By Wednesday she knew his hours.
He came to the garden at five fifty. He left at seven twenty. In the evening, briefly, he came again — twenty minutes around six forty, no more, just long enough to pull water for the bed nearest the lean-to and check something at the south wall. She did not write any of this down. She kept it the way a person keeps a phone number she has called twice already. Without intent. Without effort. Without naming the keeping.
She watched from the living-room window with the second cup of coffee, which she had stopped pretending was the first. She sat on the arm of the couch rather than stand, which set her at an angle from the glass, and watched him cross the corner heading away. Head down. Canvas bag. On the four mornings she had counted, he never once looked up at her side of the street.
She arrived at eight.
The first thing on the lean-to bench was her own gloves, which she had forgotten the day before — left them where she'd taken them off, on the wood, palms up, the index fingers stained dark from the lavender soil. Beside them, by maybe four inches, the other pair. The heavy pair. The pair he had not taken on the morning he had taken everything else.
They were stacked the way he had stacked them. Folded once at the wrist. Leather palm to leather palm. Fingers tucked. The way a person stacks gloves she means to come back to.
She put hers on. She left his where they were.
The lavender was unchanged. Lavender does what lavender does at eleven degrees and slow, which is not much, except at the roots. Two bees were already at the small purple cones along the south wall, slow in the cool air, working the way they worked when nothing was urgent — a fine pollen dust on the thoraxes, on the leaves below them. She pulled three weeds from between the second and third raised beds. She refilled the watering can three times, because the hose attachment she had ordered was still on a truck somewhere outside Newark. She tied a length of green twine around the small skinny tree at the south wall to flag it for herself, because he had glanced at it twice on the morning of the permit and she wanted to ask someone someday what it was.
By ten the brim of her hat was warm to the touch and the back of her neck was sticky where she had laid the sunscreen on too thickly that morning. The earth under the hat had its own warmth now, dry and sweet, the smell of soil that had been sun on it long enough to remember the sun. She moved into the lean-to's shadow and ate half a sandwich and drank water. She took the small white pill from the bottle in her bag — the noon dose, the second of two — and swallowed it dry, then reached for the water again, because dry was a habit she was trying to break. The orange container stayed on the kitchen sill at home. Two pills, two windows, one body. She had her arrangements.
She wrote two lines in the notebook from her bag.
Morning: 5:50 / 7:20. Evening: 6:40. Four days.
Kale is bolting.
The lines stayed unread. She closed the notebook. She put it back in the bag and zipped the bag, and she did not name the book she had been writing in.
Walking home around eleven, on the side opposite the garden, she met Esther Kaplan three doors down from her own.
A short woman in a forest-green cardigan with a milk carton in one hand and a small paper bag in the other. Silver hair cut to the jaw. Blue eyes. A brooch at the collar — a copper leaf, polished, oak. She was not hurrying. She had the upright back of a woman who had spent forty years making teenagers sit up.
She nodded once.
"Welcome to the block."
It was not warm. It was not cold either. It was the form of welcome a person extends to a colleague at a conference she has no intention of speaking to twice.
"Thank you," Pam said.
Esther took her in — the hat, the long sleeves at eleven in the morning, the gloves looped through the strap of the bag — and made a small noise that was not a hum and not a comment. She lifted the carton an inch in the direction of her own door, three down.
"Half a step late for milk on this block," she said. "There's a place on Franklin. They keep it in the back."
"I'll remember."
Esther's mouth moved at one corner — the shape a smile takes when a person has decided not to give it. She walked on.
Pam stood three counts on the sidewalk before she went in. The brooch had been a leaf. Oak, she was almost sure. The door behind her stuck the way it always did. She shouldered it open.
She washed her hands twice. The second half of the sandwich was eaten standing at the counter, dry-edged where the bread had been in the bag too long. She lay down on the couch for what she meant to be ten minutes and woke at four-twelve with her cheek printed by the seam of the cushion and the apartment so still she could hear the F train in the floor.
She washed her face. The kettle took its time. She took the tea to the living-room window.
The garden was three-quarters in shadow. A man with a stroller went by. A girl in the maroon uniform of P.S. 161 was eating something out of a paper bag with her chin tucked into her collar against the wind. The corner kept its light a little longer than the rest of the block, because the sun came at it through the gap between two houses.
At six forty-one a man crossed the corner from the south.
Canvas bag.
She watched him from the angle of the couch arm. He went through the gate. The gate did not need closing. He went to the bed nearest the lean-to and dipped the watering can into the rain barrel, lifted, walked it to the south wall. The skinny tree got a slow, careful pour around the base. He stood for a minute looking at it. He set the can down. He did something at the bench — she could see only his back, the line of his shoulders, the slight tilt of his head — and then he picked up the canvas bag and crossed back to the gate.
He went south again.
Across the street, in the second-floor window of the house facing the corner, a curtain shifted. The same curtain. She saw it move and did not look toward it on purpose. She finished the tea.
She closed her own curtain.
The next morning she came at five forty.
She had not decided to. She had set no alarm. Her eyes had opened in the dark with the kind of clarity that did not belong at five-twenty, and once a person was awake at five-twenty there was no good argument for staying in bed.
The kitchen light stayed off. She drank water in the dark. She put on the hat and the long sleeves out of habit, even though the sun would not be a problem for an hour, and crossed the street in cold blue light.
The garden was empty.
She had known it would be. Five forty was ten minutes early for him. She trusted the four mornings. She unlatched the gate herself this time — the hinge gave its small contented sound — and walked to the lean-to.
Her gloves were where she had left them.
His were not.
They were still on the bench. Still folded leather palm to leather palm. But the wrists pointed the other way, toward the door of the lean-to instead of toward the south wall, and the index finger of the right glove had been pressed flat instead of tucked. A small thing. The kind of small thing she would have missed if she had not been looking. She had not been looking. She had seen it anyway.
She picked them up.
The leather inside was warm, or nearly. Not warm enough to be sure she wasn't imagining it. The palm had molded to a shape that was not hers. Where her fingers ended, his ended longer; where her thumb sat in the seam, his sat thicker, stiffer at the joint. Two small calluses she could feel through the leather, one at the base of each forefinger.
She set the gloves down. She arranged them the way he had arranged them on the morning of the permit. Wrists toward the south wall. Fingers tucked.
Whoever they belonged to, he had come back for them.
He had not taken them.
He had only set them down again.