He closed on the house in January, but there was still no time to waste in setting out the slutgarden. The winter had been a mild one, even by Alabama standards, and he was able to begin to laying out the first flowerbeds the day he moved in. Thankfully, he didn't have to spend any extra time building a privacy fence-the house he found, at the end of a winding road in a suburb of Dothan, already had a big yard and a tall wooden fence painted a cheerful white. Even so, the ground was hard and he had a lot to do to get ready for first planting. He didn't have any sunlight to waste.
In the evening, after he finished raking and tilling the new beds, he began setting up his grow lights in the attic. He brought in pots filled with jasmine bushes and clumps of valerian, lavender seedlings and tiny passion flower sprouts just barely sticking their heads up from the soil. He took gardenias and roses and a few hybrid plants he'd never even bothered to name, placing them all in neat and serried rows like the ranks of a vegetable army, and he watered them and spoke softly to them as he pruned away dead leaves and sprayed for aphids. It was too early to plant most of them outside yet, but he knew the importance of readiness.
And finally, at the end of his first day, he unpacked a single plate, a single bowl, one each of a knife, fork and spoon, and a lone pot and pan. He made a quick and simple dinner while his air mattress was inflating, and showered off the stink of his exertions with his only towel. Then, bone tired from his hard day's work, he fell asleep. There would be more to do tomorrow.
February came and went with the speed of a thief, taking with it the time he badly needed to get the soil ready for his seedlings. He became a regular at the local garden center, making polite and unmemorable conversation while he picked up mulch and fertilizer and insecticide and replaced a shovel that he broke finding an unexpected and very large rock in his yard. He never got upset, but he always worked with urgency; the valerian could have already been in the ground by now in a climate this mild, and he didn't like being this far behind. The daylight didn't stretch nearly enough to serve his purposes, and he couldn't risk working at night. Even at the very end of a long, quiet street, people noticed eccentricity. He didn't like being noticed.
By the ides of March, he was beginning to relax a little, although he still got up with the sun every morning to till and turn the soil in another part of the large yard. The valerian was in and growing well, and the mild weather meant that he could begin planting his lavender bushes. He covered the beds at night, just in case of an unexpected frost-he hadn't trusted the weather reports in three years now, not since a cold snap nearly ruined one of his harvests-but he could already see the first buds beginning to appear on the plants. It was enough to make him smile at night, after he washed his clothes in the sink and lay down on his mattress to sleep. He wouldn't be alone for much longer.
By late April, everything but the jasmine was set out in the flowerbeds, filling the air with a heady floral scent that drew everything from bees and butterflies to his yard. But not sluts. Not yet. The jasmine was still patiently waiting under the steady warmth of the grow lights, creating a stultifying, sleepy aroma that suffused the attic with a lazy silence broken only by the automatic sprinklers. Without it, the smells of spring that he carefully cultivated weren't quite complete. Oh, he noticed a few more women than usual jogging in his neighborhood or driving down his dead-end street before turning around as though they'd gotten lost and arrived in front of his house purely at random. But they didn't stay. Not yet.
He kept himself occupied, though. A stop at the lumberyard gave him the materials to build a little extension on his privacy fence, a curving wall just wide enough to allow the gate to open and close without revealing anything of the yard to passers by. Someone walking in through the unlocked gate would have little more to do than turn right and let their feet carry them helplessly toward the rows of blossoms and blooms that exuded their tranquil scents almost halfway down the block now, attracting a little friendly attention from his new neighbors. He had plenty of practice with small talk, though, and they left thinking nothing of the retired gardener who lived at the end of the street. And he had very little time to think about them, either.
June was coming. So were his girls.
