The gate was open.
That was the first thing — not the smell of wet earth, not the cold April light catching on the chain-link, not the F train groaning underground two blocks east. The gate. Unlatched. Pam stopped on the sidewalk with the thermos in one hand and the folded permit in the other and looked at the gap between gate and post the way she might have looked at a typo in someone else's manuscript.
Inside the plot, on the far side of the third raised bed, a man was kneeling.
Broad shoulders in a faded olive field jacket. M-65, the kind her father had owned and not worn. Black hair shot with gray, cut close at the sides. Hands buried to the wrists in soil. He was working a clump of something loose, the gesture small and certain, the way a person works a knot when they have been working knots all their life.
She pushed the gate the rest of the way open. The hinge was new. Someone had oiled it.
"You're on my plot," she said.
It came out sharper than she meant. She had rehearsed something else on the walk over, some neutral declarative; the rehearsal had not survived the gate.
He took his time. He sat back on his heels and looked at her the way an attending looks at a chart — fast, complete, finished before she registered being read. Olive skin warmed by the bent-over work. A small shaving cut high on his jaw. Eyes too dark for the early light.
"Show me," he said.
She held out the permit. He made no move for it. She had to step over a coil of soaker hose, around a row of seed packets laid out in alphabetical order on a folded flour sack, to put the paper into his hand. It was warm from her pocket. He read it through. He read it twice, which she suspected he didn't need to.
Plot 14-B. Single resident, with-medical-need. Approved.
He folded it back along its original creases and held it out.
"Pam Collins."
"Yes."
"Rafael."
He did not give a last name. She kept hers back too.
He looked at the row he had been working — kale, last year's overwintered kale, leaves the color of wet pewter — and then at the box of tools at his elbow. His mouth made a shape that was not quite a smile.
"I'll finish this row," he said.
It wasn't a question. It also wasn't a fight. There was something in the way he said it — the way he had already decided he had a right to the next twenty minutes and was telling her, not asking — that should have annoyed her more than it did.
"Take what's yours," she said.
He picked up the tool box. He took the trowel and the pruning shears and one of the two pairs of heavy gloves stacked on the lean-to bench. He left the other pair where it was. He left the soaker hose. He left the alphabetical seed packets.
She watched him do it because she wanted to know what he considered his.
Not much, as it turned out. A man's tools, a man's gloves, the tomato cages he must have stored somewhere over the winter and brought back in March before she had even signed her lease. He left the bed itself raked smooth. He left the kale.
She set down her thermos and unfolded the canvas that held her own three lavender plants — small, shop-bought, leggy from the warehouse where they had spent the previous week — and carried them to the south wall. The far corner. Away from him. There was a young tree there, three feet of skinny brown trunk and a few stubborn buds, planted last year by somebody who had cared enough to stake it properly. She left the question of by whom for later. Lavender wanted sun and her skin did not, and she had not planned to think about that pairing today, but the sentence built itself anyway, in the back of her head, in the voice she used to mark up other people's pages.
Lavender wants what you can't have. Cut it.
She crouched. The left knee complained; she went on anyway. The trowel went into the soil and the soil went into the air, and she was not going to look at him while she planted.
He worked. He stopped working. Once, when she set the second plant in its hole and tamped the earth around it with the back of the trowel, the quality of the silence changed, the small alteration that comes when one of the people in it has glanced over. She kept her eyes on the third plant.
After a while there was a small sound — the metallic tap of pruning shears closing — and then the shift of his weight as he stood. He walked past her. She did not look up.
"There's a watering can behind the lean-to," he said. "It leaks. Fill it half."
"Thank you."
He crossed to the gate. From the corner of her vision he changed his shoes. The boots came off and went into a canvas sack. White medical sneakers came out, came on. The boots went into his bag with the gloves and the trowel and the shears. He zipped the bag.
The gate hinge made the small contented sigh of recently oiled metal.
He was gone.
She finished the third lavender. The cuffs of her shirt were dark to the elbows. Somewhere far above the brownstones, a starling was practicing the sound of a car alarm. The persimmon-colored brick of the corner building took the cold light and warmed it. The sun came over the roofline at a slant that meant 8:47, give or take.
She stood up. Her knee held. The earth she had moved was darker than the earth around it, which was the only sign she had been there.
She left the watering. The can was behind the lean-to and the lean-to was where he had gone first, and she had no intention of following his line.
It was a small thing. She marked it down in herself anyway.
Pam went home.
Her apartment was on the second floor of a brownstone half a block back, the one with the magnolia that had not bloomed yet and a doorbell that had been painted over so many times it stuck. She let herself in. She washed her hands twice, the way she had washed them since August — the way you wash hands when you are no longer entirely sure they are yours. She set the thermos in the sink. She took down the small white pill bottle and the small orange one from the windowsill, where she had put them on her third morning here so that she could not pretend to forget.
Hydroxychloroquine, two hundred milligrams. Prednisone, five.
She took them with tap water, standing at the kitchen window. The window faced an airshaft. There was nothing to look at. That was, in some sense, the appeal.
In the Manhattan apartment — Daniel's apartment, eventually, though she had lived there five years and paid half — she had taken these same pills standing at a window that looked west across the river and pretended they were vitamins. There had been a story, toward the end, about being a private person. There was a difference between a private person and a person who had become, over eight months, a stranger to the people who used to know her. She had not, until now, allowed herself to look at the difference straight on.
She rinsed the glass.
Then she went into the living room, which was still mostly boxes, and opened the one marked BOOKS / DESK in marker that was her own handwriting from the weekend of the move, and reached past two layers of paperbacks to find the notebook.
It was black. Soft cover. The corners had been rounded by something other than wear — pressure, a long time in a drawer. She had been telling herself, since the move, that she was not certain what was in it. This was a small lie. She knew exactly what was in it. She had simply decided to let the lid down on the question of when she would look.
She opened it.
Her own handwriting, six years old, in blue ink that had gone slightly brown at the edges. She skipped the words themselves. She read the shape of them — steady, slanted right, the loops in the d's a little tighter than her current d's — handwriting tightens when a person is paying attention to something other than the page.
She closed the notebook.
She put it in the top drawer of the desk that did not yet have a chair, and she said, in the voice you use to set something down without admitting you have set it down: List for later.
The drawer slid shut. The runner needed soap.
That was it for the boxes for today.
She made a sandwich. She did not finish it. She drank water. She read three pages of a novel she had been meaning to read since November and could not, at the end of the third page, have told anyone what was on the first.
In the early evening, with the light going lateral and gold along the brick across the street, she went to the living-room window and looked down at the corner.
The garden was two stories below and across. From here you could see only an angle of it — the south wall, the lean-to, the third raised bed. The lavender was a smear of gray-green at the wall, no closer to flowering than it had been an hour before. A man passed on the sidewalk with a folded newspaper. A dog, leashed, dragged its owner toward the curb.
Rafael was nowhere in the angle she could see. He had a shift somewhere; she did not know where, did not know what hours, did not know the names of the people he would be ungloving for and gloving for again over the next twelve. He did not know anything about her either. He did not know what she had taken at the kitchen window forty minutes ago. He did not know about the eight months.
Her hand on the windowsill smelled faintly of lavender.
He doesn't know, she thought. Nobody on this block knows.
And for the first time in eight months, that felt close to something a person might call freedom.
The light went down another notch on the bricks. Across the street, in a second-floor window of the house facing the corner, a curtain shifted — once, very slightly, the way curtains shift when someone has been standing behind them and has just decided to step back.
Pam pulled her own curtain closed.