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  “Otis works at night,” Rolanda said, under her breath and out of earshot. “She doesn’t even know who’s on duty at her own event.”

  “Bambi-no?”

  “Another one of you lunatic vendors. The man’s dressed like Babe Ruth. What the hell that has to do with gardening I don’t know.” I nodded sympathetically.

  I trailed Rolanda back to her post, still holding the gatecrasher’s bag. I could tell she was disappointed in herself for abandoning her station, so I waited for an appropriate moment to give her the boy’s bag. At the door I saw that my exhibitor’s directory had been placed on Rolanda’s chair. The Happy Valley kid was long gone, presumably inside the hallowed halls without the all-important exhibitor’s badge. Whoever it was he needed to reach, he’d do it without my help.

  “You see why I can’t let unauthorized people in?” Rolanda said. “People like you think I’m a martinet, checking papers like I’m the border patrol, but the rules are the rules. The minute anything goes wrong, you got hysterical people like the Fish Lady and Ms. Reynolds screaming conspiracy.”

  I silently agreed and moved to hand her the bag.

  “I don’t want that thing,” she said, pushing my hand away. “What am I supposed to do with it?”

  “Isn’t there a lost and found?”

  “It doesn’t open officially until the show does. Just hold on to it. You’ll probably see the little peckerwood before I do, wandering around, stealing stuff. My job is to stand here for eight hours with one forty-five minute lunch break and two informal bathroom breaks, so that’s what I’m going to do. You tell your friend if I see him again, I’ll bounce him out on his Happy Valley butt.”

  “If he comes back looking for the bag, my booth number is eleven forty-two.”

  “Wait—let me write that down. Don’t you think I can find you if I need to?”

  I said nothing, but retrieved my directory and headed to the curtained thirty-by-ten plot that would be my home until the show closed.

  Another shriek split the air, but this time I didn’t bite. Given the high-strung nature of the flower show participants, it could have been a slug or a leaf miner. I had the luxury of ignoring it and going for coffee, but Rolanda didn’t.

  Now what? she muttered.

  Five

  After the bigger shows in Philly and Boston, the Big Apple Flower Show was the Northeast’s oldest and most prestigious, sponsored by a consortium of local garden clubs. I’d only been once before and not as an exhibitor. I’m a gardener. It’s been three years since I hung out my shingle in Springfield, Connecticut: Dirty Business Garden Solutions. Quite a change from my former job producing videos for a boutique production company in lower Manhattan—just as much dirt but of a different sort. At least that’s how I started. More recently, only some of the solutions have been garden related. I’ve developed a reputation as something of a problem solver.

  I wouldn’t have been at the Big Apple show if it hadn’t been for Babe Chinnery and an eccentric artist named Primo Dunstan. Babe owned the Paradise Diner, where I spent more time and ate more carbs than I should since moving from New York to Connecticut.

  Primo was her pal. And he was a character. No one referred to him as strange or antisocial, although he was certainly both, and no one spoke of him as the town hermit either, although he lived alone in the house his parents had left him surrounded by two acres full of scrap iron, broken lawn furniture, and machine and auto parts that made his yard look like the innards of an old television set or that stretch of New Jersey highway that resembles a giant computer motherboard.

  Primo had startled some young girls on their way to school one morning and there’d been an ugly rumor until one of the girls recanted. After that, he rarely ventured out except to ride his bicycle around town, filling two hand-wrought wire baskets with interesting junk he obtained foraging through garbage. That was how he’d met Babe, behind her diner.

  The good ladies of Springfield worried about Primo and were pondering their humanitarian course of action when one day he showed up at the diner with a five-foot-long iron dragonfly he’d hoped to barter for food.

  Babe was appreciative and happily fixed Primo lunch while he and Babe’s boyfriend, Neil, soldered the oversized darning needle onto the diner’s neon marquee. The next day, she got a slew of offers for the unusual sculpture but turned them all down. Instead, she encouraged Dunstan to bring in smaller works she’d display and sell in the diner. That’s how Babe’s makeshift gallery was created. That was when Primo’s status was elevated from weirdo to a “character,” code for a weirdo with money or an artistic bent.

