In those few days, without any of us deciding it, the garden simply ran itself.

Connie took over the water schedule she’d watched Sal keep for two seasons.

Darnell settled the one dispute that came up, having absorbed more of Sal’s method than anyone guessed.

Mai organized the meals for Sal’s return.

And I — because I was, it turned out, the one who knew how to read the medication list the hospital sent home, the one whose thirty years of a discarded career had prepared her for exactly this — sat down with Sal in his kitchen when he got back and sorted his prescriptions into a weekly organizer and explained, in the plain competent voice I’d thought I would never need again, what each one did and why it mattered that he take them right.

“Well,” Sal said, watching me, a little wrung out but himself.