Brandon was staring at me.
“Or you can stay,” I said. “Rent a house in Millbrook. Learn to grow your own tomatoes. And sit on the board that decides whether this town keeps its bank.”
He looked at his hands. Brown with dirt. Rough now. A blister on his right palm from the hoe.
“That’s your choice,” I said. “Nobody’s going to make it for you.”
He didn’t answer that day.
He didn’t answer for months.
He worked the window on Thursdays. He came to the garden on Saturdays until the frost came in October. Then he came over and helped me put the garden to bed. Pulling up the tomato cages. Spreading straw over the strawberries. Mulching the roses.
On the last Saturday in October, we stood together at the edge of the empty garden with our hands in our pockets, looking at the bare dirt.
“It looks so sad,” he said.
“It’s resting,” I said. “Everything needs to rest.”
“Will it come back?”
“Every spring,” I said. “For fifty-eight years.”
He was quiet.
“My grandmother died in March,” he said suddenly. “Last March. A month before I came here.”
I looked at him.
“I didn’t tell anybody,” he said. “Not at work. I just took two days off and flew to Chicago and buried her and came back. And then corporate sent me here.” He shook his head. “I think I was so angry. At everything. And I came into that bank and I saw all these old people and I…”
He stopped.
“I wanted to be the one who decided,” he said. “For once. I wanted to be on the right side of the glass.”
“There isn’t a right side of the glass,” I said. “There’s just glass. And people on both sides of it.”
