Mr. Sawyer begins a loud protest, not caring that he has an audience. Kali casts me a meaningful look and clocks her head toward the front door.
“We’ll visit another time,” I say to Alice’s back. For now, I have everything I need.
“Bye, Alice.”
Alice is arguing with her ex-husband and doesn’t hear us. Slowly, we back away from the melee, and fetch our bikes.
“You better PUF that woman soon. She doesn’t deserve more grief,” says Kali once we pass the neighborhood gate.
“I’m working on it.” Pushing Court’s astonished expression out of my mind, I mentally flip through the ingredients I will need for his mother. Alice’s scent contains about a hundred different notes. Just my luck she comes from well-traveled stock. The more genetic variation, the more complex the scent. I alreadymatched the strongest notes, but I will need to sniff around our garden for the others. Any missing components will require a trip to Meyer Botanical Garden, forty miles away in San Francisco, where we can usually find what we need.
One particular heart note I never smelled before. The note is soft and salty, reminiscent of miso soup. Of the eighty-one countries I’ve visited with Mother collecting botanicals, I don’t remember encountering anything like it. While you can sometimes fudge the top notes, the heart notes are essential to an elixir—the secret in the sauce.
That miso note will be a problem.
EIGHT
“WE DO NOT PICK OUR NOSES.OUR NOSES PICK US.”
—Calla, Aromateur, 1866
KALI AND Ispend the rest of the weekend raking, composting, and pruning. Whenever Mother’s not watching, I sniff-match, pairing plant smells to the notes I recognized in Alice’s scentprint. I roam our entire three acres for corresponding scents, from tropicals and subtropicals to conifer and deciduous. Since the warm air tends to accumulate in the center of our property, that’s where we nurse the succulents, while evergreens with their sparkling notes crowd the cooler north side. I wouldn’t have to log so many steps if we just kept track of all the notes that went with each plant, instead of doing everything the long way, one sniff at a time.
By the time the sun nestles into the folds of the mountains Sunday evening, I’ve sniffed every note in our garden, but am still short a third of Alice’s ninety-eight notes. I won’t cut anything here until I have the rest of what I need in hand. Plants must becut close to the time they’ll be used.
I untangle myself from the branches of a hemlock tree and brush cobweb moss off my hair. I’ll definitely need a trip to Meyer Botanical Garden. It’s closed on Mondays, which means I won’t be able to get there until Tuesday.
Remembering one last plant, I take off toward the back of our lot where a natural spring runs down Parrot Hill and collects in a pond. Tabitha the chicken follows me, her salt-and-pepper feathers puffed out around her body. The sky is the color of irises, and a wet chill sits on my skin. I kneel at the edge of the pond and stretch as far as I can toward the water lilies growing in the middle, straining for even a whiff of Alice’s miso note. I should’ve smelled them before they closed up for the night. Under full sunlight, water lily emits a heady, almost rotten perfume, but now I can barely find a thread.
My nose begins to bleed from the strain, both nostrils. It happens, usually, when I’m not getting enough sleep. I pinch its bump between my fingers and fall back onto my haunches. Tabitha scratches at the ground beside me. Mother works hard, but she’s careful never to overwork her sniffer. To do otherwise leads to a headache and nose fatigue. But I’d gladly take those over what will happen if I don’t undo my mistake.
After the bleeding stops, I try again, closing my eyes, and inhaling more gently this time. I filter out the iron scent of dried blood and zero in on the scent of the water lilies. Past the syrupysweetness to the core, I find a medley of salty-sweet innards, but no miso.
With a deep sigh, I pick up Tabitha and head back to the workshop. I stroke the white plumage on top of her head, soft as a dandelion puff, and it washes away some of my anxiety. Tabitha clucks softly, head swiveling back and forth.
When I return to the workshop, Mother is looking up into our strangely prolific papaya tree, which fruits even in October. “Oh, there you are. Ready to get started?” Her head bobs to one side as she considers my blank expression. “Flower market? Last Monday of the month is tomorrow, remember?”
I stifle a groan. Tomorrow, a van will collect our excess flowers to sell at a flower market up in San Francisco, one of the ways we defray our living expenses. “No one buys in October. It’s a dead month. Couldn’t we just skip it this once?”
“Of course not. Why would we do that?”
“Because we’ve never taken a vacation. We’re overdue.”
“We travel every season. You’ve seen more of the world in your fifteen years than most people see in their lives. Not everyone gets a Cloud Air jet, you know.” When Mother and Aunt Bryony were children, Grandmother Narcissa fixed the president of Cloud Airways with the love of his life, and in exchange, he gave Grandmother the use of a private jet. Technically, it’s a gift, but Grandmother accepted it because the Aromateur Trust Fund wasn’t written to include air travel.
“I don’t mean traveling. I mean, not working. We could go surfing.”
She snorts loudly, not bothering to remind me we don’t swim.
“Or we could just chill somewhere.”
She crosses her arms. “I’m chilling right now. Now put down the chicken and let’s go.”
Piles of flowers fight for space on the farm table that occupies the center of our workshop. The table, as well as most of our furniture, was made by a man named William, who lived here as groundskeeper when Mother and Aunt Bryony were growing up. I never knew the man, but I always imagined him to be a quiet, patient person. There’s an exacting quality to his work, a marriage of artistry and craftsmanship.
I trim the flowers while Mother separates bushy stalks of snapdragons. Her cheerful humming grates on my nerves.
A rose thorn pricks me, and my irritation at Mother grows, though of course, it’s my own fault my fingers ache and my nose is encrusted with blood. But if she’d just cut me a little slack, I wouldn’t be in this mess.
