This is a bit of fluff and nothing more, set fourth season after "Road Trip" and completely rated G. I guess if it's anything it's a snapshot of Miss Parker, mid-fourth season.

Thanks to Kelly for beta, and to Karen for saying it was worth it.

I really need a disclaimer for something this small? Just in case: I didn't create and don't own these characters or the premise of the show; I'm just borrowing them for a little bit. This story is for entertainment purposes only, no infringement is intended, and absolutely no money is being made from any of my scribblings. Please do not reproduce in print without my permission. Please do not archive. Archive links to this page are welcome.

Feedback: Pretty please. To kirbyfest@yahoo.com.

***

Shopping was arguably the cure for any ill.

When in doubt, when not feeling quite herself, disappearing for a weekend of shopping was something she'd done for years. She had a lot of money, after all, and every now and then she bothered to spend it. She'd take a trip far from Blue Cove to shop for more of the expensive tight unyielding clothes that her hometown stores certainly didn't carry.

Parker had just walked out of Overpriced Boutique #4. In under an hour, she'd managed to help the saleslady earn her commission goals for the next three months, and made the same saleslady passionately want to kill her with her bare hands. Parker had never understood the point of making nice to salespeople. They wanted to sell, she wanted to buy. Why waste energy on anything else?

In front of the glossy shop window, Parker automatically checked her reflection while she thought about where to go next. There was a shoe store on level one that had looked promising, but there was also a vague rumble in her stomach reminding her that it was after one and all she'd had for breakfast was room service coffee and a piece of limp toast. Lunch.

Pivoting, she stalked back towards where she thought she'd seen a little restaurant, all high-backed chairs and mahogany and, hopefully, some good Scotch. There was no food court filled with manic children at this mall, thank God.

The restaurant wasn't where she thought it would be, and Parker paused, tapping her foot while she looked around with the kind of glare that turned Broots white as a ghost and had lost her several secretaries. Spotting greenery out of the corner of her eye, she turned, hoping-- but it was just a little gardening store. In this mall, it was almost certainly the type that catered to the rich and dirt-averse.

The front window was a muddle of colors and shapes that, somehow, still worked because they were all real. Plants, some miniature topiaries, and brightly colored flowers combined to make a surprisingly welcoming display, and Parker walked towards the window without thinking.

The flowers in the window were bulbs. You could force bulbs to bloom in the fall and winter, Miss Parker remembered vaguely. Her mother had done it; she'd loved delicate, long- necked white flowers-- paperwhites, Parker thought they were called-- and had timed them so they bloomed just before Christmas. Her mother had loved to garden. Everything she'd touched had grown lush and fragrant, seemingly without effort.

Parker herself couldn't keep a cactus alive, yet she found herself going into the warmth of the little store.

***

The box was among the packages waiting for her when she came home from work one night. She'd almost forgotten her shopping trip, and the many purchases she'd ordered shipped rather than carry home. The stylized green and black label from the garden shop brought a wrinkle of confusion to her forehead. What... then she remembered, and for no reason at all things felt marginally less bleak.

Hauling everything inside, Parker left the stack by the front door while she changed into comfort clothes: a fleece pullover, old khakis. It was a legacy of Thomas that she still acknowledged, sometimes, when she let herself think about him. He had encouraged her to be comfortable out of the Centre uniform, and while she never went out in public in clothes like these, wearing them at home was both practical and sentimental.

Downstairs again, she scissored open the box and put the contents out one by one on the kitchen counter, next to the sink, until the box was empty of everything but the styrofoam popcorn. So much for environmental correctness, she thought as she pushed up her sleeves and opened the little flyer that the shop had included.

She'd bought two glass containers for bulb forcing. Even though she still had plenty of pots in the house from her mother's gardening days (they were tucked in the far corner of the basement, cobwebby and ignored), these had just been too pretty to pass up. One was a cranberry glass, the other the blue of the ocean.

According to the pamphlet, the first step was to put stones in the vases, up to about four inches from the top. She'd spent a ridiculous amount of money on stones: half were black and shiny, the other half white and marbled. She carefully put some of the white stones in the red vase. She liked the way they looked behind the glass, how the white still shone through the color.

This is the kind of gardening she liked-- no dirt, no kneeling in a muddy patch of earth crawling with bugs, no crescents of grime under her nails. Just clean, shiny rocks and glass and water.

Her mother had loved to garden. Really garden. She had loved the planned disarray of wildflower beds in the back yard of their house. Parker could still remember her mother coming into the house, face flushed, arms brimming over with vivid blooms. She'd tuck them around the house in various vases and jars, and even now Parker could almost feel the rush of warmth she'd experienced at finding a little nosegay of something in an unexpected place-- her bedside table, the bathroom counter. It had been like finding little reminders of her mother everywhere she went.

Remnants of those wildflower beds were still there, now trimmed regularly by a landscaping service that never let a single leaf get out of line. All Miss Parker had to do was write them a check once a month.

Yanking open a crackling paper bag, she pulled out several fist-sized bulbs and arranged them on the counter. She'd been tempted by the paperwhites-- memories of her mother, the fragile strength of the blooms-- but had ended up buying overpriced amaryllis bulbs because their vibrant color was too much for her to resist. Scarlet and yellow and one that would be white with a crimson center, all promising midwinter brilliance for the small price of keeping some water at the roots.

As she finished putting stones into the vase, the phone rang. She grabbed it with one damp hand. "What?" It was a wrong number, the voice high and young over the line as it apologized and hung up. Parker clicked the phone to off, pushing aside a vague sense of disappointment.

For some reason, she'd thought it would be Jarod. He tended to call just before she went to sleep, or minutes after she'd gotten home from somewhere-- no matter where he was, he seemed to have a sense of her schedule. Long ago, that had bothered and angered her. Now, it was just part of their odd shared routine.

He hadn't been calling as much, though, since he escaped from the Centre again. Since she'd been shot. Even his recent all-expenses paid trip down memory lane for her and Broots and Syd hadn't been followed up by a phone call.

Someday, she thought, he might not need to call them any more.

Shaking her head to push those worthless thoughts aside, she bent down to peer at the level of the stones inside the cranberry glass. High enough? Not quite, and she dropped in another two flat, veined stones, then filled the grey-blue vase with the smooth black stones.

There.

The blue vase was wider than the cranberry one, so two bulbs would go in that one. It only took a moment to nestle the bulbs comfortably into the stones, adjusting them carefully to make sure they were level. Water came next, a pitcher for each container, and she was done.

She thought that she could get used to this kind of gardening.

The front of the house got very little light, so she settled the containers on the kitchen table by the window. The window faced the back yard, looking out on the neat flowerbeds that were now little more than denuded stalks in the twilight.

Tomorrow, the sun would shine, and tomorrow the flowers would start to grow.

End

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