Salsify and Lead

You would not believe my day job. I measure sugar droplets coming off plant hairs. Plant hairs! They're called trichomes, and on salsify they exude this tiny bead of sugar water that we weigh on a microbalance for reasons I could explain but you'd regret asking about. So there I was, twenty-seven years old, bent over the salsify row in the greenhouse tunnel at the Béjar Biotech Research Annex, holding a capillary tube up to a droplet the size of a pinhead, when the mop bucket hit the concrete.

Clang! Water everywhere. Not on my plants, thank god, but on my boots.

"Sorry!" the voice said. And I knew the voice before I knew the face, which is a weird thing about old classmates, isn't it?

I straightened up and there was Abe. Abe from the botany seminar, six years back. Abe from the graduation party, where we shared one kiss so awkward I still think about it while brushing my teeth. He was pushing a mop bucket, wearing the janitor uniform, and he had a deep-digging fork tucked under one arm like he was planning to attack the floor with it.

"Cynthia? Hey! You work here?"

"I work here. What are the odds, right? You too?"

"I'm the janitor. Not the fancy kind." He said it fast, like he wanted it on record as a joke before I could make it one. He wasn't smiling though.

"You clean the greenhouse tunnel?"

"Tuesdays and Fridays. Apparently the salsify row gets dusty." He set the bucket down and reached for the fork like it needed urgent adjustment. The fork did not need adjustment. I looked away to give him the dignity of his pretend chore.

Six years. I dated our lab supervisor for eighteen months during that stretch, which ended badly and quietly, and dated Deidre for three months after that, which ended well and quietly, and here was Abe, who I had kissed exactly once when we were both twenty-two, holding a mop.

"You still measure the little drops?" he asked.

"Still measure the little drops. Somebody has to."

"Somebody with steady hands."

"Flatterer," I said, and he laughed, and something in my chest went ping, which I ignored professionally.

Then Gene's voice came booming down the tunnel. "Everybody in the salsify row! Rule clarification. Surprise meeting, ten minutes, no excuses."

Gene runs the Béjar Duct Tape Sculpture Festival, which is exactly what it sounds like, and this year it was happening inside our greenhouse because the building's main hall was under renovation. Duct tape sculptures among towering edible roots and irrigation hoses. Béjar is a strange town and I love it.

I tucked my capillary tube into my lab coat and walked over. Abe fell into step beside me, or I fell into step beside him, hard to say. He smelled like rain, which was funny because it hadn't rained in a week. Maybe it was the mop water. I'll take rain.

"Shoulder to shoulder, folks," Gene said, waving us into a line between two salsify plants. So I stood shoulder to shoulder with Abe, close enough to see he'd gotten a small scar over one eyebrow at some point in six years. I did not ask about it. Yet.

"Okay," Gene said. "New rule interpretation. The festival is three days, starting Friday. The old rules said no adhesives on the plants. Obviously. But there's a gray area. Somebody asked whether duct tape counts as a plant if you make a duct tape salsify."

"Does it?" Abe asked.

"Does it what?"

"Count as a plant?"

"That's the clarification. No. It does not. A duct tape salsify is a sculpture, not a plant, and you may anchor it to the irrigation hoses but not the real roots. Anchor points are fair game. Any questions?"

"Gene," I said, "who is asking these questions at nine in the morning?"

"Deidre," said Deidre, arriving from behind us.

Deidre! Twenty-six, freelance sculptor, Gene's assistant, and briefly mine, three months when I was twenty-five, all of it friendly on the way out. She hugged me, hard, the way she does.

"Cynth. You still smell like glucose."

"That's the trichomes. How are you? How's your entry?"

"Secret. It's a surprise and it's going to win." She turned, spotted Abe, and did the head tilt. "Who's this? New?"

"This is Abe. Janitor," Abe said, offering his hand.

"He's an old classmate," I said, probably too fast.

"Abe with the strong forearms, huh," Deidre said, shaking his hand and not letting go as fast as strictly necessary. "Listen. I need an anchor man. My sculpture has a base that takes two people to seat properly. You free Friday morning? You'd be helping the eventual champion, which looks great on anybody."

