To put him out of her mind, Sadie wants to create her own world in her smallish backyard, dig up the grass, eat flavorful zucchinis and tomatoes, grow glorious wildflowers, learn to cultivate intoxicatingly fragrant roses.

She’s going to people her life with plants.

The former owners left a rusty old hoe with a splintery handle in the garage and a sage-green wheelbarrow resting upside down against the back fence. Sadie buys a spade and a fork-tongued weeder, an edger, a lawn mower, thick gardening gloves, and rubber clogs.

The next weekend, buckets of rain fall from the sky. She can’t garden, but she wants to be outside. She wears her rubber clogs and looks through her unpacked moving boxes for an umbrella. When she can’t find one, she pulls on a hoodie. The downpour has let up briefly. She steps out into drizzle. Lots of rain will make it easier to dig up the lawn, she tells herself. That’s what the lady at the gardening center told her, anyway.

She strolls down the block with rain in her face. The stately red-brick church’s lights are on and its bells are ringing. Cars pull into the parking lot and men in slacks and women in skirts awkwardly push their umbrellas out the car doors and angle themselves out. The rain starts to fall harder, and Sadie puts her hands in her pockets. She’s underdressed and wet, but she walks inside and sits on one of the long wooden benches, toward the back of the big, high-ceilinged hall. She rubs her hands together and tries to catch the warmth of the room, like cozying up in front of a fire.

The hall fills up a little more than halfway, with most people sitting toward the front. Empty seats surround her. The white walls of the church open her mind, and the stained glass comforts her. Someone is reaching a hand out to someone else in every scene.

When the service begins, she watches the congregants. She stands when they stand, picks up the hymnbook from the little shelf on the seat in front of her when they do, and sings when they sing—quietly, so no one can hear.

Later, if anyone asks her about her first time at the church, she will not be able to tell them what hymns were sung, what sermon was given, who attended that day in the sanctuary.

She will tell them, instead, how she never knew before how alone she had been.

FORGIVENESS

For months, Sadie reads King James and goes to Bible study and drinks instant coffee and asks God for guidance and helps sort donations for the annual rummage sale. She thinks about the Virgin Mary, alone with a child.