The Heat Is On
Written
by Katherine Tomlinson
Illustrated
by Mark Satchwill
Vera Polk was bored. It was
such an unusual sensation for her that she almost didn’t recognize it at first
and thought it was just another variety of depression. It had been a tough
school year and now that it was summer, she should have felt the usual vacation
uptick in her mood, but instead she’d been plagued with sleeplessness and a
vague sense of ennui.
“Just be glad you’re not
teaching summer school,” her friend Moira had said when they met for lunch at
City Wok one weekend.
Moira’s husband had been
unemployed for nearly two years. She was burnt out on the job of teaching
English to disinterested teens, but there was no scenario in which she could
afford not to teach during the summer. It was starting to get to her, though.
Whenever she and Vera got together, all Moira wanted to do was vent.
“We’re doing a section on Romeo & Juliet,” she said. “I
promised everyone I’d give them an A if they could prove they’d watched any of
the movie versions.”
She forked in another morsel
of the crispy, sweet-hot City Wok Chicken they’d both ordered.
“Poo came in with a screen
shot from Romeo is Bleeding,” she
added.
Vera raised her eyebrow.
“Joel Silver movie,” Moira
explained. “Jet Li. Gangs.” Moira slugged down the rest of her diet Coke. “I
gave him a C and he was happy with it.”
Vera shuddered. She taught
geometry, trigonometry and calculus. There was no chance that the thuggish Poo
was going to end up in one of her classes.
She grabbed the check when
it came. “My treat,” she said, as she almost always did.
“I’ll get it next time,”
Moira said, as she almost always did.
“It’s on Ms. Math Whiz,”
Vera assured her.
Vera was bored with Ms. Math
Whiz. She’d turned in a draft of her latest “math for idiots” book in May and
was waiting for her editor to give her the final edits. She made a nice side
living from the books—almost twice what she brought home from her teaching
job—but writing them was getting to be a chore. She enjoyed getting email from
enthusiastic geeks who wanted to talk about famous math puzzles and she looked
forward to interacting with a couple of her Twitter followers who engaged in
lively conversations about subjects ranging from the discovery of the “God
Particle” to the science of Prometheus.
Other than that, though, being Ms. Math Whiz was about as much fun as teaching
remedial math in a vocational school.
She was sitting on her
balcony, relaxing with a glass of wine and gazing at the empty parking lot
behind her condo when she was suddenly struck with the notion of creating a
container garden.
She knew it was too late in
the season for tomatoes, but she could try some herbs—chives and sage and
dill—and chili peppers. The idea made her happy.
She finished off her glass
of wine and went into her home office to tweet a few things before bed. The
follower who called him/herself @geekusinterruptus was raving about the new
Spider Man movie and wondering if she’d seen it yet. She’d lied and said she
had, that she thought it was the best one yet.
The last time Vera had
attempted any sort of gardening project, she’d bought all her plants from
Stevens Nursery in Studio City. She’d loved browsing there, especially on cool
days when the tropical humidity of the greenhouse felt like a lush oasis in the
middle of the generally arid LA suburbs.
Stevens had been razed years
ago, though, to make room for the ugliest mega-condo/apartment complex in the
area.
Vera had found a nursery in
Burbank that had a resident cat and good prices. She’d filled a basket with
little green and white plastic pots filled with three-inch shoots of aromatic
green. She’d been captivated by a square-stemmed plant that smelled like a
peppermint patty.
“That’s chocolate mint,”
said a guy wearing a dark green polo shirt with the Plant One On Us logo. “It’s great mixed with strawberries, but it’s
a little late to be planting it.”
He took the pot out of her
hands and put it back on the shelf with the other baby plants. “You’ll want to
wait until the fall for it, or maybe early next spring.”
Vera was somewhere between
bemused and annoyed as he looked over the other choices in her cart.
“Rosemary and sage but no
thyme?” he asked. “How will you ever season a roast chicken?”
“I make roast chicken with
garlic and lemon,” she said, not sure why she was trading cooking tips with a
total stranger.
“Simple and elegant,” the
guy said, “like the cook.”
Vera blushed from the tips
of her toes even as she deflected the compliment with a bit of a shrug. “It’s
hard to mess up a roast chicken,” she said.
“Au contraire,” the guy
said, with a pitch-perfect accent. “At the Culinary Institute of America they
ask you to make two things to show off your expertise before graduating.”
“A roast chicken,” Vera
guessed, “and what?”
“An omelette,” he replied.
“The idea being that if you can create something beautifully simple, you can go
on to cook something more complex.”
“You’re a cook?” she asked
the guy.
Now it was his turn to
shrug.
“I eat a lot of pasta,” he
said. “I picked up a cookbook in self-defense.”
Vera casually glanced at the
guy’s bare left hand while pretending to tidy the plants in her basket.
Divorced? Gay?
“Let me know if you need any
help with anything,” the guy said and turned away.
Say something Vera.
“What about chilies?” she
blurted, holding out a pot with a couple of the bright red peppers already
ripening.
“Good choice for summer
gardening,” he said. “Good way to spice things up.”
She smiled at him, charmed.
“I think I’m ready to check
out,” she said.
“Right this way,” he said,
and without asking, took the handle of her cart and rolled it over to the
checkstand.
“Good luck,” he said to her
as she walked away with her purchases. “Let me know if you have any problems.”
Vera blushed again as she
put her change away. “I will,” she said, and was surprised that she actually
meant it.
The owner of the shop looked
at her brother as he watched Vera head for her car.
“She’ll be back,” he
promised her.
She knew he was right.
Business had almost doubled since he’d started working for her.
Seducing the middle-aged
customers was like shooting fish in a barrel for him.
She almost felt guilty about
it.
Almost.
As for Vera…she wasn’t bored
any more.
