Ch.49 – Bug Spray

Debbie caught me on the way out the door.

"Before you go, sweetie." She was drying a bowl with a dish towel, standing in the kitchen doorway in her blouse and apron. "Diane called. Her garden's full of bugs. She sounds pretty upset about it."

"Bugs."

"Bugs. Lots of them, apparently. Aphids or beetles or- she wasn't specific. She just kept saying they're everywhere and her tomatoes are ruined and I told her I'd send you over."

"You told her you'd send me."

"I told her my strong young man would come help." She smiled. The private smile, the one that had been showing up since our night together. "Would you mind, sweetie? She's next door and she doesn't have anyone else to ask."

I minded zero percent. I minded negative percent.

"Sure. I'll grab bug spray from Consum-R on the way."

"You're wonderful." She pressed her hand against my cheek for a second, warm, and went back to the kitchen. I went out the door.

The ride to Consum-R took ten minutes. I bought a can of garden insecticide for fifteen dollars from a bored cashier who was reading a magazine about fishing. The can was heavy and the label had a picture of a beetle with a red X through it. I strapped it to the bike rack and rode to Diane's.

Diane's farm was a ten-minute ride from our house if you took the road or a two-minute walk if you cut through the fence line between the properties. I took the road because I had a can of bug spray bungee-corded to a bicycle and the path through the fence required carrying the bike over a gap in the posts.

The farmhouse looked the same as last time. White paint going grey at the edges. A porch that wrapped around the front. Garden on the south side with the trellis and the stakes and the rows of plants that Diane maintained through what appeared to be sheer stubbornness. The wheelbarrow was still broken and sitting at the corner of the garden where it had been broken last time. Someone had put a flower pot in it.

Diane was in the garden.

She was in a white tank top and denim shorts and work boots and she was swatting at a tomato plant with her gardening gloves. Her brown hair was pinned up with a clip and the short strands at the back of her neck were damp with sweat. She was cursing at something I couldn't see from the gate.

"Get- off- you little-"

"Need help?"

She turned. Her face was flushed from the heat and the frustration and when she saw me and the can of bug spray in my hand her whole expression changed. The grin. The Diane grin, wider than Debbie's, more teeth, less careful.

"You are a lifesaver." She pulled her gloves off and walked toward me. "They're everywhere. The tomatoes, the peppers, the squash. I don't know where they came from. Yesterday they were fine and today it looks like a convention."

I looked at the garden. She was right. Small green bugs on the tomato leaves, clusters of them, and the leaves were curling at the edges where the bugs had been eating. The pepper plants had a different kind, smaller, darker, and the squash vines had white spots that might have been eggs.

"Aphids on the tomatoes," I said. "Those dark ones on the peppers are flea beetles. I don't know what's on the squash."

"How do you know that?"

Because I'd played a farming route that included a pest identification minigame, but that answer wasn't available.

"Internet."

"The internet knows everything." She took the spray can from me and examined the label. "This'll work?"

"Should. You spray the underside of the leaves and the stems. Avoid the fruit if you can."

"Look at you." She shook the can. "Garden expert."

"I watched a video."

She laughed. We sprayed.

The work was slow and hot. The afternoon sun was on the garden and there was no shade and the bug spray smelled sharp and chemical and I was holding leaves up while Diane sprayed the undersides and the bugs dropped off the plants and landed in the dirt and some of them crawled and some didn't. She was thorough. She went plant by plant, talking to each one as she sprayed it, apologizing to the tomatoes for letting the bugs get this bad and promising the peppers it would be okay.

"They can't hear you," I said.

"They absolutely can." She sprayed a cluster of aphids. "Studies show plants respond to sound. And love."

"Studies show you're spraying poison on them while talking about love."

She pointed the can at me. "Do not sass my garden."

I held my hands up. She laughed again and went back to spraying and I went back to holding leaves and the sun was hot on my back and sweat was running between my shoulder blades and down my arms.

Diane reached up to spray the top of the trellis where the tomato vines had climbed past where they were supposed to go. Her arm extended above her head and her tank top rode up and there was a stripe of skin above the waistband of her shorts. Tanned, smooth, the muscles of her lower back visible when she stretched. Her side. The curve of her hip where the shorts sat low. I looked at the bugs.

The bugs were very interesting. The bugs were the most fascinating things I'd ever seen. I stared at the bugs while Diane stretched above me and the stripe of skin was in my peripheral vision and her tank top was riding higher and she was saying something about the trellis needing new ties and I was looking at aphids dying on a tomato leaf.

We worked for two hours. By the time we finished, the garden was sprayed and the bugs were dead or fleeing and we were both covered in sweat and chemical residue and dirt. My shirt was soaked through. Diane's tank top was stuck to her back and her hair had come loose from the clip on one side and her cheeks were red from the heat and the effort.

"Shower sounds amazing but drinks first," she said. "Come on."

The porch was shaded. The wood was warm but the shade was cooler than the garden by twenty degrees and sitting down felt like a reward. Diane went inside and came back with two glasses and a pitcher of lemonade that she'd spiked with vodka. The ice clinked against the glass when she poured.

"To dead bugs," she said, and clinked her glass against mine.

"To dead bugs."

