Wyatt got the doughnuts and condensed milk from the backseat, then unlocked his trunk and took out a burlap bag with green strings hanging from it. He closed the trunk, frowning at the burlap bag.
"What's that?" I asked.
"I told you I'd get you a bush. Here it is."
I stared at the poor bedraggled plant. The green strings had to be its limp little limbs. "What will I do with a bush?"
"You said the house didn't have a single plant in it, like that somehow made it unlivable or something. So here's your plant."
"That isn't a houseplant! That's shrubbery. You bought shrubbery for me?"
"A plant's a plant. Put it in the house and it's a houseplant."
"You are so clueless," I snapped, reaching to take the poor thing from him. "You've had it in your trunk all day in this heat? You've cooked it. It may not live. Maybe I can revive it, though, with some TLC. Open the door, will you? You bought some food for it, didn't you?"
He unlocked the door before he answered with a cautious, "Plants eat?"
I gave him an incredulous look. "Of course plants eat. If anything's alive, it eats." Then I looked at the plant I held and shook my head. "This poor thing may never eat again, though."
My injured arm was protesting holding the weight of the plant, even though I was using my right arm to do most of the work and was mostly balancing the thing with my left hand. I could have given it to Wyatt, but I didn't trust him with it. He'd already proven himself capable of major plant brutality.
While he was bringing in my bags, I had the plant in the sink, gently spraying it with cool water in an attempt to revive it. "I need a bucket," I told him. "Something you won't miss, because I'm going to poke holes in the bottom."
He was in the process of fetching a blue plastic mop bucket from the laundry, but he paused at my last words. "Why are you going to ruin a perfectly good bucket?"
"Because you have abused this plant to the point that it may not live. It needs water, but the roots don't need to stand in water. So-it needs to drain. Unless you have a nice planter with drain holes in it, which I doubt because you don't have any houseplants, then I'll have to poke holes in a container."
"See, this is why men don't have houseplants. They're too much trouble, and too damn complicated."
"They make a house look nice, feel nice, and they keep the air fresh. I don't think I could ever live in a house without plants."
He sighed. "All right, all right. I'll punch holes in the bucket."
My hero.
He used a long screwdriver to stab through the plastic, and in short order the bedraggled plant was sitting in the bucket in the laundry room sink, the root-ball soaked and draining. I hoped by morning it would have perked up some. Then I turned on his double ovens and started assembling what I would need to make the bread puddings.
He clasped my shoulders and gently forced me down onto a chair. "Sit," he said, which was totally unnecessary, since he'd already made certain I was. "I'll make the bread pudding. Just tell me what to do."
"Why? You never listen." Now, is there any way I could have resisted saying that?
"I'll make an effort," he said drily. "This one time."
Big of him, wasn't it? The least he could have done, considering the day I'd had, was solemnly promise that from then on he'd pay attention to what I was saying.
So I supervised the making of the bread pudding, which is really simple, and while he was tearing the doughnuts into chunks, he said, "Explain something to me. Those people your mother was talking about: the man tried to do something nice for his wife, and she tried to kill him, so why were y'all on her side?"
"Something nice?" I echoed, staring at him in horror.
"He had their bedroom professionally decorated as a present for her. Even if she didn't like the style, why didn't she thank him for the thought?"
"You think it's nice that, even though they've been married thirty-five years, he paid so little attention to her that he didn't know how long and hard she worked to get their bedroom just right, and how much she loved it just the way it was? Some of the antique pieces she had, and which were sold before she could retrieve them, were heirloom quality and can't be replaced."
"Regardless of how much she loved it, it was just furniture. He's her husband; don't you think he deserved better than her trying to hit him with her car?"
"She's his wife," I returned. "Don't you think she deserved better than to have something she loved destroyed, and replaced with something she absolutely hates? After thirty-five years, don't you think he should at least have been able to tell the decorator that Sally didn't like metal and glass?"
The look on his face said he didn't care for the ultramodern look himself, though he wouldn't have phrased it that way. "So she's mad because he hadn't noticed what style she likes?"
"No, she's hurt because she's realized he doesn't pay any real attention to her. She's mad because he sold her things."
"Weren't they his things, too?"
"Did he spend months searching for each piece? Did he refinish each one by hand? I'd say they were hers."
"Okay. That still doesn't justify trying to kill him."
"Well, you see, she wasn't trying to kill him. She just wanted him to hurt a fraction as much as she's hurting."
"Then, like you said, she should have used a riding lawn mower instead of a car. Regardless of how hurt she is, if she'd killed him I'd have arrested her for murder."
I thought about it, then said, "Some things are worth being arrested for." Personally, I wouldn't have gone as far as Sally, but no way would I tell Wyatt that. Women have to stick together, and I thought this would be a good object lesson for him: you don't mess with a woman's things. If he could just get past his tendency to categorize things according to what laws were broken, I was sure he'd see reason. "A woman's stuff is important to her, like a man's toys are important to him. Is there anything you really treasure, like something that belonged to your father, or maybe a car-" It struck me. I stared at him, aghast. "You don't have a car!" The only car in the garage was the Crown Vic, which was city-owned and practically yelled, Cop!