Romance

The Margin Left for an Answer

The first letter arrives in a donated gardening book. The cover promises roses that will astonish your neighbors. On page seventeen, somebody has underlined four incompatible instructions and written, perhaps the rose has had enough advice. You laugh in the returns room, where laughing usually means a trolley wheel has finally done the thing you predicted. Mae Rowan puts her tea down and asks what the book has done. You show her. “Sensible rose,” she says. “Put it in a union.”