  Since then, Primo’s found-materials sculptures had gotten modest press, giving him a reprieve from the do-gooders who wanted to fix whatever it was they thought was wrong with him—his hair, his clothing, and his social life or lack of one. Some said he had Asperger’s, but Babe insisted he had just never gotten around to cultivating his social skills. She was the one who had the bright idea Primo should exhibit at the flower show with me managing the booth, since he was far too shy to do it himself. Like I said—I’m a sucker.

  Six

  When Babe wasn’t finding work for me, she was trying to fix me up. The jury was still out on her latest matchmaking effort: Hank Mossdale, a stable owner in Springfield. We had met over a mountain of manure he’d generously offered on Freecycle, an online bulletin board where people found takers for their unwanted stuff. I was the only nibble. Hank and I had shared a few diner meals but no actual dates until Babe donned her matchmaker hat and suggested he drive to New York on Monday, to help me deliver Primo’s unsold items to a library in Ridgewood, where she had arranged for a private showing the following week. Surprisingly, Hank said yes.

  During the flower show, I would crash at Lucy Cavanaugh’s apartment. She was my oldest friend and one of my last real connections to my life in New York. I had no serious regrets about leaving the big city, just the occasional twinge when Lucy jetted off to some exotic place and I found myself shoveling compost or dining alone with my seed catalogs.

  This time Lucy was somewhere in Central America for work. She was delighted to let me use her place and anything in her closets, since in her fashionista math it would bring down the cost per wear of any clothes I borrowed. Always happy to be of service, I arrived a few days early.

  My booth neighbors at the flower show were David Heller, one half of a Brooklyn Heights couple who made light fixtures with botanical motifs, and Nikki Bingham, a chatty antiques dealer from upstate New York. Nikki and her much-mentioned but never-seen husband specialized in vintage and reproduction garden furniture.

  Both she and David subscribed to the notion that food is love, and it was abundantly clear that every morning and afternoon would be punctuated with a platter of rich, breadlike substances in which we would all be encouraged to partake lest we be considered antisocial. She came over and held open a white cardboard box, and the smell of cinnamon filled my booth.

  “Crumb cakes,” she said. “I made them myself.”

  “I had a big breakfast,” I fibbed. I set down my things and pitched the gatecrasher’s bag in my booth under a standard trade-show rental, a six-foot table tastefully stapled with royal blue plastic. “Maybe later.”

  David Heller didn’t have an ounce of fat on his rangy body and had no such reservations about the crumb cakes. He plucked a thick square from the box and a gust of brown powder escaped.

  “Quite an outburst this morning. Anyone know what happened?” David licked cinnamon sugar from his fingers one at a time.

  Nikki launched into a detailed re-creation of events, including a very good, if unkind imitation of Connie Anzalone’s hysterics. “I wasn’t there, but I heard about it in the ladies’ room. That’s where you get all the best info.”

  “Her garden didn’t look that bad, but she was pretty upset,” I said. Why kick the woman when she was down? Connie Anzalone was an easy target. The Little Mermaid outfit didn’t help.

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nbsp; “She’ll recover,” Nikki said, mouth full. “And you watch, two guys named Paulie and Vito will be guarding her booth tonight.” She flicked her nose with her index finger, leaving a trail of cinnamon on her left nostril.

  David’s eyebrows rose over hipster, tortoiseshell frames. “Do you know her?”

  “A little bird told me. Her husband’s connected, if you know what I mean.” Nikki had already downed two pieces of cinnamon cake, so she settled for picking at the topping on her third. “Apparently you don’t get your lawn mowed in her neighborhood without Connie’s husband’s say-so.”

  Seven

  Michelangelo, da Vinci, Puccini, and all my Italian ancestors were banging on the inside of my head, urging me to uphold the honor of my people. Or at least half my people; the Irish half didn’t mind a bit.

  “I think everyone whose name ends in a vowel has to deny they’re in the mob, at least once in their lives,” I said.

