The Zucchini Proposition

I turned forty-six on a Sunday, and I mention this only because it frames everything that came after. My plan for the birthday was simple: no party, no reflection, no crisis. I'd house-sit for my boss, Jeffery, while he was off at a vegetable conference in Oregon, water his plants, sleep in a house that wasn't mine, and let the weekend slide past as quietly as possible. That was the plan. Plans are funny that way.

Jeffery owns the consulting firm where I've worked as a data analyst for six years. He's fifty-two, divorced for seven years, and the sort of boss who actually reads the reports you send him, which in my experience is rarer than honesty in a used car lot. We'd always gotten along. There was banter. There had been banter for years, the kind you file under professional and don't examine too closely, because examining it would mean admitting you look forward to Monday meetings more than a person probably should.

But this is getting ahead of itself. Back to Thursday.

* * *

His house sat at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac, mid-century modern, all low rooflines and big windows, the kind of house that looks like it's wearing sunglasses. He'd left a key under a fake rock that fooled nobody, and a note on the kitchen counter that said, in his actual handwriting, which surprised me because I'd assumed the man only communicated in email: "Vikki. Water the ferns twice a week, ignore the compost, and the guest room is yours. Help yourself to anything in the fridge except the pickles. Those are spoken for. J."

The pickles were spoken for. By whom, I wondered. This is the kind of question I hold onto, the way some people hold grudges.

I did a walkthrough, because I'm an analyst and walkthroughs are what we do. Living room with an embarrassing number of books. A den with a record player and, I noted with approval, actual records. The guest room had a quilt on the bed and a window facing the back garden, which was enormous, which was also odd, because Jeffery struck me as a man whose garden would consist of one sad basil plant and a lot of mulch.

I was wrong about the garden, and about a great deal else, as it turned out.

It was the garage that gave him away. The side door was unlocked, and I went in looking for a rake, because the yard had leaves and I had a conscience. Instead of a rake I found a small warehouse. Crates of canning jars. A folding table, still in its packaging. Rubber aprons, cash boxes, a hand truck, and stacked against the wall, leaning like drunks at a party, at least a dozen hand-lettered signs.

I picked up the nearest one. COSMIC ZEPHYR ZUCCHINI, it said, in confident yellow paint, with a smaller line underneath: THE VEGETABLE THAT DARES. Below that, in a different hand, as if someone had argued about the copy: GROWN WITH WEIRD LOVE.

There were more. ROMANO'S REVENGE ROMAINE. THE GHOST OF GILBERT GOURD. A sign that just said ZUCCHINI and, in smaller letters, yes, that one.

I stood in that garage holding a painted sign and did the math I always do. Six years of working for this man. Six years of Tuesday status meetings, of him talking about quarterly projections and the Blue Ridge account, and at no point had anyone mentioned that he spent what I could only assume were his weekends painting the word DARES on lumber next to a cash box.

I put the sign back exactly where I found it, because I'm tidy even when stunned, and went back inside to think about my life with a glass of the wine in his fridge, which was, to be fair, spoken for by me the moment I found it.

* * *

Here is what I knew about Jeffery's personal life, in total: he had been married once, it had ended the way most of them do, with two people politely agreeing they'd rather be apart, and since then he dated occasionally and spoke of it the way you'd speak of a bus route that never quite gets you where you're going. He mentioned a woman named Mollie once. He mentioned a weekend in Charleston once. That was the entire archive.

As for me, I'd had a two-year relationship with a fellow analyst named Russ that ended at forty, amicably, almost suspiciously so, like a treaty nobody wanted to violate. Since then, nothing serious and mostly nothing at all, which suited me. I'd told people, and mostly meant it, that I was single by choice. The choice was partly genuine and partly the sort of choice you make when the alternatives seem exhausting.

I slept badly that first night, which I blamed on the strange pillows, and spent Friday doing what any reasonable person would do: snooping, gently, in a house I'd been trusted with. In a kitchen drawer I found a business card that did not match the consulting firm. It said MARROW & MYSTERY, HEIRLOOM VEGETABLES, and under that, ASHLAND FARMERS MARKET, SATURDAYS, 8 TO 1. There was a small painted tomato on the card. It was, I admit, charming, and I resented it for that.

The conference was in Oregon. He'd said he'd be gone through the following Thursday. The card in my hand said Saturdays, 8 to 1, and the card had a tomato on it, and I had a car, and it was Friday, which meant the following morning was a Saturday.

I must be honest that I debated exactly one minute before deciding.

* * *

The Ashland Farmers Market was held in a leafy park that probably looked lovely in every season, though on that September morning it looked specifically lovely, the kind of lovely that makes you suspicious of everyone else enjoying it. There were tents. There was a string quartet near the entrance, playing with the quiet desperation of people being paid by the hour. There were dogs everywhere, being walked and admired in roughly equal measure.

I found the booth on my third pass, because I kept walking past it in disbelief. MARROW & MYSTERY, said the banner. And there, arranging summer squash on a slanted board with the concentration of a man defusing nothing at all, just arranging squash, stood Jeffery. My boss. In a straw hat. Wearing an apron that said ASK ME ABOUT CUCURBITS.

He had not mentioned cucurbits. He had not mentioned any of this, ever, in six years, and I understood immediately why, because the moment you tell people at work that you spend Saturdays selling ghost gourds, you become A Person With A Thing, and every meeting for the rest of your career contains a joke about zucchini.

