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Then she said, I don’t suppose you can do anything.

Oh yes I said. Just wait here a minute.

I ran out of the pressing room and went to the back of the barn, the shady side that faces the fields and the orchard. I checked to see if anyone was there within plain sight. Nobody was. I took the cotton bandanna out of my hair. I looked around again and lowered my jeans and my underwear and I squatted and peed a little into the cotton. Funny about what you learn in Campfire Girls. Then I hitched up and ran around again and found her and dabbed at the spot on her ankle where she’d been stung. Her skin was as red as a little cloud at dawn. After about fifteen seconds she smiled and turned that hothouse smile in my direction.

Ah, she said, girl, it turns out that you are the life of me. What’s that miracle cure you’ve got there?

My secret.

I drove back. I drove her car. I didn’t let her drive. I didn’t drive to our apartment. Not to where Bradley and I lived. No. Not there. I drove to her building. Outside we sat down and talked. That was all we did. I was curious about conversation with her and the atmosphere of calm expectancy that it created. We told each other chapter-and-verse of our lives. What I’m saying is that we waited.

For days after that, I sat on the front stoop, my own, ours. I watched the sun setting while my husband Bradley sat next to me and we shared the small talk of that particular day. And then sometimes he would go inside and I would stay out there looking toward the west as the breezes wafted through the tree (there was only one) in the front yard. I was thinking about her and about the feeling that she gave me.

Two weeks later, after Jenny and I had done some gardening together at one of those communal gardens where you have your own section, collecting a few late-ripening tomatoes in brown paper bags we brought along, we went calmly up to her apartment. We took the tomatoes into her kitchen. I took two of them out and found a small plate and a knife, but my hand was shaking too hard for me to slice them. I put the knife down on the table and looked straight at her.

Then she took my hand and led me to the bedroom. She told me to forget about the tomatoes for a while. In the bedroom we lay down together and we shed our calm exteriors completely and I saw her and when she asked me what I wanted, I said: I want you.

Afterward she sang to me. What she sang was “Hail to the Victors.” She meant it as a joke and as an anthem. I learned how to do that from her. Her cat, Ralph, watched us from the dresser. I was miserable with happiness. Our souls had merged. I lay there and stared up at the string of red pepper lights attached with tiny hooks up near the molding, the ones I had bought for her, and I exchanged jealous glances with Ralph the cat who in agitation had knocked over a hairbrush, and I felt the cool autumn breeze blowing across my body and Jenny’s where our two souls were lodged, and I heard the Good Humor truck go by on the street, little glockenspiel notes.

Then we both went back into the kitchen and, naked, finished slicing and eating the tomatoes. They were delicious, and she had made me ravenous.

My idea was that I could save my marriage. In some respect I suppose I loved him still. Bradley took me to the Humane Society on a Sunday and we walked among the dogs as he held me, and I guess I named them individually even though I don’t remember doing so. I don’t see what importance it would have if I did do that, or if I remembered it.

We made love several times that day and each time I came — and I did, believe me — I thought of Jenny. I thought of the flower-garden smell of her soul and how I could just reach in and find her heart any time I wanted it and of how that would be the end of my loneliness here on earth. When he was on top of me, I would hold out my hands above him in the air and imagine that I was grasping her, her invisible spirit, in the air, terrible hypocrite that I am. No, actually, that I was. I stopped being a hypocrite.