"I'm on shift," Abe said. "But Gene lets me flex hours for festival stuff. I could do it."

"Perfect. Saturday too?"

"Sure."

"You're a doll." She patted his arm. She patted it! Twice!

And there it was, this hot spike right behind my ribs. Jealousy. Actual jealousy, mine, brand new, never before owned, over a man I'd kissed once six years ago and ignored for the rest of the morning. Isn't that embarrassing? I stood there doing math about anchor schedules like it was my business.

"You okay?" Abe murmured to me as the group broke up.

"Fine. Great. Sugar droplets wait for no one."

"You've got a spot of sap on your chin."

"I've got a what?" I wiped it. It was sap. Wonderful.

He went back to his mop. I went back to my droplets. Deidre caught my eye on her way out and gave me a look that said she had noticed something, because Deidre always notices something.

The rest of the day crawled. I measured forty-one droplets, which is a good number, and thought about absolutely none of them.

Here's a thing about our greenhouse tunnel: at the far end, past the last salsify row, there's an old case of lead printing type somebody donated years ago for a signage project that never happened. The letters are all jumbled in trays. Somebody, years ago, arranged two rows to spell a single word: alas. Just alas. Nobody's ever fixed it. It's become a landmark, basically. "Meet me at the alas," people say.

That's where I found Abe at the end of the day, coiling a hose. Or that's where I went to find him, let's be honest about who found whom.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey. Forty-one droplets?"

"Forty-one. How do you know?"

"You told the whole line at the meeting. You said, and I quote, 'if I hit forty today it's a personal record.'"

"I said that out loud? In front of everyone?"

"In front of everyone."

Okay. Deep breath. Cynthia, say the thing.

"So here's a question," I said. "The festival is three days. Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Are you busy those nights? After close?"

"Depends. Why?"

"Because I'd like to propose an experiment." I gestured at the trays of type. "In the spirit of this thing. Rules-based. Clarified in advance."

"An experiment," he said. He set the hose down.

"Each night we add one new rule about touching. That's it. Night one, only hands. Hands only, nothing else. Night two, only mouths, and only above the neck. Night three, whatever's left over. And a standing rule the whole time: no talking about it after. No confessions, no strings, no defining anything. Each rule gets agreed out loud before it counts. Nobody does anything without saying yes to that night's rule first."

Abe looked at the word alas like it might have advice. "And this comes from where?"

"Deidre patted your arm and I got jealous. That's where it comes from. I don't like that I got jealous. I'd like to figure out what's going on there in a controlled way, with rules, the way I do everything."

He was quiet for a second. The irrigation dripped somewhere behind us.

"You're proposing this because you were jealous," he said slowly. "Not because you remembered the graduation party."

"Do you think about the graduation party?"

"Every time I brush my teeth, which is a weird sentence I did not plan to say out loud."

"Then yes. And the party. Both can be true, can't they? It's an experiment. Scientists love experiments. You were pre-med for a whole semester, you know this."

"I switched to sanitation science," he said. "The pay is worse but the smells are more honest."

"Is that a yes?"

"It's a yes to night one. Hands only. We agree on each night separately, right? Nothing carries over unless we both say it does."

"Exactly. That's the whole design." I stuck out my hand. "Deal?"

He took it. And he held it a beat longer than a deal requires, and neither of us mentioned that part, because technically the rule hadn't started yet.

"Friday," he said. "After close. Hands only."

"Hands only," I said, and walked back down the salsify row feeling like I'd just signed something with my whole body.

Friday took forever to end, is my first observation. My second observation is that I checked the clock so many times that Jody in the next row asked if I had a train to catch. "A date," I said, too loud. "I mean. An appointment." She gave me a look and went back to her droplets.

A date. Was it a date? It was an experiment. Those are different. Experiments have controls.

