CHAPTER 13
The following week, three days after it was official on the calendar, summer danced its way across the farmers’ market. The sun shone brighter, high up in the sky, hot enough to warm my skin through the thin cotton of my blouse.
“I’ve got little green ones,” I said to Mykia.
“What?” She tilted her head back to take in the sun, and a carrot fell out of her hair.
“My tomato plants have green fruit popping up all over.” I couldn’t keep the joy from my voice. I’d gotten up early to water the garden, and to my surprise, the tomato plants were bearing gifts seemingly overnight.
“You’ve got to watch out for pests,” Mykia warned. “Keep a close eye.” She squinted up at the sun. “You’re going to be inundated with tomatoes. What are you going to do with all of them when they ripen?”
“Could I sell them here?” I said, a bit sheepishly.
Mykia squeezed my arm. “Sorry, but no. I’ll be dealing with an onslaught of my own. I end up canning enough to last through the zombie apocalypse.”
A memory, Technicolor sharp, ran across my consciousness. Jesse’s mother teaching me to make her secret salsa recipe, one of the few treasures his family owned. She taught me when she knew I would soon be a member of the Moresco family, tattered and spare as it was. She passed away a few years later, and it was our only real lasting legacy.
“I’ll make salsa. I have an incredible recipe.”
“I don’t have a decent salsa recipe,” Mykia said, a smile forming. “That’s not something I do. But if it’s something you end up doing, and doing it right, test run some jars in my booth.”
It was work to keep from tearing up. “I’ll learn how to can properly,” I said, struggling to stay practical when all I wanted to do was hug her tightly. “I promise I won’t give anyone botulism.”
“The lawsuit will be yours if you do,” she said. “But if it’s a hit? I’ll take you on at ten percent.”
Anything would have been a deal in my eyes. “Done,” I said. We shook on it.
As we shared a pint of strawberries, I watched Glynnis wind herself through the market, reaching out to touch plants and produce and never quite making contact. “If things keep going the way they’re going at work,” I told Mykia, “salsa making will be my only source of income.”
“That bad, huh?”
“That bad. We’re supposed to have a presentation next week for Landon Cosmetics.” Glynnis and I had not a single idea. Not one. Not even a file full of bad, in-case-of-emergency-only ideas. Jackie and Seth had found some common ground. I had seen them locked in intense conversation, nodding at each other like bobbleheads. Byron and Rhiannon swaggered through the office like they’d seen the future and knew they had the competition in the bag. We wanted to pelt them with copies of Petra’s book until they screamed for mercy.
“What do you do when you feel all tapped out?” Mykia asked. “I work on the farm. Hard labor. It gets the juices flowing again.”
“Whenever I was stuck, I’d talk to my husband, and he’d ask the right questions to loosen the spigot.” Had it been that long since I’d felt supported while I was being challenged? Over two years?
Mykia frowned. “Husband, past tense. You had me thinking he was still around. I had to figure out that he wasn’t from what your son was saying. How long were you married?”
“I’m sorry. I have trust issues. And . . . twenty-one years married, longer than that together.”
Mykia whistled. “That’s pretty monumental. No wonder you’re digging up your backyard. Why didn’t you want me to know?”
I shrugged. Sometimes the explanation required more energy than I was willing to give. But then sometimes the simplest explanation was the one that could be best understood. “Sometimes I feel vulnerable without my husband around. You were a stranger then, for the most part.”
“I hear you. No offense taken.”
“Good.”
She whistled. “I haven’t got any advice for dealing with that kind of grief. My longest relationship lasted a year, and he was in Doctors Without Borders. We Skyped more than anything.”
“That’s not unusual when you’re young,” I said, sensing she saw this as a fault.
“I’ve got nothing for you as far as ideas go. If you want to know the best ways to cook carrots to get maximum flavor, I’m your girl. But advertising tips? Sorry.”
“I don’t think there’s any work advice that could help me at this point, unless you have a solid, kick-ass idea for selling retro frosted lipstick and false eyelashes.”
