Page 55 of Mistaken
She should have known he would take care of that before he did anything else. Not even a wave of a hand, but as she gazed out at the scrubby grass and occasional spiny cholla cactus, a split-rail fence appeared out of nowhere, closing in what she thought was maybe an acre or so of land. It wouldn’t keep out any marauding coyotes, most likely, but at least it defined the area he wanted to work.
“The herb garden over there,” he said, pointing to the patch of land immediately behind the kitchen, and at once it was neatly tilled, with basil and thyme and rosemary and other plants she didn’t recognize growing in tidy little rows. “And then the vegetables.”
Just beyond the herbs, another piece of land became similarly covered in happy, lush plants, tomatoes and zucchini and beans and eggplant, and even several rows of tall corn taking up the rear.
“That was easy,” she remarked, and he shrugged.
“I told you we would not be digging any holes.”
That was for sure. And who was she to argue, when all those fun veggies and herbs told her she could probably convince Abdul to make eggplant parmesan in the very near future?
“Fair enough,” she said. “Now the roses?”
“I believe so.” He was silent for a moment, surveying the undeveloped side of the property. “But I think that needs a bit more thought. Some trees, and perhaps a fountain somewhere?”
As he spoke, a line of poplars sprang into place along the eastern edge of the fence, with a couple of sycamores a little closer to where they stood. A gravel path appeared out of nowhere, and along with it, a small water feature nestled beneath the trees that included an artfully constructed stack of rocks on one side to create a waterfall.
“I like that,” Sarah told him. “Especially since you can’t really see the pond on the other side of the house when you’re standing out here. Every place can use a little water.”
Even in the desert, where that resource was as precious as gold. But then, they didn’t need to worry about water anymore, not with so few people to use it up, and not with the way the monsoons had gotten so much wetter over the past couple of years.
“I am glad,” Abdul replied. “Now we can consider the roses. Which colors would you like to see?”
She almost replied that she loved all of them — her mother had left behind a rose garden when she died, and although Sarah’s father had been too heartbroken to tend to the flowers himself, he’d at least made sure to hire gardeners to keep them alive and give them all the love and care they needed. Those roses had grown in a riot of color, red and pink and yellow and white and lilac, but she didn’t know if that kind of jumble would work as well here, not with the stark rocks of Ghost Ranch as a backdrop. No, this garden needed something that would blend better with the landscape.
“Red, of course,” she said. “And that pretty kind that’s sort of cream-colored but has the red along its edges? Yellow, too, and something sort of apricot or salmon.”
“That is a good combination,” Abdul agreed. He gazed out at the empty space between the water feature and the house, and out of nowhere, rosebushes appeared, fully grown and laden with blooms in the same shades Sarah had suggested a moment earlier.
Even as dry as the air was that day, their scent seemed to be everywhere, sweet and piercing at the same time. She breathed it in, thinking it had been a very long time since she’d smelled roses like that. A few people grew them in Los Alamos, but most of the town’s inhabitants were more concerned with cultivating edible plants and herbs, so there wasn’t anything close to a real rose garden there.
“It’s wonderful,” she said. “And it’s going to be so nice to look out the kitchen window now and see all this growing here instead of just dirt and weeds and cholla cactus.”
“That was why I suggested it,” he replied. “And, of course, there is a great deal to be said for using fresh herbs and vegetables, something that transcends what I can summon for our meals.”
She’d heard much the same thing from people who were into gardening in the before times, but she’d always been so busy back then that the thought of trying to grow anything on her own hadn’t even entered her mind. They had fresh stuff in Los Alamos, true, although it all went into a communal pot and you could never be sure of what you were getting from week to week. Fresh, homegrown tomatoes were amazing, but she could have happily skipped the lima beans.
“Then we’ll need to make something special with them tonight,” she said. “Eggplant parmesan, or ratatouille, or…well, you can probably come up with a lot more ideas than I can.”
“Not really,” Abdul replied. “I think eggplant parmesan is an excellent idea. And we can make some fresh rolls to go with it, and perhaps a salad with other items from the garden. It is probably good to have a meal without meat every once in a while.”
A kind of eating she’d experimented with from time to time during college, thinking it might make her a little leaner and meaner when she was practicing extra hard for an upcoming performance.
Besides, skipping meat tonight would be easy enough after having that amazing breakfast burrito just a little while ago.
“Sounds like a plan,” she said. “Should we gather what we need now, or wait until closer to dinner?”
“We might as well do it now,” Abdul replied after a slight pause to consider the question. “That way, we won’t have to rush when we get back from our ride, and the vegetables can rest on the counter for that short an amount of time, rather than going into the refrigerator.”
True — she kind of hated the thought of taking all those lovely sun-warmed veggies and sticking them right in the fridge. They would definitely be able to handle sitting in the kitchen for a couple of hours.
A pair of large wicker baskets appeared then, looped over Abdul’s arms, and he removed one so he could hand it to Sarah.
“I’ll gather the eggplant, and you can look for lettuce and tomatoes for the salad,” he told her.
That was fine — she thought she was probably much better equipped to judge the various levels of ripeness of the tomato plants he’d conjured, rather than try to figure out which of the eggplants was the right one for the parmesan they’d planned.
He headed for the row where the eggplant grew next to some exuberant zucchini, while she moved down to the one where romaine and butter lettuce were flourishing. It wasn’t too hard to find a head of each that looked as though it would be utterly scrumptious in a salad, and the grape tomatoes also appeared to be at the peak of perfection, gleaming like jewels among their leaves, so ripe and juicy that if she hadn’t still been full from breakfast, she might have started plucking them off their vines and eating them like candy.