BJ wondered why the buildings had never held any interest for her before. Even odder was the fact that Evelyn had never shown BJ inside the buildings. The only thing she would say was that the greenhouses were something that reminded her of her travels around the world with her friend Aimee.
When you understand the key to happiness, Baylor, you’ll be able to appreciate my greenhouses.
BJ could hear Evelyn’s voice as if she were standing beside her. “Funny that I don’t remember her saying that till just now,” she mused aloud.
“Well, you with me, Squirt?” BJ looked down at Arturo. She held Evelyn’s operations manual in one hand, the keys in the other, while maneuvering her crutches at the same time.
They went through the back door of the house, which led to the main greenhouse. BJ was surprised to find a four-foot hallway and another door. Asign on the door said, “Temperature-Controlled Environment: Keep Door Closed.”
“Well, that’s different,” BJ said. Arturo barked in apparent agreement.
BJ opened the door to enter the greenhouse and turned to close it without looking inside. She pressed the door shut and immediately felt a humid warmth surround her. Turning and looking up, she reeled in stunned dismay.
“What the hell...I mean, wherethe hell am I?” The greenhouse was a tropical paradise. “It’s a jungle.”
BJ took a few cautious steps and watched as Arturo barked and sped off toward a large pool, complete with a fifteen-foot rock waterfall. The dog never missed a step as he launched himself into the water. He retrieved a floating object and jumped out of the pool. The small pup looked even smaller dripping wet until he shook himself with unmitigated vigor, fluffing his fur back into shape. He ran over to BJ and dropped the tennis ball at her feet.
“Ah, you’re a regular here, I see,” she said. Arturo wagged his tail in reply. “This place is amazing!” Wearing a wondering grin, she turned in a circle. “It’s like your own little Shangri-La. Too cool! So, Tanti, why have you been hiding this from me all these years?”
Armed with her grandmother’s instructions, BJ followed a stone path to the west side of the greenhouse. The tropical plants were dense in this portion of the building, and she was hot and sweaty by the time she reached her destination. Without Evelyn’s detailed drawings, BJ never would have found the hidden plastic and metal boxes that contained the watering system’s controls.
BJ looked at key number two. It was marked along the top as “main: lock boxes 1-3.” She easily opened all three hinged lids and looked over the contents of the boxes. Each contained ten knobs that appeared to be water shut-off valves. Each row of knobs had a different color of plastic coating. Letters identified each knob, and each knob had numbers around its base like a clock, one through twelve.
“All righty then,” BJ said as she leaned in to take a closer look. She squinted and studied the knobs with intense fascination. “There it is, all right...a bunch of totally unidentifiable knobs.
Geez!” She pulled out her drawings and scanned them. “What the hell is this, Tanti? What do I look like—an engineer? How do these old broads do this?”
BJ had a quick flashback just then. She was in the house and the old woman from next door had just handed her the enormous set of keys. Okay, Beej. Note to self. The next time someone asks you if you’d like them to run through the steps involved in anything, you just nod politely and say yes.
“We can do this, eh, Squirt?” BJ spoke to Arturo, who had found a high perch on some twisted tree roots that resembled the bottom of a mangrove tree. “I mean, it’s right here in black and white.” She indicated the manual in her hand. “How hard can it be?”
Arturo let out a tiny whimper, which didn’t seem like a good omen to her. She decided to overlook her new friend’s lack of confidence. Usually, she would have been the first to admit her own limitations when working with her hands. When she thought about it later, she realized she had never done anything like this before. She paid people to do mundane physical chores, even if they were in her realm of capability. She couldn’t remember ever attempting to do something like fixing a leaky sink or changing her own flat tire.
“Okay, let’s give this sucker a shot, shall we?” BJ held up the instructions in one hand and began turning knobs with the other.
Finally reading all of the small print that Evelyn had added to the instructions, BJ learned that the tightly sealed building was a rainforest, complete with its own storms. When set to exact specifications via the colored knobs, the system controlled every aspect of the watering of the main greenhouse. The system knew exactly how much rain to add and when to add it to the carefully maintained environment. The key was to set the controls differently each day of the week, then begin all over again on Monday.
“Red H-4...Blue C-10...Green F-1. Geez, I feel like I’m playing Twister, or at the very least calling bingo. Okay, only a few more to go.” BJ completed the last few turns as the instructions indicated. “Ha! Don’t tell me I got no skills.” She stood back and folded her arms across her chest, a gloating smirk on her face. Glancing down at the instructions again to double-check her work, BJ stared in disbelief at the next paragraph. “Under no circumstances should you adjust the last knob in the series before making sure you have a clear path to the outside door. The system begins two and one-half minutes after last knob adjustment.”
“Oh, Tanti! Do you think you could have written this before you told me how to move the last knob?” BJ cried out in frustration.
Aheartbeat later, a siren sounded over BJ’s head, causing her to involuntarily duck. “Oh, that can’t be good. Come on, Squirt. We gotta book or we could end up in the middle of a typhoon.”
That was about the point where things started to unravel for BJ. She was suddenly faced with the unenviable task of grabbing the manual, the keys, and a small wiggly dog and crutching herself out of the dense undergrowth of tropical plants. Everything would have been fine, too, if it hadn’t been for the rubber stoppers at the bottom of her crutches.
BJ had breathed a sigh of relief, juggling her items. The door that exited into the backyard was within sight. Her progression came to a jerking halt, however, when her crutch slipped between the rocks in the path. She tugged once to free herself but overestimated the strength of her pull. All of the objects that she had precariously balanced within her hands took flight, including Arturo.
“Shit!”
The dog made a perfect four-paw landing and stood barking before the door.
“Oh, fuck this!” BJ threw the trapped crutch to the ground. She hopped on one foot and threw open the door for Arturo to escape. Asound like a distant, rolling thunder came from overhead. “Great, sound effects to boot.”
BJ bent to retrieve the manual and tossed it through the door. She turned around to grab the keys and was hit full in the face with a spray of water from a sprinkler jet that lay hidden among the plants. “Jesus Chr—”
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know what would happen next. While BJ was busy fighting off the water, she lost her footing on the now slick rocks. Her good luck continued to hold out, however. She fell, but instead of cracking open her skull on the stony path, she landed in a patch of elephant ear plants. The bad news was that by this time, the misters and sprinklers had all come on full force. The elephant ear patch was much softer than the rocks, but it hadn’t taken long for the ground to turn to mud.
“Motherfu—” BJ rolled toward the path, covered in mud and soaking wet, just as another sprinkler hit her in the face with a sudden jet of water. She crawled, rolled, and finally threw her body through the greenhouse door.