squash blossom tart
Chapter 3
My life was defined by walks. Walking my dog, walking for coffee, walking with music, walking at sunset, at sunrise. Walking. I decided to walk to the farmer’s market just because it was an excuse to walk somewhere. The cacti were scorched, the sidewalks hot. The fruit cart on the corner was long gone. Too bad. I would’ve enjoyed some melon and cucumber with Tajin, or anything really. The market line was too long when I finally got there, so I turned around and walked back. When I sat down at my desk, I opened my browser to an anonymous email:
Read the March 17th, 2021 issue of The New Yorker. Your next clue lies there.
I would’ve preferred a love letter, but I’d settle for a mystery. It’d been a while since the cake debacle. I’d sworn off both refined sugar and private investigation. Now the adventure was looking for me. I pulled the dated edition from my overflowing stack of unread pandemic prints and scoured the pages, trying to find something. It was mostly op eds on the vaccine, or political pieces that felt skewed and manipulative. There was a fun restaurant column, Table For Two, that made me want to live in New York City. Basically, there were a lot of words and ads. I flipped back and forth a few times, in a surreal cloud, not really paying attention when I stumbled onto the cartoon. The one I hacked up. There it was on page 27. This time with the artist’s signature beneath:
Paxton Charles Hubble
Just like the highway—PCH, an ironic reminder that the journey along this endless highway of clues was leading me nowhere. But I googled him anyway. Paxton was an agricultural professor with a farm in Topanga, a farmer-slash-cartoonist—how quintessential California. I got in my car, threw Maude in the back seat, and headed west. It was a nice day for a drive. And I couldn’t bear to walk again, maybe ever.
I arrived at his address and stopped the car. A white horse was staring at me. I had to remind myself that it was just a horse, and not a spy sent to take me out. A friend once told me to say, “It’s just a horse,” when things seemed overwhelming. But was it just a horse? Maybe this was Paxton Charles Hubble himself. I’d seen some strange things on these misadventures already. It wasn’t impossible.
“PCH?” I shouted to whoever would answer.
“Howdy!” someone hollered, rushing out from a ranch house on a hill in painter’s clothes. “Want to come pick some squash blossoms?”
Only in LA—no, only in Topanga—would a stranger ask you to pick produce without asking who you are, or invite you into his house for tea, or tell you he loves you and then never see you again.
“Yes,” I said. “I’d love to.” He gave me a small pair of shears and lead me to a back garden. We clipped squash blossoms. “Shall we stuff them with ricotta and fry them?” he ruminated aloud, “or make a tart?”
I stared at him. All I could think was, here he is living this simple life picking squash blossoms and here I am having a quiet existential crisis. But what does it take for someone to bug out to Topanga anyway? Maybe he’s having his own existential crisis. Maybe the blossoms are more important than I thought. Maybe we all feel the same. Maybe life on a vineyard in Tuscany is home after all.
“Both,” I said. “Definitely both. By, the way, my name is—”
“Oh!” he cut me off. “I’m no good with names. Just come inside already, will you?”
Walking into a stranger’s house used to be a different kind of a risk. A farmer could still be a killer. But I was vaccinated now. I had nothing to lose but a walk.
To be continued…