“It’s OK. I know it’s legal now. Just maybe not to sell it?”
Phil threw the chair down on the ground, frustrated, and turned around to her. “He asked me, OK? I was growing strictly for my personal use, and that’s it. Your kid came over—”
“Step-kid.”
“Whatever. He came over, I don’t know how he knew—”
“Maybe it’s the blacked-out windows and that you smoke pot in the yard every night?”
“And he just started pressuring me. Scott is very, you know, he’s very ambitious.”
That was not a word Aubrey had ever heard used to describe Scott. In a way, she was kind of proud of him. “Anyway, the fuckers stole most of it, and the rest is dying without the grow lights.” He looked over at the boarded-up window morosely. “Worst part is they made me help load it in their truck.”
She looked at him. She didn’t exactly feel sympathy, but she knew loss when she saw it. The guy took pride in his plants.
“What do you do, Phil?”
“I’m a data analyst for CRB?” He said it like a question, as if clearing it with her.
“Well, there’s not going to be any data to analyze for a long time,” she said, “so you’re a farmer now. If we turn all the soil out here, what kind of edible food could we get down in the next week or so?”
Phil squinted at her. “Is that necessary? You really think the power’s gonna be out for a year?”
“I think we’re fucked,” Aubrey said. “Degrees of fuckage, I don’t know. Do you really want to wait around to find out?”
Phil turned and looked at the strip of exposed soil, thinking about it. “Well, space is a premium, so you want anything that’s got good bulk. Tomatoes, obviously, you can make just about anything with them, or eat ’em cold. I’d grow a bunch of tomatoes and can the shit out of those, if I could find enough salt and vinegar.”
“Now you’re talking,” she said. “What else?”
Phil kept thinking, warming to the challenge. He looked around his front yard and gestured at the locations of imaginary crops. “Zucchini, that’s good and chunky, doesn’t rot, keeps you for a while. Carrots, obviously, if I could scare up enough chicken wire to keep the critters out. Spinach, eggplant, pumpkins, squash. Don’t have room for any more than that.”
“What if you did? What if we opened up all the yards?”
“Well, then, yeah. Sky’s the limit. First off, any kind of bean we can possibly get in the ground, we should do it. It’s protein.”
“Corn?” Aubrey offered.
Phil laughed out loud, then realized she wasn’t joking. “No. Not corn. Takes up too much space and has, like, zero nutritional value. Don’t get me started on the corn lobby.”
Aubrey made a mental note to never, ever get him started on the corn lobby.
“We’re not looking for cash crops here,” he said. He looked around the neighborhood, expanding his thinking. “If I had that half-shaded plot down there, by Janelle and Derek? I might just put some orange watermelon in. Wouldn’t that be a treat? You ever had orange watermelon?”
She shook her head.
“Oh, you don’t know. Come August, I can eat a whole one of those in a day. Man, it’s sweet.”
She looked at him, coming to life in front of her. Four days ago, they both would have sounded like nutters, some kind of crazy survivalists, tearing up their front yards to plant seeds for the apocalypse, but today, standing here on the strangely quiet block, under a sky empty of airplanes, it sounded to her like the most rational conversation she’d ever had in her life.
She looked down at the sod lifter he held between his dirty hands. “Is that hard to use?” she asked.
“Not at all. Here.” He held it out to her, and she wrapped her hands around it. “Hold it straight up and down, like that, at the end of the row I just started.” She did, putting the rounded end of the blade upright on the grass. “Now turn your hands, like this.”
He came around behind her and reached up, not physically adjusting her grip but gesturing at her with his hands in the air, twisting them just so. Aubrey had an innate creepiness detector that kicked into gear when a man was about to put his body too close to hers, but Phil kept a good two feet between them. That was nice.
“Now hold it tight and just hop up a little bit, enough to get the soles of your feet up onto the flat edge. It’ll drop right into the sod.”