Common Ground
I noticed it first from Darnell.
Sometime in late August he stopped calling me Miss Marilyn, which he’d landed on early as a compromise between formality and whatever he actually felt, and started calling me Mare, the way Sal did, the way Connie had taken to doing, and I realized the whole garden had quietly renamed me.
It is a small thing, a nickname.
It is also not a small thing at all.
Marilyn was the pharmacy director, the woman with the title and the corner office and the scaffolding, and she had been a good and serious person and I did not miss her as much as I’d feared.
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