We were two women the world had finished with, and we found each other in a vacant lot, and neither of us was finished at all.

Chapter 7 — Mai’s Table

Mai had the two plots along the south fence, and she grew things I had never seen in my life — climbing gourds and long beans and fragrant herbs whose names I couldn’t hold, water spinach in a low wet bed, perilla and Vietnamese coriander and a dozen greens that never once appeared in the supermarket where I’d shopped for forty years.

She was about Sal’s age and spoke a soft, economical English, and she communicated mostly, I came to understand, through food.