Jane Hanna's Arc

Chapter 2 of 4

Jane sat on the roof past sunset with dirt drying on her knuckles. Four pots had brought a handful of ants and two pink spiders. She needed a full bed by tomorrow evening, and her wallet was empty. She didn't know which of the old evening flowers to chase. Guess wrong again and the roof would sit quiet at dusk, the bugs gone back to wherever they came from. She went down to the custodial office because the only person who might remember the garden from before was her boss. Joe had run the brooms and boilers at this school since Jane was in grade school herself. White beard down to his second button, uniform shirt tucked tight over his belly, he was writing something on a clipboard when she knocked. He didn't look up. "You're tracking soil on my floor, Hanna." "I need to ask you about the roof." That made him look up. He set the clipboard down. Jane spoke fast. She told him she had replanted. She told him about the ants at the fruit scraps and the little pink jumpers on the borage. She told him she needed more plants by tomorrow and didn't know which ones drew the bugs at dusk. Joe was quiet a long moment. Then he opened the bottom drawer of the desk and pulled out a battered green notebook. He set it on the desk and pushed it across. "That was mine," he said. "When they still let us up there. Evening bloomers are in the back." Jane opened it. Pencil lists. Dates. Little sketches of leaves. On the last written page: evening stock, sweet alyssum, night phlox, and a fruit bush he had drawn in careful lines, blossoms and fat berries clustered together. Beside it he had written, brings everything. "I can't afford any of this," Jane said. Joe scratched his beard. "District has a grounds budget nobody touches. I sign for it. Bring me a list by morning, I'll put the order in. One tray. Don't make me regret it." Jane looked at him. "Why?" "Because I planted the first one," he said. "And I was the one who locked it." She stayed up that night at the kitchen table copying his list in her own handwriting. Evening stock. Night phlox. Sweet alyssum in three flats. The berry bush at the top, underlined. By the next afternoon a delivery truck left a stack of trays at the school's back door. Jane hauled them up herself, one flat at a time, uniform soaked through. She planted until the light went orange. Then she sat down by the new berry bush and waited. The ants came first, up the drainpipe in a thin brown line. Then the pink jumpers, one, then four, then more than she could count. Something bigger hummed past her ear and landed on the stock. Jane didn't laugh this time. She wrote it down in the green notebook. Page one of her own.