And the kindest thing I ever did for my daughter that year I did without knowing it, by planting three beans in a fenced lot across town and becoming, again, a person who did not need her to be the ground I stood on.

Chapter 10 — The Heat

August brought a heat wave that sat on the city for eleven days, and it very nearly took the garden, and it was in fighting for the garden that I understood I had, without noticing, become part of it.

The water pressure failed on the worst day, ninety-nine degrees and climbing, every plot wilting toward ruin, and there was no discussion, no organizing, no committee — there was just, suddenly, all of us, out there at six in the morning and again at dusk, hauling water in buckets and jugs from the one spigot that still worked and the trunks of our cars, an old fire-brigade line of gardeners passing water hand to hand down the rows.

Sal directing without seeming to.