I bought a coffee from a cart and stationed myself at a respectful distance to observe, which is the professional skill I am best at. He was good at it. That was the surprising part. He chatted with customers, he made change, he handed a toddler a single sugar snap pea with the gravity of a man presenting credentials, and the toddler ate it, which felt like a minor miracle in this economy. He laughed at something a woman in a sunhat said. He looked, and there is no better word for it, happy. Loose. A version of Jeffery I had never seen across a conference table, one where his shoulders sat where shoulders are supposed to sit.

I finished the coffee and walked over, because at some point observation becomes cowardice.

"Well," I said, stopping at the edge of the booth, next to a crate labeled ROMANO'S REVENGE. "The vegetable that dares."

He looked up and his face did something complicated. Surprise first, then embarrassment, then, quickly enough that I almost missed it, something warmer that he got under control. "Vikki." He set down the squash. "You found the garage."

"I found the garage."

"I left the garage locked." He said it mostly to himself, then waved a hand, surrendering. "I never lock it. Left hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing."

"Cosmic Zephyr Zucchini," I said. "The vegetable that dares. Someone wrote that. Someone with paint."

"My ex-wife's cousin lettered the good ones. I do the backups." He straightened the apron in a gesture I suspect he did not know he was making. "How much have you seen."

"All of it. I've been standing over there for twenty minutes watching you sell a gourd to a child."

"That was a pea."

"She loved it, Jeffery. She's telling her friends."

He laughed, an actual laugh, and rubbed a thumb along the edge of the crate, and I noticed his hands, which I had noticed before in meetings and filed under professional, and which I was now re-filing. "Okay," he said. "So. Six years of a secret life, and my data analyst cracks the case in one afternoon. Do you want a zucchini. On the house. Consider it a welcome gift."

"I want the whole story," I said, "and a zucchini." I glanced at the sign above us. "And to know what a Cosmic Zephyr tastes like, because I've never heard of it and I suspect neither has anyone else."

"Nobody has. That's the point. I bred it myself, or the seed company did, and I get to say I bred it. Tastes like a zucchini, honestly. But a proud zucchini." He picked out one, long and pale green with faint silver stripes, and handed it over with a formality that made the woman in the sunhat grin at me. "There. Now you're a customer. I'm going to pretend this isn't the strangest Saturday of my year, and you're going to tell me how you really found the garage."

"I was looking for a rake."

"You don't rake."

"I was looking for an excuse to rake." I turned the zucchini over in my hands. It was a good zucchini. I thought about the note on the counter, the pickles spoken for, the quilt in the guest room, the man in the straw hat laughing at toddlers, and I thought, with the birthday looming the next morning, that my no-crisis plan had maybe one flaw in it, and the flaw was holding eye contact with me while wearing an apron about cucurbits.

He kept the story coming in installments between customers, which was a new way to learn about a person, in chunks of two minutes surrounded by lettuce. The divorce had come with a garden, oddly, because his ex-wife had gotten the house and he had gotten the yard habits. He had put in a few tomato plants at his new place out of grief, then discovered that breeding oddities was the only hobby that reliably shut off his brain. Seven years later the brain was very shut off and there were forty beds of it.

"I don't hide it because it's embarrassing, exactly," he said, weighing a bag of Romano's Revenge for a man in a Bike Trail t-shirt. "It's that work-Jeffery has a reputation for being a certain kind of serious, and the reputation is useful. You know how it is. You walk into a negotiation with a reputation and half the work is done."

"I keep my reputation too," I said. "Mine is that I'm the one who will find the error in the spreadsheet. Nobody's ever asked me what I do on Saturdays."

"What do you do on Saturdays?"

"Clearly not this. This would have shown up in my annual review."

He laughed again and I filed that sound away too, next to the hands, in a folder that was getting crowded for a Saturday in September.

The market ran until one, and around eleven he said, casually, the way people say things they have rehearsed, "I could use a hand packing up, if you're not doing anything. Two-person job, the table's heavier than it looks." I said I wasn't doing anything, which was true, since my only scheduled birthday activity was dinner alone with a book, and it felt suddenly like a plan someone else had made.

* * *

At one o'clock the traffic thinned and the vendors around us started the familiar shutdown dance, tarps snapping, crates thudding into wagons. He handed me a rubber apron from a bin under the table, the same kind I had seen in his garage, and I put it on over my shirt without being asked, which felt like a small act of allegiance. We worked well together, which surprised me. I have packed a lot of things in my life, mostly decks of data, and I have found that most people are bad at it, either too fussy or too careless, and Jeffery was neither. He stacked, I latched. He counted, I confirmed. Six years of working for the same mind will do that, apparently, even when the mind is wearing a straw hat.

The folding table went into the trailer hitched to his pickup, and the cash boxes went into a lockbox, and then there was only one crate left, the one at the bottom, and it held the strays. Seconds, he called them. The crooknecks and the ones that grew strange. He lifted out a zucchini that made me stop what I was doing and just look at it.

"Jeffery. What is that."

"That," he said, holding it horizontally with both hands, "is my problem child. Came in off the back bed. Nobody knows why it did that." It was easily nineteen inches long and thicker at one end than my forearm, a pale furious green, curved like something caught mid-motion. It was, and I want to be careful with this comparison, not the sort of thing a person can look at neutrally. It was the sort of thing a person looks at and then looks