Something dependable for—
Benjamin stopped.
He closed the notebook and rested both hands over its cover.
Outside, morning sunlight moved across the store’s gravel parking lot.
Three years earlier, his wife, Elaine, would have been sitting beside him.
She would not have tolerated the employees’ behavior.
Elaine possessed the ability to correct a rude person without raising her voice or disturbing her smile.
She might have said, “Young man, confidence is useful only when it survives contact with knowledge.”
Then she would have asked for the owner.
Benjamin missed that voice more than he missed anything else.
He lived alone eight miles outside the small Virginia town of Red Hollow, in a white farmhouse his grandfather built before the interstate divided the county.
The property included twelve acres, an aging barn, two sheds, and a vegetable garden Elaine had maintained for forty-one years.
The garden was the most difficult part of losing her.
Their bedroom was quiet, but Benjamin could leave it.
The empty chair at the dining table hurt, but he could avoid looking at it.
The garden waited for him every morning.
Elaine had planned every row.
Tomatoes near the southern fence.
Herbs beside the kitchen path.
Beans against wooden trellises Benjamin built during their first summer in the house.
Zucchini in the far corner because, as Elaine said, “They need room to spread out like children.”
After pancreatic cancer took her, half the rows went empty.
Benjamin continued growing tomatoes and herbs because allowing the entire garden to disappear felt too much like losing her a second time.