Brandon looked at the bowl of peas.
He took it.
He sat back down in George’s rocking chair. He set the bowl in his lap. He picked up a pea pod and split it with his thumb, clumsy, the way somebody does when they’ve never done it before.
The peas rolled out into the bowl.
“Like that?” he asked.
“Like that,” I said.
He came the next Saturday at eight in the morning.
He was wearing jeans and a gray T-shirt and old sneakers. White ones. Cheap. He’d bought them at the Dollar General on Route 9, he told me later. He wanted them to look like his grandmother’s.
He didn’t know anything about gardening. Nothing. He didn’t know a tomato sucker from a tomato leaf. He pulled up half a row of my carrots thinking they were weeds.
“Those were carrots, Brandon.”
“Oh no. I’m so sorry.”
