One evening, Maury calls. Those public service announcements, he tells Frances, the ones about casual drug consumption supporting terrorism? Apparently they’re working. Now his customers insist their marijuana be grown domestically. He needs the entirety of her last two harvests, which Frances estimates at roughly twelve pounds, counting the supply that’s now curing in mason jars in her basement. “These people buy organic produce, if you know what I mean,” Maury says. “They read the New York Times.”
He’ll pay her a thousand dollars a pound, but he wants her to deliver it. Here’s the trouble: Memphis is fifteen hundred miles from Phoenix, and her three kids are home from school for the summer.
At the dinner table Frances says, “How about a road trip?”
The boys throw their hands in the air, cheering her. Todd, the six-year-old, her little sports freak, the kid whose Little League coach is already planning his career, wants to know if they can sleep in a tent. The middle one, Robbie, who is eight and plays chess and computer games, says he guesses Memphis is cool. Emily inches one shoulder toward her ear, a half shrug that is one of her few signals of approval. She is fourteen.
Frances doesn’t grow pot because she’s a desperate single mother, though she is. She grows it to pay off her half of the thousands upon thousands of dollars in credit card debt she and her ex racked up during their marriage. Recently her minimum payments have become unreasonable. On three separate credit cards the Amount Due hovers resolutely above the ten-thousand-dollar mark, unaffected by the enormous sums she sends each month. At 19 percent interest, she figures, Todd will have graduated from college before she pays off the debt. She’ll still be wringing payments from her meager take-home as a per diem nurse on the oncology ward, digging herself fruitlessly deeper into the hole. In the memo line of her checks she scrawls her account number followed by you fuckers, an act which offers diminishing satisfaction with each new check. Lately she’s had to rotate payments; she pays one bill, neglects the next. A shift in tone has occurred in the personalized notes printed on her bills: they’ve devolved from the tactful supposition of Frances’s forgetfulness to the sinister hint of third-party collections.
So there’s the money. Yet, also: there’s nothing else in her life that offers the same satisfaction as the squat plants, the cultivation of perfect, tight, and tender buds, the recognition that she’s expert at something. She grows weed and she grows children, but the weed doesn’t talk back. The children make noise and messes. The weed is reliable. She feeds, she prunes, she waters, and uncomplicated as the sunrise, it grows.
Some of it she smokes, but who needs that much pot? She reaps three ounces per square foot every sixteen weeks, a yield right up there with the big guys. In her basement the plants fill a walk-in closet that she’s double-dead-bolted against Emily, a kid who emerged from Frances’s womb demanding to know everything.
Frances uses the Screen of Green method, which requires careful attention to the training of each plant for maximum light on the buds, and involves a complicated system of chicken wire, drip irrigation, grow lights, airflow fans, irrigation tubes, water pumps, thermostats, and exhaust pipes. Industrial-grade soundboard and weather stripping ensure that all this activity goes undiscovered by Emily. If she suspects anything, she hasn’t mentioned it.
The promise of a cross-country adventure has excited the boys, requiring of Frances a draining amount of bedtime cajoling. When all three are finally asleep, she goes to the basement to smoke her excellent pot, empties the dehumidifier in her drying cabinet, then pads barefoot through her double-mortgaged ranch house, back upstairs to their bedsides. She stands over their sleeping bodies. She bends close to their faces to peer at them in the dark. The eyelashes! The lips! She wanders from bedroom to bedroom. Their faces are never, during the day, as still as this. Emily’s scowl is absent; she looks like she did in kindergarten, before Frances married the boys’ father. Emily would hate to know her mother stares at her like this, big teenage girl that she is; she’d accuse Frances of invading her privacy. Frances absorbs the impossible beauty of her children. She gets teary with the joy of their existence and the delirium of primo homegrown.