Mykia laughed. “Not in my wheelhouse.”
“Clearly not in mine any longer.”
“That could be,” Mykia said, growing serious. “I was thinking about what you said about change. I thought about when I left dental school, and at first I felt I’d experienced the quick change you spoke of. But that wasn’t right. I’d been slowly moving in this direction since I was a teenager. I just didn’t notice. Isn’t it possible that you didn’t change overnight either? That your garden is something you’ve been moving toward for a long time?”
I wasn’t sure how that made me feel. Had I been unhappy and not realized it? Acknowledging any unhappiness while Jesse was still alive felt like a betrayal. Recognizing it when he was no longer around to defend himself felt grossly unfair. But still, I had to ask myself—was I unfulfilled and didn’t know it? “I don’t know,” I said. “And I don’t know how valuable it is to dig that deep.”
A slow smile spread over Mykia’s pretty face. “Worst pun ever.”
I laughed, and it felt like a release, an exhale. “Yeah. I guess so.”
She handed me a bunch of dandelion greens. “On the house. Keep getting those toxins out.”
Without thinking, I grabbed her shoulders and gave her an awkward hug. “Thanks,” I said, emotion muddying my voice.
Mykia pushed me away gently. “Go back to the office and figure out how to sell your shit. My grandmother used to love her false eyelashes. She looked like Diana Ross, but with better hair.”
And then there it was. The lightning bolt. I waved the dandelion greens at Mykia and dashed for Glynnis.
I handed Glynnis my phone with the video I’d found on YouTube.
“They’re gorgeous,” she said after watching, “and they sound great. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard that song before.”
It was “Stop! In the Name of Love” by the Supremes. Pretty sure? It was my mother’s generation’s music, but still. Sometimes Glynnis had the ability, with just a single phrase, to make me feel like one of the ancients.
“How are we going to use it?” she said, brow furrowing. “It’s the era Landon is trying to evoke, but the ad can’t be stuck in the past. Trinka’s targeting a younger demographic. Does that make sense?”
I brought up a photo of Diana Ross backstage before a show, sitting in front of her makeup mirror, carefully applying liquid eyeliner. Then I brought up one of Tina Matthews, a pop star I’d seen on the cover of Teen Vogue. It was an arty photo of her pressing a lip gloss wand to her pouty lips. It had a retro feel.
“We can’t use these,” Glynnis said. “They’re proprietary.”
“But we can use the general impression. We’ll tell a story of how these women use makeup to build themselves up for a concert, but it’s their confidence that really shines through. One from the past, one from the present, connected. Get it? Not ancestors, glamcestors! The performers from today got their cues from the ones of the past, the ones who set the mold. Landon becomes both a homage to those women and a modern link to them.”
“Isn’t it a little too obvious?” Glynnis said, drawing out every syllable of the last word as if to annoy me thoroughly and completely. “But I guess we don’t have much else.”
“We don’t,” I said tersely. “You can handle the modern image, and I’ll do the retro one. We’ll find common ground and put them together when we’re done.”
Glynnis shrugged. “I guess it’s not too bad. But I don’t know.”
I bit my tongue so hard I was surprised it didn’t fall out on the desk between us. So much about my life confused the hell out of me, but professionally, I thought I knew what I was doing. Was I wrong? Maybe Glynnis didn’t like the idea because it was me suggesting it. Or maybe the idea sucked. When had I lost my confidence? I gathered the tattered shreds from some corner of my brain.
“What’s your idea? Let’s hear it.”
Glynnis flushed. “You know I don’t have one.”
“Exactly,” I said.
We sat there for a moment, in the silence of a passive-aggressive tug-of-war.
“If this isn’t good enough,” Glynnis said softly, “we’ll lose our jobs. I need to be sure.”
I put my hand on her arm. “I know. But we don’t have time to be sure. It’s better to have something than nothing.”
“I’m always trying to have something,” she said miserably, “but I always end up with nothing.”
“Not this time,” I assured her, though I wondered if it was a false assurance. “Not this time.”