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By Root 577 0

night Louise had a bonfire and watched the weeds burn in a metal trash can, sending sparks blazing into the sky. After that, she started collecting the rocks that littered the ground, shards of mica-filled granite. She made a pile she intended to use for a rock garden, unless she wound up in Portland. She worked tirelessly. She had discovered that gardening made her stop thinking, and she was pleased by the effect of hard labor. When she realized her hands had become ragged from her digging, she found an old pair of her mother’s leather gloves. Even they didn’t do the trick; when she took the gloves off at night, her fingers were bleeding. She soaked them in a bowl of warm water and olive oil, then rubbed in some of her mother’s lemon-scented hand cream.

One day Louise went to the hardware store to buy white paint. She planned to freshen the shabby picket fence that surrounded the garden. She hadn’t even known it was there till she’d cut down the last of the brambles. The fence was falling apart, and she hoped a coat of paint might spruce it up enough to make it last a while longer. People thought anyone related to the Bradys was surely rich, but they just looked that way. After her mother’s illness, the accounts had dwindled to almost nothing. Louise didn’t mind being thrifty. She’d never had an extravagant personality.

The checkout girl at the hardware store was about her age, pretty, and extremely competent. “Hey,” the girl said to her, tentative. “Don’t I know you?”

“Nice to meet you,” Louise said, not really listening in the way that people who live alone often ignore others, their heads filled with silent, argumentative dialogue. Right then Louise was busy thinking about paint, debating between Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore. She made her decision and pointed to the shelf of Benjamin Moore. “I’ll take two gallons of the white.”

“No. I mean we’ve already met.”

The clerk was Allegra Mott, a local girl. Her brother Johnny had gone to kindergarten with Louise and had hit her on the head one bright afternoon and made her cry, which was the reason Louise’s parents decided to send her off to private school in Lenox. She’d had a bump on her forehead for weeks.

“Did you know you were wearing a mosquito net?” Allegra asked gently. She had heard rumors about the Brady genes. Everyone had. Some of the Bradys were said to be completely mad. In the old days, one of them ran around town swearing she’d slept with Johnny Appleseed of all things, as if he were Mick Jagger. Others had disappeared, drowned, married the wrong men, generally scandalized the town.

Allegra gave a little smile and touched her head, signifying that Louise had forgotten to remove the mosquito netting cape she’d fashioned to fend off the flies.

“Oh, crap.” Louise quickly grabbed off the netting and scrunched it into a ball. “I haven’t experienced blackfly season in some time. It’s a killer. I’m trying to undermine the flies without losing my marbles in the process.”

“Right-o,” Allegra said, ringing up the paint.

She couldn’t wait to tell her brother that the love of his life was back.

LOUISE FOUND THERE were fewer flies in the mornings, so she went out to work while the sky was still dark. Blackwell was known for its songbirds, and this was the hour when they were waking in the trees. Sparrow, mockingbird, lark. All of them sounded glad to be alive. Because the garden was elevated, Louise could see the crest of Hightop Mountain as she toiled away. For some reason the view caused her to experience a catch in her throat. She hadn’t thought she cared much about her hometown; she wasn’t a rah-rah sort of girl. Yet when she saw the mountain, she felt moved in some deep way, the way she had when her mother had squeezed her hand in her last moments. Louise had known it was her mother’s way of thanking her for all the time she’d spent with her in the hospital, for coming home from school and insisting everything would turn out fine when clearly it wouldn’t.

Once the garden was ready, the red soil turned, Louise planted a grapevine, cucumbers, green