“Do you like flowers?” I asked Jean-Paul.
“Of course.” He gave the slide a quick look before handing it back. “Why?”
“After we dump our load, I thought maybe we could go see some flowers.”
“Is there time before the Hungry Ghosts party?”
“The party goes on all day and most of the night, so we can show up at any time,” I said. “The ghosts will still be there when we get there. They always are.”
Chapter 9
I heard Jean-Paul’s sudden intake of breath when we turned onto the access road to Mr. Sato’s greenhouse. In front of us, spread across flat fields almost as far as the eye could see, an ocean of flowers in full bloom, their colors more vivid than film could ever capture. The perfume in the air was nearly overwhelming.
At one time, this area south of San Jose was covered by flower nurseries. But over the years, piece by piece, the land had been sold to developers who replaced the nurseries with stucco housing tracts and boxy gray industrial parks and shopping centers. But nestled among warehouses and cinderblock fences, an oasis of commercial nurseries had managed to survive.
Mr. Sato, perched on a canvas director’s chair in the shade of his greenhouse, was surveying what remained of his once-vast patch of roses through binoculars. When he heard the crunch of gravel under our truck tires, he turned the binoculars on us. Slowly, he got to his feet and directed Jean-Paul where to park.
“Hey Maggie, you come to see my roses?”
“They’re amazing,” I said, shaking his hand. “But we came to see you.”
Introductions made, he offered us shade, chairs, and beer, in that order. We gladly accepted all three; it was at least twenty degrees hotter south of San Jose than it was in Berkeley.
After some preliminary chitchat, I took out the two slides that had parts of the man I did not recognize and asked Mr. Sato to look at them.
“Sure, sure,” he said, slipping his reading glasses back into his pocket and handing the slides back to me. “That’s Duc.”
“Duck?”
He spelled the name for me. “Vietnamese guy. Duc Khanh.”
“Did he work with you?”
“Yep.” He rocked forward. “Worked for me a couple years. Best helper I ever had. I was real sorry when he quit.”
“I think this picture was taken around the time that Mrs. Bartolini died.”
He reached for the slides again and held them both up to the light, the effort to remember apparent in his frown. After a moment, he nodded.
“Yep, I think you’re right,” he said. “The other day you asked me about my helper back then but I couldn’t quite pin it down, you know? But now I see this-” He flicked the corner of a slide frame. “That’s the good thumping my rusty old brain needed. Yeah, Duc was working with me then.”
He took another look at the slides. “Chryslers, you know, after they flower in the summer they have a short bloom again in the fall. That year, though, this rose just kept going till Christmas. Not a few pissy little late roses, but big, beautiful ones. So red they were almost black on the ends. And the perfume. Jeez, knock you out. Soon as that one went dormant, me and Duc pruned it and took cuttings.”
I had to smile. My dad would sequence events by the way his roses performed during a particular year, or the stages of their bloom when something happened. Like Dad, Mr. Sato would remember the roses that year more clearly than he would lurking strangers.
“Did Dad ever talk to Duc about that day?”
He shook his head, unsure. “But now I remember why I fired the guy who worked for me before Duc.”
I asked, “Why?”
“Let me run it down, see if I can put it all together.” He scratched his chin, thinking. “The kid I had working for me for a long while-Fernando something, good worker, too-got picked up by Immigration and sent back to Mexico. I was in a jam, lotsa work to do. Your mom turned me on to a list of refugees needing jobs. That’s where I found a guy named Van. He was a good enough worker when he put his mind to it, but he kinda thought he was above mowing lawns, you know? Always calling in sick. I had to take on Duc part time to fill in; found him on the same list. Like I said, Duc was the best helper I ever had, learned real quick. So when Van said something that bothered Mrs. Bartolini, I told him to take a hike and I hired Duc full time.”
“Do you remember what Van said to her?”
“No. But I got the idea it had something to do with the old country. Her father, maybe.”
“Do you have any idea where Van or Duc are now? I’d really like to talk to them.”
He grinned at me. “You’re still my nosy girl, Maggie.”
“Can’t help it,” I said.
He turned to Jean-Paul. “Better watch yourself, boy. Don’t ever try to sneak one past our Maggie.”
“Wouldn’t dare,” he said, laughing out loud.
“Van? I don’t know what happened to him. But you wanna talk to Duc?” Mr. Sato raised an arm and pointed to the south. “There’s Duc.”
I followed the trajectory of his arm, but all I saw was the commercial nursery on the far side of his greenhouse.
“Where?” I asked.
“Next door. I used to have six acres here,” he said, pulling out his telephone. “Now all I got’s this greenhouse. Duc bought me out a long time ago.”
He hit speed dial on his phone, had a quick conversation, and put it away. “He’s there now. Go on over. Said he’d like to meet you.”
The office of Khanh Wholesale Nursery was a freshly painted red barn, perhaps left over from the area’s rural past. Except for the koi pond moat around a Zen garden with a Buddha in a pagoda in the middle, it could have been a barn anywhere in America. In front of the Buddha there was an ancestor offering of fresh fruit and a giant bouquet of pristine white roses.
We walked inside, happy for the air-conditioning. I recognized Duc from the slide as he walked across the reception area to greet us. He was older, of course, but his smile was unchanged. He was a small man, weathered to a nut brown by years of working outdoors, wearing crisply pressed chinos and a green polo shirt, with work boots on his feet. The skin on the hand he offered me was as hard as the handle of a hoe, but there was a gentility about Duc’s speech and carriage that suggested a formal upbringing.
“So, you’re Al’s girl,” he said by way of greeting. “How’s your mother?”
After assurances that Mom was just fine and introductions were made all around, he said, “I want to show you something.”
He led us out through the back into the open nursery fields. There were plants of all sorts, but more than half the land we saw was covered with roses arranged in tiers by color and variety, some in the ground and some in pots. Maybe a dozen workers were on duty pruning, harvesting, moving irrigation drip lines, and pulling weeds that dared to intrude through the well-manicured soil. It was an impressive, bustling operation.
“My friend Tosh says you have some questions,” he said as we walked through ranks of white roses. The sun beat down on our bare heads; heat came up through the soles of our shoes. Duc and Jean-Paul seemed unaffected; I wished for a hat.
“I’ve seen your program, of course,” Duc said. “Your father and Tosh wouldn’t forgive me if I hadn’t. Are you working on something for television?”