Chapter 6 — Connie

Connie had the plot next to mine, and for the first few weeks we only nodded, two women of an age doing our separate silent work, until the morning my hose fitting burst and sprayed us both, and there is nothing like being soaked to the skin by the same accident to make two strangers into something else.

She was sixty-three, widowed four years, retired from teaching third grade for thirty-one of them, and she had, she told me over the coffee we started getting after that, joined the garden for exactly the reason I had, which was that she had woken up one day on the far side of a whole life and not known what to do with her hands.

“They don’t warn you,” she said, and I felt something in my chest unlock, because it was the first time since I’d retired that another human being had named the specific weather I’d been living in.