At close I signed out, waited for the last car to leave the lot, and walked back into the tunnel with my heart doing something I refuse to describe. The grow lights were down to the night cycle, just that dim purple glow, and the salsify rows looked enormous in it. Taller than me, always, but at night they felt like a crowd.

Abe was already there. Of course he was, he'd cleaned at five, but he'd come back. He had a folding stool set up next to the irrigation manifold and two bottles of sparkling water, which, okay, who brings beverages to a hands-only experiment?

"Sparkling water?" I said.

"Hydration is important."

"Is that a sanitation science thing or a pre-med thing?"

"That's a my-mom-raised-me-right thing." He held one out. "So. Rules."

"Right. Rules." I took the bottle and sat on the stool, which meant we were very close, because it was one stool. Whose fault was that? His, probably, for bringing one stool. "Night one. Hands only. Hands on hands, arms, shoulders, whatever hands touch. Nothing else. We stop the second either of us says stop, and the rule lasts until midnight, at which point we go home like adults."

"Until midnight," he repeated. "Agreed. Out loud, per the design."

"Agreed out loud. You have to say it too."

"Agreed," he said. "Out loud. Happy?"

"Thrilled." Was I thrilled? My hands were sweating, which is terrible for a person whose whole job is delicate measurement. "So how do we, um. Begin?"

"You're the scientist. Design a protocol."

I laughed, and it came out like a hiccup. "Fine. Protocol one. Sit there. I'm going to measure a trichome, because it's Friday night and I'm behind on my counts, and you're going to sit next to me and do absolutely nothing."

"That's your protocol? Nothing?"

"Baseline conditions. You need a baseline."

He laughed too, and something in my chest unclenched a little. This was fine. This was Abe, who I'd sat next to in a botany seminar six years ago while he drew little skulls on his notes instead of leaf diagrams. He'd switched to pre-med that fall, then out of it by spring. I hadn't thought about the skulls in years and now they were all I could think about.

I clipped my headlamp on and took out my counter and my little glass plate and picked a leaf at random, about chest height, four plants down from the alas. There's a trichome on the underside of the leaf, a tiny glasslike hair, and if the plant is at the right stage it weeps a bead of sugar exudate at the tip, and you count the beads and log the volume and pretend it's not the loneliest job in the world.

"Steady," I murmured, easing the leaf flat.

And then Abe touched my arm.

Just his fingertips, just the inside of my forearm, resting there like he was checking a pulse. My hand did not shake, I want that noted, my hand stayed perfectly level. My entire everything else shook.

"Cynthia."

"Counting," I whispered.

"I know. I just wanted to use my hands, per the rules."

"Is that what the rules are for? Using them?"

"What else would they be for?" His fingertips moved an inch. An inch! Up my forearm, slow, along the bare skin above my glove. "Your pulse is fast."

"My pulse is always fast. I'm a professional."

"Uh huh." He traced up past my elbow, feather light, and I lost the bead. The droplet slid off the trichome tip and ran into the leaf vein and was gone. "Oops."

"You made me lose a droplet. That's weeks of stage alignment."

"I'll sponsor a replacement plant."

"You can't afford a replacement plant, you're a janitor."

"Wow," he said, and his hand stopped. "Okay. Noted."

Oh no. Oh no, that came out wrong, it came out exactly the wrong way, the way it always does with me. "Abe. Wait." I pulled my glove off with my teeth, which is a move, I'll admit, and turned on the stool to face him. "That was a joke that landed like a slap. I'm sorry. It's an old reflex. People have been making that joke at your expense for six years and I refuse to be one of them."

"It's fine."

"It's not fine. It's the opposite of fine. You're not your job title. You're the person who taught me the Latin name for salsify when I'd forgotten it, and who drew skulls in his botany notes, and who I have been criminally weird to since graduation."

"Criminally weird," he repeated. His mouth twitched. "I kind of liked criminal weird."

"Well, get used to more of it." I took his hand. Deliberately. Both of mine around one of his, gloves off, which felt shockingly intimate for a hands-only arrangement. "Protocol two. You talk, I listen. Tell me something true about your last six years."