Not softer, exactly.

But like I’d become a person instead of a sentence he was serving.

“Three beans,” he said, and almost smiled.

And the next morning, without a word, he showed up at Plot Twelve before the van even dropped him at his own assignment, and started weeding my squash.

What grew between Darnell and me that summer was the thing I understood least at the time and treasure most now.

We had nothing in common — sixty years apart, worlds apart, brought together by a court and an old man’s hunch — and we became, over a season of dirt, something I do not have a clean word for.