Free The Barbarian Nurseries by Héctor Tobar Page A

psychotropic compounds, and without a game console like the one their father played with. What Maureen wanted, the only thing she could say with certainty she wanted, was to bring goodness and beauty to the life of her family.
    For that reason she was headed to her local nursery to research some clever, cheap, and elegant solution to the problem of the dying rain forest in her backyard.
    T hrough the smoky glass of the sport-utility vehicle, Araceli watched freeway destination signs pass overhead. SAN DIEGO. LOS
ANGELES. NEWPORT BEACH. Being the car-trip escort to la señora Maureen used to be one of Guadalupe’s responsibilities. Other people go to work in factories. I have to squeeze into this automobile, with this woman and her children. All for that moment at the end of the week when they give me an envelope with two pictures of Benjamin Franklin and one of a man called Grant.
    No one talked, but Araceli could hear Brandon and Keenan tapping away at their electronic toys in the backseat. Brandon’s hair was auburn, darker than his mother’s, though he had the same smart, wide-apart eyes that to Araceli suggested ancestors in some rough-hewn European village, like those peasants of Daumier and Millet in Araceli’s art history textbook, the largest of the handful of books in her personal library: gleaners, sowers, potato eaters. Brandon’s fingers moved over the buttons of his little machine with artistic precision and for a moment it occurred to Araceli that he might do well with piano or guitar lessons, but
la señora
Maureen never pushed him. Sometimes you had to push children to do things that were good for them: if she ever found a partner to share her dreams, they would raise their offspring with that piece of Mexican wisdom. Maureen had the air conditioner on high and the cold made Araceli’s nose run, and she gave a theatrically loud sniffle and feigned a cough, but her
jefa
didn’t seem to notice.
    T he idea had come to Maureen after her perusal, at a local bookstore, of various gardening guides. She had begun with a handbook or two on tropical gardens, but was quickly intimidated by their instructions for elaborate irrigation systems and complex recipes for organic fertilizers, and tips for keeping alive fragile species. The authors lectured her on keeping the air and soil humidity above seventy percent, and insisted she install various electric sensors, then teased her with shots of couples standing next to their Balinese jungle gardens, and stone paths lined with breadfruit trees and palm fronds dripping water. A tropical garden, she decided, was like a “special needs” child: you could make him bloom if you made him the center of your universe, but she had three children already, thank you very much.
    Wandering deeper into the stacks, she came upon a book titled
The Wonders of the Desert Garden.
Its cacti and assorted succulents caught her interest, as did a chapter called “Southern California: theSonoran Possibilities” that carried several photographs of the agave, aloe, and the Golden Barrel cacti in the Huntington Gardens in San Marino. In another she found a map that showed the Sonoran Desert reaching to a mountain range in California: on a clear day, you could see these mountains, the Palomars, from the toll road that cut through the hills behind her home.
We’re practically on the fringes of the Sonoran and the Mojave.
It made so much more sense to try to re-create an ecosystem that was native to this part of California, rather than one native to Southeast Asia or the Amazon. Desert gardens, by definition, needed very little water. The moisture that came from the occasional ocean breeze or from the fog bank that climbed up from the sea into their hillside cul-de-sac was more than enough.
    They arrived at a nursery, Maureen leading the way with Samantha in her arms, Araceli and the boys trailing after, walking through the narrow spaces between the tables with plants.
    “Yeah, your tropicals