  “I only know what I was told.” Nikki sniffed. Having denuded the third piece of cake she put it out of its misery and polished off what was left. “You have to admit, she is a fish out of water in this atmosphere.” She paused, and then snorted at her own unintentional joke.

  With or without the garish costume, Connie Anzalone was a fish out of water. Apart from her, the Big Apple crowd was comprised of Mayflower bluebloods who probably never touched dirt themselves, smooth-talking hucksters selling Hansel and Gretel–like sheds and sunrooms (Is there no one left selling electric organs in suburban malls?), and garden club doyennes with big hats and short white gloves. With her long nails, white-blond hair, and—shall we say—salty language, Ms. Anzalone was a breath of fresh air. Although her fashion and landscaping choices weren’t my style, she’d managed to get here, and if she didn’t have a right to verbally abuse her neighbors, she did have a right to be pissed off if she thought her garden had been intentionally sabotaged.

  I identified with that fish-out-of-water feeling. I’d felt it many times in Springfield, especially on days when money was tight, the phone didn’t ring, and I wondered if I’d made the right decision to leave everything and everyone I knew and move to the suburbs. But all it took was one person to make me feel welcome. I promised myself—and my Italian ancestors—I’d swing by Connie’s booth to say ciao and buona fortuna before the end of the day.

  For the rest of the day we shared box cutters, duct tape, and crumb cake, and critiqued one another’s displays. Placement was everything—one inch to the left or right could change destinies, or so I was told. Primo’s sculptures didn’t need much attention, but it took hours to unwrap, assemble, store the bubble wrap, and find the proper arrangement to make them irresistible.

  As heavy as Primo’s sculptures were, they would have cost a small fortune to ship, so once again Babe had enlisted the help of friends. If they wanted to stay on Babe’s good side, truckers passing through New York allowed themselves to be shanghai’ed into delivering pieces to the convention center. It had been going on for the past three days, ever since the earliest exhibitors with the most elaborate displays arrived. The good news was that the shipping was free. The bad news was that I was never sure when items would arrive, so I had to be there every day since setup began. Most likely I’d be moving things the next day to make room for new arrivals, so I tried not to obsess about placement. Hopefully all the pieces would arrive by Friday morning in time for that evening’s reception. If not I had a slide show on my laptop, including pieces too big or too expensive to ship.

  A veteran of these events, David had his own displays that showed off his chandeliers, sconces, and table lamps to best advantage. He also had a giant copper tub that held hundreds of pinecone-shaped nightlights, his bestselling item.

  “We’re all hoping for that one big score,” he said, “but you’ll see, I’ll be refilling this tub all weekend. It makes people feel like they’ve been somewhere if they buy something. And a five-dollar nightlight is easier to say yes to than a torchère in the shape of a weeping cherry tree.”

  He had a point. It also explained the popularity of those T-shirts with Someone Went on a Cruise and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt inscriptions.

  After perfecting her own booth, Nikki set her sights on mine. “You need a real tablecloth. Did you bring one? No worries. I have one you can use.”

  All Primo’s pieces were named, and I was busy labeling them when Nikki came over to help.

  “You know, if you move this piece to the left—see it lines up with the P in Primo on the sign—the arrangement will be more symmetrical.” She stepped back to admire her handiwork. I failed to see how that would improve sales but thanked her anyway.

  Our three booths were in a ghetto, but a nice, arty one. The smaller, nonfloral exhibits were relegated to an area known as the Garden Shop. If the display gardens got all the publicity and the photo ops, the shops did the real business and paid for the show. Prefab gazebos, fertilizers, and antique pots shared space with what must have been an entire containerload of merchandise from China—chimes, resin figures of St. Anthony, and a hundred different items with hummingbirds or frogs plastered on them. And curly willow. It would be a small miracle if no one was impaled or had an eye put out by one of the ubiquitous corkscrew branches.

  Purists grumbled that Kristi Reynolds had no low bar and anyone who put an X on a check could exhibit at the show, but that was generally a sentiment shared by those who didn’t accept that gardening was a multibillion-dollar business and wasn’t just about pretty flowers and afternoon tea on the veranda. A large part of that business involved the systematic genocide of deer, chipmunks, squirrels, and slugs—creatures made lovable by the likes of Walt Disney, Chuck Jones, and various children’s book authors but much reviled by any gardener who’s had her heart broken when her tulips, hostas, and bird food disappeared. Someone once said that gardening was all about sex and death. He might well have added murder.

