked this bar a lot.

"Merlot, please," Dorian said when Steven came over. Steven looked at him, taking a measure of another man's soul, then nodded and walked off.

"See?" Gabriella said. "He loved that."

"I could tell. He's going to tell his wife about me later. The mulch guy ordered merlot without flinching."

"Steven's married?"

"To the bar, mostly. He told me once he bought this place at thirty-two after quitting a corporate job and he's never regretted a single day except the days the toilet breaks."

The wine arrived. Steven said the word merlot on the way over, like a little announcement, and Gabriella grinned at Dorian across the table.

"So," she said. "Eleven messages. Now the truth comes out. Do you actually find art history interesting or have you just been polite?"

"I find it interesting the way I find a foreign country interesting. I don't speak the language but I like walking around in it."

"That's the nicest non-answer I've ever gotten."

"Thank you. I practice."

She told him about her week. She was an adjunct, which meant she taught three sections of intro art history for less money than he made spreading mulch, and she had a student this week who looked at a Pollock and called it a splatter mess.

"What did you say?" Dorian asked.

"Nothing. I stood there for a second and then I said, well, the splatter took him two years and a ladder. And the kid said, a ladder? And the whole room got interested. So I guess it worked out. But I wanted to lie down on the floor for a minute first."

"That's fair. I feel that way about crabgrass."

"How so?"

"Nobody respects it. Everybody underestimates it. Then August comes and it's won."

She laughed, a real laugh, the kind that came out before she checked it. He decided he'd work to hear that again.

They stayed two hours. The record player flipped to a new album at some point and Steven announced the change to nobody. They finished the wine slowly and talked about her pothos, Beatrice, who was two years old and thriving in a way her cactus never had, and about his jobs, and about the town, and when it got to eight thirty she looked at the window and looked surprised.

"Wow. Okay. That went fast."

"It did. So which is it? Finish one drink and leave with dignity, or figure it out?"

"Figure it out. I'm free Saturday. There's an arboretum on campus I like."

"A bar and then a garden. You do know how to show a landscaper a good time."

"I have my reasons."

---

Saturday afternoon he met her at the gate of the arboretum. She was wearing boots that had seen actual mud, which he noted with approval.

"You dressed for the terrain," he said.

"I dress for lectures. This is my day off. I get to be a person."

The arboretum was a long spread of paths behind the east side of campus, oaks and maples and a native plant section somebody had clearly abandoned halfway through a vision. They walked and she narrated the bad decisions like a tour guide who'd been waiting years for an audience.

"Okay, look at this bed here. Somebody planted rhododendrons in full sun. Full sun. They're frying. Look at the edges of the leaves."

"They're toast. Whoever did that was going for color and didn't read a single label."

"Can they be saved?"

"Maybe. Move them in fall, amend the soil, and shade them. But it's a city contract thing, so probably nobody will. There's a bed like that behind the library too, and a row of Yoshino cherries planted under power lines. They'll get topped in five years and look like umbrellas."

"Umbrellas. That's such a specific grief."

"It's my whole job. I see a landscape and I see all the arguments the installer lost."

She stopped at a bench near the water feature, which was a small pond with a pump that had given up, and sat down. He sat next to her. A heron or some gray bird stood at the far edge doing nothing with great commitment.

"Can I ask you something real?" she said.

"Sure."

"Why landscaping? You're smart. I can tell. You read, you argue, you make actual jokes. Why dirt?"

He picked a leaf off the bench and turned it over.

"Honestly? I like that a day ends with a thing that didn't exist at the start of it. A bed clean, a