The drink was strong. Lemon and sugar and vodka and the vodka was generous. Cold going down my throat and settling in my stomach and I leaned back against the porch rail and closed my eyes for a second. The evening was coming. The light was going gold and the shadows from the garden stakes were getting long.

Diane had two glasses to my one. By the middle of the second her posture had loosened and she was sitting closer to me on the porch step and her knee was touching mine. Same as last time. Lemonade and weeding and the knee bump that neither of us acknowledged.

"Milk prices are terrible," she said. She was looking at the garden and her voice had the slow quality it got after vodka. "It costs more to feed the cows than I make selling what they produce. I've been thinking about- I don't know. A farm stand. Selling eggs and vegetables instead of just milk. But that's more work and there's only one of me and the wheelbarrow's been broken for a month and a half now."

"I can fix the wheelbarrow."

"You can not fix the wheelbarrow. The axle is bent."

"I can try."

She looked at me. Her grey eyes were Debbie's grey eyes in a different face. Shorter hair, wider grin, more freckles across the nose. But the eyes were the same color and in the gold evening light they caught it the same way.

"You're a good kid, you know that?"

"I'm eighteen."

"You're a good eighteen-year-old kid." She drank. "Most boys your age would've said no to bug spraying. They'd be on their phones or at the beach or- I don't know. Doing whatever boys do."

"I'm doing whatever boys do. I'm sitting on a porch drinking spiked lemonade."

She laughed. The Diane laugh, big and loose. She leaned sideways and her head landed on my shoulder. Her hair smelled like sweat and bug spray and underneath both something citrus, the same lemon scent I'd caught last time, her shampoo or her skin or just Diane. Her head was warm against my shoulder and she was looking at the garden from this angle and the shadows were getting longer.

"I get lonely," she said. Quiet. To the garden. To the shadows. "Don't tell Debbie I said that. She worries enough."

I didn't say anything.

"The farm is good. I love the farm. But it's a lot of quiet and the quiet gets heavy after a while and some days I don't talk to anybody until Debbie calls or the mailman rings the bell." She finished her drink. The ice rattled. "It's nice having someone here. That's all."

Her hand was on my knee. It had landed there when she'd put her head on my shoulder, her palm flat on my kneecap, her fingers resting on the inside of my thigh. She hadn't placed it deliberately. It had landed where it landed and neither of us moved it.

The heat of her palm came through my jeans. Her fingers were warm and still and her head was on my shoulder and the bug spray chemical smell was fading into the evening air and the citrus underneath was getting stronger.

"Debbie's lucky to have you around," she said.

She'd said a version of this before. Last time. Lemonade instead of vodka, weeding instead of spraying. Except this time her head was on my shoulder and her hand was on my knee and I was sleeping with Debbie and she didn't know.

"She is," I said. True in more ways than Diane was guessing.

The sunset was orange and pink on the white paint of the house. The garden was in shadow. The broken wheelbarrow gold-lit in the corner. The sky was big out here, bigger than in town, because the farm was on the edge of things and there was nothing between the porch and the horizon except flat land and a few trees.

I should go. Debbie would wonder where I was. Jenny probably wouldn't but Debbie would. The light was fading and the ride home would be dark and I should go.

I didn't go.

We sat. The light faded. The temperature dropped enough that Diane's bare arms got goosebumps and she rubbed them with her free hand and her other hand stayed on my knee. A cricket started somewhere in the garden. Then another.

The porch light clicked on. Automatic timer. The sudden brightness made us both blink and a moth appeared within ten seconds, circling the bulb in tight loops, and Diane watched it.

"I should probably let you go home," she said.

"Probably."

She didn't lift her head from my shoulder. The moth circled. The crickets went.

"Five more minutes," she said.

I stayed for five more minutes. Then ten. Then the sky was dark and the stars were showing and her head was still on my shoulder and her hand was still on my knee and the porch light was the only bright thing for a hundred yards in any direction.

I rode home in the dark. The bike's front light was weak and the road was quiet and the air had cooled and the sweat from the garden had dried to salt on my skin. Diane's citrus scent was on my shirt. Her hand had been warm on my knee for forty minutes and my knee was cold now where her hand had been.

Debbie was in the kitchen.

"How's Diane?"

"Garden's sprayed. Bugs are dead."

"Good." She smiled. "Did she feed you?"

"Spiked lemonade."

"That sounds like Diane." She shook her head. "She's been doing that more lately. The drinking. I worry about her."

"She's okay."

Debbie looked at me. Her grey eyes, the same grey eyes. "She's lonely, sweetie. She won't say it but she is."

She said it. To the garden. To the shadows. While her head was on my shoulder.

"Yeah," I said. "I know."

I went upstairs. Showered. The water washed off the bug spray and the sweat and the dirt but the lemon stayed. In my hair, on my hands, under my fingernails. Diane's farm and Diane's drinks and Diane's head on my shoulder and her hand on my knee and the porch light turning on and neither of us moving.

I lay on my bed. The popcorn ceiling. My knee was still warm where her hand had been or I was imagining it.

Debbie was lonely and I'd fixed it. Diane was lonely and I hadn't. Not yet.

The moth was probably still circling the porch light. Moths did that. They found the brightest thing and they went toward it and they couldn't stop.