  Eight

  This year’s most ballyhooed product was SlugFest, a supposedly guaranteed slug repellent. While that might not register high on the wish lists of most people, to a gardener, it ranked right up there with world peace. And if it worked, its creators could make a fortune—gardeners were constantly looking for a magic bullet to keep the little critters from munching expensive plants and leaving silvery trails all over the garden like so many chalk-outlined bodies. Copper wire, baking soda, beer in shallow containers—the last was my favorite method for dispatching the little buggers. Showing no preference for imported or domestic beer, they slithered into the containers and died with a buzz on. On one hand, plenty of humans wouldn’t mind going out that way, and it beat being crushed under the heel of a garden clog. On the other, disposing of a container of bloated, decomposing slugs was not one of the most fun things I’d ever had to do. Where do you put them? Do you bury them? Say a few words? Leave them out for the birds to deal with? I did that once and then worried I’d caused a nest of chickadees to be born with fetal alcohol syndrome or the avian equivalent.

  SlugFest’s booth was six times the size of Primo’s, but as of Wednesday, no one had seen anything other than their rotating hologram, a slug inching toward a hosta and then vanishing, and half a dozen female employees, decked out in salmon-colored polo shirts and khaki pants so unflattering it was a wonder any of them took the job.

  Rumor had it that Scott Reiger, the company’s founder, was close to a major distribution deal with an international chemical company, but no samples were on display and no one had gotten as much as a whiff of the actual product for fear that it would be ripped off.

  “We’re in a good spot, strategically,” Nikki said. “He’ll bring a lot of action our way.” That’s what we all wanted—action.

  Nine

  After three hours I called it a day. I stored the packing materials, leaving one box intact for box cutters, water bottles, and whatever supplies I’d need during the show. I tucked a piece of bubble wrap around the bag I was babysitting to make it less attractiv
e to potential thieves. It was a drawstring bag with some of the same patches I’d noticed on the kid’s jacket. I wasn’t normally a suspicious person, but why tempt anyone? I was surprised the kid hadn’t come back for it, but perhaps he’d run into another security guard with the same SWAT team training and dedication Rolanda Knox had. When the lost and found opened, I’d dump it.

  In the meantime I headed to the ladies’ room to wash up. Two women entered, whispering conspicuously in a fashion guaranteed to attract attention. One of them I’d seen at this morning’s excitement; she was the charmer who’d offered Connie Anzalone the cigarette.

  Her badge read Allegra Douglas, Riverdale Garden Club. Allegra was all of four foot eleven in ballet flats, slim black slacks, and a black smock not unlike the ones worn by employees at department store makeup counters. Her short gray hair looked like half a dozen steel wool pads had been knitted together to form an unbecoming cap, and her eyes were rimmed with a black pencil liner in a style that no doubt suited her better in her youth. Her companion was a jolly woman in frameless glasses, a white turtleneck, and a novelty sweater bearing the image of an enormous golden retriever and the message Prince of Pups. She had the same sloppy, puppylike demeanor as a golden, and if she’d been any shorter, I’d have been sorely tempted to bend down and scratch her behind the ears.

  We mumbled hellos and I continued scrubbing my hands with a small nailbrush and a bar of gardener’s soap I’d brought from home. I was stunned when Allegra blissfully ignored the Thank You for Not Smoking sign, produced a pack of Winstons, and lit up. She inhaled deeply, then released a plume of smoke that drifted my way. I imagined her forty years younger, hand on hip in a slinky dress. The only things missing were the cigarette holder and a martini glass.

  “All I know is the exhibitors’ committee opened a Pandora’s box when they started allowing that element into the competition. This is the second year, and it’s changed the entire complexion of the event.” She dragged on her cigarette again, and her cheeks and the wizened, red scar that was her mouth were sucked into her skull.